Investments and Business

Connected media - Connected media Workers who have helped lead the organizing said the development had surprised them. “It still feels pretty surreal right now,” said Michelle Eisen, a longtime barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first company-owned store to unionize during the current campaign. “There has not been a single call I’ve been on today where either I wasn’t crying or everyone else wasn’t crying.” If a framework is agreed to and quickly leads to contracts, experts said, it could be a major development in labor relations in corporate America, where companies like Amazon and Apple…

Linked media - Associated media “There’s a lot that goes into moving these safely and properly,” said Angeline Beltsos, chief executive physician at Kindbody, which has 35 clinics across the country and provides fertility benefit coverage for employers, including Walmart. Will my health insurance cover the cost to move my embryos if I can no longer get I.V.F. in my home state? Maybe. Some coverage could be broad enough to pay for the transport of embryos. “It is likely that employees working for large employers have some kind of coverage,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, the chief executive officer of Purchaser Business…

Associated media - Linked media Though Apple had not unveiled its car to consumers, the product had for many years been one of Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secrets because it was being tested on public roads. The cancellation is a rare move by Apple, which typically doesn’t shelve such public and high-profile projects. The company has struggled in recent years to find new avenues for growth as its all-important iPhone has saturated the market and people are upgrading their phones less frequently than they used to. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has publicly hinted that Apple was interested in entering the…

Linked media - Connected media Innovation on wheels Has Apple really crashed the car? The tech giant has killed its electric vehicle project as it pivots to artificial intelligence, prompting many observers to declare the venture a major failure for the company. Here’s a contrarian thought: That critique misses a wider point about how Apple innovates, because the company has used the project to power a whole ecosystem of products and services that have been unmitigated successes. Apple invested billions to build a self-driving car. Reports emerged about the secret effort, code-named Project Titan, in 2014, and the company has…

Economic vibes don’t necessarily predict electoral outcomes, though, and this campaign is different in many ways from those in the past. “We’re kind of in an unprecedented situation where we’re weighing two incumbents,” said Joanne Hsu, who runs the Michigan survey.Anthony Rice, a 54-year-old Democrat in eastern Indiana, and pretty much everyone he knows, he said, are doing well right now. Gas prices are down, jobs are plentiful, and Mr. Rice, a unionized dump-truck driver, is benefiting directly from the infrastructure law that Mr. Biden signed in 2021. Yet few people in the deep-red part of the country where he…

Kacey Poynter doesn’t have to commute far to clock in for work. She’s a paid caregiver and simply rolls out of bed to tend to her charge: her 2-year-old son, who sleeps in a portable playpen right beside her.Sonny was born with a congenital malformation that impaired his brain development and needs near continuous care simply to breathe and eat. Ms. Poynter left her job at a call center when she brought him home from the hospital and has nursed him ever since rather than relying on aides or institutions. Indiana’s Medicaid program has paid her for this labor of…

When Shawn Fain, the United Automobile Workers president, unveiled the deal that ended six weeks of strikes at Ford Motor in the fall, he framed it as part of a longer campaign. Next, he declared, would be the task of organizing nonunion plants across the country.“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” he said at the time. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six.”Four months later, the first…

A federal judge held a veteran investigative reporter in contempt of court on Thursday for not revealing her sources for articles she wrote about a scientist who was investigated by the F.B.I.The journalist, Catherine Herridge, formerly of CBS News and Fox News, was ordered to pay $800 a day until she divulged the information. The judge, Christopher Cooper of U.S. District Court in Washington, stayed the fine for 30 days to give Ms. Herridge time to appeal.The case, which has alarmed First Amendment advocates, relates to a series of articles that were written by Ms. Herridge and her colleagues in…

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Tuesday that she had personally urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to increase commercial engagement with the West Bank, contending that doing so was important for the economic welfare of both Israelis and Palestinians.Ms. Yellen’s plea was outlined in a letter that she sent to Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday. It represented her most explicit public expression of concern about the economic consequences of the war between Israel and Hamas. In the letter, Ms. Yellen said, she warned about the consequences of the erosion of basic services in the West Bank and called…

The Federal Reserve may have a housing problem. At the very least, it has a housing riddle.Overall inflation has eased substantially over the past year. But housing has proved a tenacious — and surprising — exception. The cost of shelter was up 6 percent in January from a year earlier, and rose faster on a monthly basis than in December, according to the Labor Department. That acceleration was a big reason for the pickup in overall consumer prices last month.The persistence of housing inflation poses a problem for Fed officials as they consider when to roll back interest rates. Housing…