Business

How a Pirate-Clad Pastor Helped Ignite Trump Media’s Market Frenzy
Business

How a Pirate-Clad Pastor Helped Ignite Trump Media’s Market Frenzy

Associated media - Connected media Mr. Nedohin raised his arms in celebration. A few minutes later, he cut to a video of a rocket blasting into the sky, with Mr. Trump photoshopped onto it. “We are holding Trump stocks,” he declared. “We are now financial investors in him.” Mr. Nedohin is one of hundreds of thousands of amateur investors who own shares of Trump Media, convinced that its sole platform, Truth Social, will become one of the world’s most popular and profitable social media sites. In recent months, tens of thousands of Trump fans have tuned into Mr. Nedohin’s webcasts, where he exhorts viewers to invest in the company, arguing that “Trump always wins in the long run.” The enthusiasm from Mr. Nedohin and other Trump supporters has turned Trump Media into the latest “meme s...
Ohtani’s Former Interpreter Is Said to Be Negotiating a Guilty Plea
Business

Ohtani’s Former Interpreter Is Said to Be Negotiating a Guilty Plea

Connected media - Connected media A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Ohtani, referred to the player’s detailed explanation he gave to the media two weeks ago, when Ohtani said Mizuhara had stolen from him and he promised to cooperate fully with the federal and Major League Baseball investigations. “I never bet on baseball or any other sports or never have asked somebody to do that on my behalf,” Ohtani said. “And I have never went through a bookmaker to bet on sports. Up until a couple days ago, I didn’t know this was happening.” The allegations about the theft surfaced when the Dodgers were in Seoul to open the season with games against the San Diego Padres. Interest in the team has been intense since it signed Ohtani to ...
Richard Leibner, Agent for Top Broadcast Journalists, Dies at 85
Business

Richard Leibner, Agent for Top Broadcast Journalists, Dies at 85

Associated media - Related media A trained accountant, Mr. Leibner was described in a 1989 profile by Ben Yagoda in The New York Times Magazine as an idiosyncratic character with a “remarkable emotional range.” “He can be plaintive, cajoling, jocular, terse, profane, sentimental, jovial, respectful, dismissive, analytical or expansive: The one constant is the strain of his native Brooklyn in his voice,” Mr. Yagoda wrote. He was also known for telling incredibly dirty jokes. Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News, said in a phone interview: “It would have been easy to dismiss him as a Damon Runyonesque showman, but when it came to actual negotiations, he’d come in, sit on the couch with a legal pad and pen, and we’d go through the details together. He was scrupulously detailed...
Roberto Cavalli, Designer Who Celebrated Excess, Dies at 83
Business

Roberto Cavalli, Designer Who Celebrated Excess, Dies at 83

Related media - Related media Roberto Cavalli, the Italian-born fashion designer who celebrated glamour and excess, sending models down the runway and actresses onto red carpets wearing leopard-print dresses, bejeweled distressed jeans, satin corsets and other unapologetically flashy clothes, has died. He was 83. His company announced the death on Instagram but provided no details. Mr. Cavalli’s signature style — “molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano,” as the British newspaper The Independent once described it — remained essentially unchanged throughout his long career. But he skillfully reinvented his clothes for different eras, enjoying several renaissances and building a global lifestyle brand in the process. In the 1970s, Mr. Cavalli designed jackets, jeans an...
Audemars Piguet’s New C.E.O. Wasn’t an Obvious Choice
Business

Audemars Piguet’s New C.E.O. Wasn’t an Obvious Choice

Related media - Related media Innovation — especially in the form of ambitious building projects — has been a running theme at the brand for the past few years. In 2020 in Le Brassus, it opened a museum, the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, designed by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. A year later, it completed a manufacturing site in Le Locle, another village about a 90-minute drive northeast of Le Brassus. A former Renaud & Papi workshop, the Manufacture des Saignoles now specializes in the brand’s most complicated timepieces. In 2022, the brand opened a luxury hotel, Hôtel des Horlogers, also designed by Mr. Ingels, in a space adjacent to the museum and factory in Le Brassus. And in late 2023, it began construction of a new industrial building in Meyrin, on the outskirts of G...
Auto Insurance Spike Hampers the Inflation Fight
Business

Auto Insurance Spike Hampers the Inflation Fight

Linked media - Linked media Job growth, wage growth and business growth are all lively, and inflation has steeply fallen from its 2022 highs. But consumer sentiment, while improving, is still sour. One reason may be sticker shock from some highly visible prices — even as overall inflation has calmed. The cost of car insurance is a key example. Motor vehicle insurance rose 1.4 percent on a monthly basis in January alone and has risen 20.6 percent over the past year, the largest jump since 1976. It has been a huge hit for those driving the roughly 272 million private and commercial vehicles registered in the country. And it has played a part in dampening the “mission accomplished” mood on inflation that was bubbling up in markets at the beginning of the year. According to a recent pri...
China Has Thousands of Navalnys, Hidden From the Public
Business

China Has Thousands of Navalnys, Hidden From the Public

Related media - Linked media After watching “Navalny,” the documentary about the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, a Chinese businesswoman messaged me, “Ren Zhiqiang is China’s Navalny.” She was talking about the retired real estate tycoon who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for criticizing China’s leader, Xi Jinping. After Mr. Navalny’s tragic death this month, a young dissident living in Berlin posted on X, “Teacher Li is closest to the Chinese version of Navalny.” He was referring to the rebel influencer known as Teacher Li, who used social media to share information about protests in China and who now fears for his life. There are others: Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in government custody in 2017, and Xu Zhiyong, the legal scholar who is servi...
Boeing Faces Justice Dept. Review Over Max 9 Incident
Business

Boeing Faces Justice Dept. Review Over Max 9 Incident

Related media - Connected media The Justice Department review was reported earlier by Bloomberg. The episode in January reignited the intense scrutiny and criticism that Boeing faced after crashes in Indonesia in late 2018 and Ethiopia in early 2019 killed a combined 346 people. The Max 8 and Max 9 were banned from flying globally days after the second crash. Since the jetliners started flying again in late 2020, they have carried out several million flights worldwide. The weight of the crisis appeared to be lifting before the January incident. A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board suggested that the plane in that episode may have left Boeing’s factory without bolts needed to secure the panel. The Federal Aviation Administration immediately grounded nearl...
FAA Gives Boeing 90 Days to Develop Plan to Address Quality-Control Issues
Business

FAA Gives Boeing 90 Days to Develop Plan to Address Quality-Control Issues

Linked media - Associated media The meeting on Tuesday, which took place at the F.A.A.’s headquarters in Washington, came two weeks after Mr. Whitaker toured Boeing’s 737 plant in Renton, Wash. During his visit, Mr. Whitaker spoke with Boeing engineers and mechanics to try to get a better sense of the safety culture at the factory. The F.A.A. said after his visit that Mr. Whitaker planned to discuss what he saw during his visit when he met with Boeing executives in Washington. On Monday, the F.A.A. released a report by a panel of experts that found that Boeing’s safety culture remained flawed, despite improvements made after fatal 737 Max 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019. The report, which was mandated by Congress, had been in the works before the harrowing episode in January involving the...
Divisions Among Finance Ministers Flare Over Seizing Russian Assets
Business

Divisions Among Finance Ministers Flare Over Seizing Russian Assets

Connected media - Related media “While we should act together and in a considered way, I believe there is a strong international law, economic, and moral case for moving forward,” Ms. Yellen said. But Mr. LeMaire, who spoke just a few hours ahead of a private meeting with Ms. Yellen, pushed back on that assertion. “We don’t have the legal basis to seize the Russian assets and we should never act if we don’t obey by the international law and by the rule of law,” Mr. Le Maire said, according to a recording of his remarks. Western officials have been considering several options for how they can use the approximately $300 billion Russian central bank assets, most of which is held in the European Union, to provide economic and military support for Ukraine. That includes the European Commi...