WASHINGTON — The U.S. is setting up a $1.7 billion national network to identify and track worrisome coronavirus mutations whose spread could trigger another pandemic wave, the Biden administration announced Friday. White House officials unveiled a strategy that features three components: a ...
WASHINGTON — House Democrats approved legislation Thursday that they say would help close the gap between what men and women are paid in the workplace, though the measure faces little chance of overcoming Republican opposition in the Senate. The bill, which is supported by President Joe ...
NEW YORK — Bernard Madoff, the infamous architect of an epic securities swindle that burned thousands of investors, outfoxed regulators and earned him a 150-year prison term, died behind bars early Wednesday. He was 82. Madoff’s death at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North ...
WASHINGTON — More than 300 businesses and investors, including such giants as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Coca-Cola, are calling on the Biden administration to set an ambitious climate change goal that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. The ...
Microsoft, on an accelerated growth push, is buying speech recognition company Nuance in a deal worth about $16 billion. The acquisition will get Microsoft deeper into hospitals and the health care industry through Nuance’s widely used medical dictation and transcription tools. Microsoft ...
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden released a $1.5 trillion wish list for his first federal budget Friday, asking for substantial gains for Democratic priorities including education, health care, housing and environmental protection. The request by the White House budget office for an 8.4% ...
Vote counting in the union push at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, is underway but a winner may not be determined until Friday. By Thursday evening, the count was tilting heavily against the union, with 1,100 workers rejecting it and 463 voting in favor. The count will resume Friday ...
WASHINGTON — Finance officials of the world’s major economies on Wednesday agreed on a proposal to boost the resources of the International Monetary Fund by $650 billion as a way to provide more support to vulnerable countries struggling to deal with a global pandemic. The Group of 20 ...
WASHINGTON — Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos endorsed President Joe Biden’s focus on building up the country’s infrastructure Tuesday and said the company even supports a corporate tax rate hike to help pay for it. Bezos’ statement, posted on the company’s website, was notable ...
WASHINGTON — U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday urged the adoption of a minimum global corporate income tax, an effort to at least partially offset any disadvantages that might arise from the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the U.S. corporate tax rate. Citing a ...
NEW YORK — Just as President Joe Biden is pushing to raise taxes on companies to help pay for his infrastructure plan, a report from a Washington policy group is highlighting how many firms pay zero despite making big pretax profits. More than 50 of the largest U.S. companies paid nothing ...
WASHINGTON — A top Biden administration official says the government is undertaking a new effort to help electric utilities, water districts and other critical industries protect against potentially damaging cyberattacks. “Our aim is to ensure that control systems serving 50,000 or more ...
Microsoft won a nearly $22 billion contract to supply U.S. Army combat troops with its augmented reality headsets. Microsoft and the Army separately announced the deal Wednesday. The technology is based on Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, which were originally intended for the video game ...
PITTSBURGH — President Joe Biden outlined a huge $2.3 trillion plan Wednesday to reengineer the nation’s infrastructure in what he billed as “a once in a generation investment in America” that would undo his predecessor’s signature legislative achievement of giant tax cuts for ...
What happens inside a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, could have major implications not just for the country’s second-largest employer but the labor movement at large. Organizers are pushing for some 6,000 Amazon workers there to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union on the ...
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is moving to sharply increase offshore wind energy along the East Coast, saying Monday it is taking initial steps toward approving a huge wind farm off the New Jersey coast as part of an effort to generate electricity for more than 10 million homes ...
DETROIT — Volkswagen plans to change its brand name in the United States to “Voltswagen” as its shifts its production increasingly toward electric vehicles and tries to distance itself from an emissions cheating scandal. A person briefed on the plan said a formal announcement is planned ...
BESSEMER, Ala. — Linda Burns was excited at first to land a job at the Amazon warehouse outside Birmingham, Alabama. The former nursing assistant had always enjoyed ordering from the company, Now, she would be working for them. A cog in a fast-moving assembly line, her job involved picking ...
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve said Thursday that as of June 30 it will end for most banks the temporary limits it had imposed on their ability to make dividend payments and buy back their own stock. The Fed imposed the restrictions last summer, citing the need for banks to conserve ...
It’s becoming increasingly clear that for Facebook, there is no returning to its habits of the past. Some of its most dramatic post-election changes, from algorithm tweaks to a strict crackdown on political misinformation, were supposed to be temporary — “ break-glass “ measures ...