Business Update

Bryan Bedford, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration, told senators on Wednesday that he would make air travel safety his top priority if confirmed as the agency’s next administrator. Mr. Bedford, who spent decades running and revamping regional commercial airlines, pressed his credentials before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation…

The Washington Post said Wednesday that it had hired Adam O’Neal, a correspondent from The Economist, to be its next opinion editor. Mr. O’Neal will be charged with carrying out a new direction for the section laid out by Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post: to champion “personal liberties and free markets.” Before…

Los Angeles is a city of immigrants. It is also a city of unions. And in California, those two constituencies have essentially melded into one. So it should come as no surprise that federal immigration raids on workplaces around Los Angeles County this week set off the largest protests to date against President Trump’s immigration…

Over the past few months, after President Trump imposed wave after wave of tariffs, companies began paying billions more to bring goods into the country. In May, the Treasury collected more than $22 billion in tariff payments, data released on Wednesday shows, a record high. The income figures are among the first concrete indicators of…

The British government announced on Wednesday hundreds of billions of pounds in spending on defense, health care and investment in infrastructure and housing, as it laid out its economic priorities for the next few years. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, presented a breakdown of the public finances in Parliament, detailing how much money…

Richard Beattie, a mergers lawyer who helped pioneer private equity takeovers — work that was immortalized in the much-lauded book “Barbarians at the Gate” — and who served in Washington and New York City government, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. His daughter Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen said the cause was…

Disney and Universal sued a prominent artificial intelligence start-up for copyright infringement on Wednesday, bringing Hollywood belatedly into the increasingly intense legal battle over generative A.I. The movie companies sued Midjourney, an A.I. image generator that has millions of registered users. The 110-page lawsuit contends that Midjourney “helped itself to countless” copyrighted works to train…

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is pushing to investigate whether Harvard University violated federal sanctions by collaborating on a health insurance conference in China that may have included officials blacklisted by the U.S. government, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Rubio signed off on a…

In its high-stakes trade talks with the United States, China has been trying to strike a balance in how it wields its market clout. It controls the world’s supply of rare earth metals and magnets. And it has withheld supplies of the materials, which are crucial ingredients in everything from cars to fighter jets, as…