The company, like much of corporate America, has not made good on its promised investment surge from President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

WASHINGTON — In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard.

Some are preparing for a potential downturn by cutting spending and raising money earlier than planned. Just as they did before.

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Frank, who runs a health technology start-up called SonderMind, had planned to wait until the end of 2020 to raise more money for his company.

Once a generation, Hollywood experiences a seismic shift. It is happening again.

LOS ANGELES — Every three decades, or roughly once a generation, Hollywood experiences a seismic shift. The transition from silent films to talkies in the 1920s. The rise of broadcast television in the 1950s. The raucous “I Want My MTV” cable boom of the 1980s.

At least five trademark applications are pending for the retort, according to a database for the federal patent office, including one by Fox Media, which hopes to use it for a possible television series.

First came the “OK Boomer” memes on social media. Then came the T-shirts, phone cases and other merchandise emblazoned with the viral retort. Now, get ready for an all-out war at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and a possible television series using the phrase.

After years of on-and-off debate over nearly snoop-proof security, the industry is girding for new pressure from law enforcement around the world.

SAN FRANCISCO — A Justice Department official hinted on Monday that a yearslong fight over encrypted communications could become part of a sweeping investigation of big tech companies.

Companies want to avoid racism, sexism and misgendering. Consultants are standing by.

Recently, a story circulated within the diversity, equity and inclusion industry (D.E.I.), one that somehow didn’t go viral on social media: At an unnamed company, co-workers were taking their seats before a sensitivity training workshop began, when some white male employees entered as a group with targets pinned to their shirts — a sartorial statement about their anticipated persecution.

As environmental concerns grow, chains like Burger King and McDonald’s are rethinking what to offer with children’s meals.

In the climactic scene of “Toy Story 3,” Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the crew narrowly escape death when a remote-controlled claw lifts them from an incinerator just before flames engulf them.

The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah have hosted speed chasers for decades, but the course is distressed. An advocacy group has a plan, but not the money.

Not even 30 years after Karl Benz built what is said to be the first automobile, Teddy Tetzlaff climbed into a Blitzen Benz racecar and blasted across the snow-white surface of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, clocking in at 142.8 miles per hour and setting an unofficial land-speed record.

Some workers may be more exposed to artificial intelligence than previously thought. But worry more about automation’s threat to less skilled employees.

Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Colombia, Rwanda and Croatia were seen as dangerous and conflict-ridden. Now they top travel bucket lists. How other countries can follow their lead, in seven steps.

Twenty years ago, an opinion writer for The New York Times described Colombia as a country dominated by “drug killings, paramilitary massacres, guerrilla kidnappings, death squad murders and street crime.”

The $16 billion acquisition would be the largest ever in the luxury sector.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton will be having a lot of breakfast at Tiffany's - as well as lunches, dinners and board meetings.

From champagne delivery to 10-minute embarking, these cruises are using apps and other technology to make you to feel at home at sea.

People who work on cruises often describe ships as “cities at sea,” but cities usually have speedy Wi-Fi, food delivery services you can summon on your phone, and homes with voice-activated assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google to answer questions and provide information.

Experts are divided over whether flooding the Asian market with convincing artificial rhino horn would help or hurt rhinos’ survival.

In Africa, 892 rhinos were poached for their horns in 2018, down from a high of 1,349 killed in 2015. The decline in deaths is encouraging, but conservationists agree that poaching still poses a dire threat to Africa’s rhino population, which hovers around 24,500 animals.

StubHub Sold to Smaller Rival Viagogo for Over $4 Billion

Twenty years ago, when Eric Baker tried to buy a secondhand ticket to “The Lion King” on Broadway, the high prices and hassle of the experience gave him a business idea: What if there were an easier way to buy and sell tickets online?

The economy is relatively strong, and consumers are spending. So why are things so tough for some retailers?

Retailers are trying everything they can to keep up with Amazon. Macy’s offers same-day delivery and in-store returns for online purchases. Black Friday deals are already starting at Kohl’s. And craft cocktails are served in the women’s shoe department at Nordstrom.

The man lost his memory and then quickly got it back. Doctors were perplexed when tests ruled out seizure and stroke.

“Where am I?” the 68-year-old man asked. His daughter explained again: He was at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. He had been found on the ground in the parking lot of the grocery store near his apartment. The man nodded, as if taking it all in, but minutes later asked again: Where am I? He had never had any memory issues before, but now he couldn’t remember that it was Saturday. Didn’t remember that he spent the morning moving the last of the boxes he had stored at his daughter’s house t

How a hedge fund’s efforts to take the island territory to the cleaners wound up before the Supreme Court — with ordinary Puerto Ricans arguing in the hedge fund’s favor.

Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy protection at 11:32 in the morning on May 3, 2017; by 11:33, the magnitude was obvious. No American territory had ever defaulted on so much debt. “A bankruptcy without precedent” ran a morning-after headline in the tabloid El Vocero, in an issue that also quoted leftist politicians warning readers not to be fooled: The filing, they claimed, was a prelude to more austerity. The island owed $72 billion. Already there was out-migration of 60,000 people a year and 10

AT&T, Verizon and other wireless carriers agreed to let consumers use a technology that makes it easier to switch carriers, the Justice Department said.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had ended an investigation into possible coordination among AT&T, Verizon and a standards-setting organization to make it more difficult for people to switch wireless carriers. The agency said the groups had agreed to change their practices, reducing competition concerns.

Don’t trade away your health data without considering the potential issues first.

After I signed up for my insurance plan, I got an email with a link to a “wellness program” that, if I traded some health data — such as steps from a pedometer or smartwatch exercise data — could earn me a small monthly payout and some gift cards. But the second I logged in, I felt paranoid about the whole thing.

What should we make of videos that seem to show Tesla drivers napping while their cars zip along on Autopilot?

I discovered the videos in January. One of the first I saw was posted by the irreverent online car magazine Jalopnik. “Dangerous Idiot Sleeps While Driving His Tesla on Autopilot,” read the headline. The cellphone-captured footage did, as promised, appear to show a man snoozing in the driver’s seat of a Tesla as it zipped along a road somewhere outside Las Vegas. And because the man was asleep, it was safe to assume that navigation was indeed being handled by the car’s onboard driving-assistance

Customer reviews are incredibly important in e-commerce, but they can be unreliable or downright dishonest.

In the world of e-commerce, the online review is king, the internet’s answer to walking into a store and trying out a product for yourself.

Medicare revamped its reimbursement policy for physical, occupational and speech therapy in nursing homes. That has left some patients with less help.

Medicare revamped its reimbursement policy for physical, occupational and speech therapy in nursing homes. That has left some patients with less help.

When I moved from country to country, I kept friends and relatives close through recipes, each morsel an ode to remembrance.

I grew up an immigrant child, spending my formative years in three countries, England, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In a time before keeping in touch was an internet call away, I’d have to say goodbye forever to bedrooms, to classrooms, to friends. I learned to rely for continuity on two constant companions: books and food.

My quest to imagine a different reality.

Social media is broken. It has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process. Many of us just want to get away from it, but we can’t imagine a world without it. Though we talk about reforming and regulating it, “fixing” it, those of us who grew up on the internet know there’s no such thing as a social network that lasts forever. Facebook and Twitter are slowly imploding. And before they’re finally dead, we need to think about what the future will be like a

The biggest metropolitan areas are now the most unequal.

In 1980, highly paid workers in Binghamton, N.Y., earned about four and a half times what low-wage workers there did. The gap between them, in a region full of I.B.M. executives and manufacturing jobs, was about the same as the gap between the workers near the top and the bottom in metro New York.

If the fantasy that Democrats are all zealots were reality, the primary campaign would have turned out quite differently.

Democrats are too “woke” for their own good, or so goes the argument. “Today’s progressivism is more or less a secular form of religion with its own high standards,” Matt Lewis, a conservative columnist, wrote this spring. “Eventually,” he concluded, “the revolution devours its own.” Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time, urged Democratic presidential candidates to “Get out of Woke-ville, for a day.”

United States regulators say hemp businesses should not be treated with any more suspicion than other bank customers.

The number of banks in the United States willing to lend to hemp producers can be counted on one hand. That is about to change.

Our Place at the Table

Turning Point: The Michelin Guide this year awarded 11 stars to women chefs in France, the most in the guide's history.

The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why.

“Thank God for Mississippi.” That’s a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi.

22 Things That Happened for the First Time in 2019

1. Scientists release first-ever image of black hole For the first time, astronomers released an image of a black hole — something that has eluded scientists for more than half a century. An international effort involving eight radio observatories across four continents observed the black hole located in Messier 87, a large galaxy some 55 million light-years away from Earth, over 10 days in April 2017. But it took two years of computer analysis to piece together the image, which was released in

A deal with LG Chem of South Korea will further the automaker’s plans for electric vehicles and fulfill a pledge made after its Lordstown plant was idled.

After idling its car plant in Lordstown, Ohio, this year, General Motors promised that it would bring jobs back to the once-mighty manufacturing region.

Deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest, an important buffer against climate change, has soared under President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.

RIO DE JANEIRO — When the smoke cleared, the Amazon could breathe easy again. For months, black clouds had hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. Now the rainy season had arrived, offering a respite to the jungle and a clearer view of the damage to the world.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the spending as the country’s economy has slowed because of reduced demand from China and tensions with South Korea.

Conventional wisdom seems to have been too pessimistic about how much the economy could grow before setting off inflation. In hindsight, a costly mistake.

There are a lot of good things to say, and few bad things to say, about the November employment numbers that were published Friday morning.

Stampeding billionaires took over Miami Beach for the annual art fair where everybody is V.I.P.

Leave it to Maurizio Cattelan. The first flight of V.I.P. collectors had barely arrived at Art Basel Miami Beach, the art fair that some call the “Running of the Billionaires,’’ and the satirical Italian artist had already won the battle for Instagram.

Kicking the Industrial Age’s Worst Habits

Turning Point: A 2019 United Nations report found that close to one million species of animals and plants are nearing extinction, in large part because of the harm that humans are causing to ecosystems around the world.

We asked writers, scientists, actors, designers and others to explain the indispensability of beauty in our everyday lives.

Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it. Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.” We asked a group of ar

A new study answers the question, but also shows that things have been improving.

There are at least 80,000 dogs registered in New York City in a given year, according to the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which estimates the total canine population at about 500,000. With so many pooches using the city’s streets as a toilet, it’s surprising that we aren’t stepping in their unpleasant remains more often.

When it comes to race, “It's always like 'O.K., but now we're going to start the lesson on peas,''' a biology teacher said. A study will test a new approach.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Biology textbooks used in American high schools do not go near the sensitive question of whether genetics can explain why African-Americans are overrepresented as football players and why a disproportionate number of American scientists are white or Asian.

This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system will make its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust.

It came out of the Northern sky, a frozen breath of gas and dust from the genesis of some distant star, launched across the galaxy by the gravitational maelstroms that accompany the birth of worlds.

Racial discrimination by algorithms or by people is harmful — but that’s where the similarities end.

In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their resumes were about as similar as two resumes can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan.

Ladj Ly started with videos of police confrontations with his friends in Paris’s immigrant suburbs. Now, his wrenching film “Les Misérables” is up for an Oscar.

PARIS — From barren territory on the outskirts of Paris, Ladj Ly hit movie theaters last month with an urgent message: Multicultural France is here, it is real and it is not in good shape.

A coal town in southwestern Virginia has been trying for years. Hope is running thin.

GRUNDY, Va. — Jay Rife surveys the landscape — hundreds of flat, grassy acres reclaimed from a spent mountaintop mine once operated by the Paramont Coal Company. A few handsome homes stand on one end of the project. An 80,000-square-foot shell, to house some future manufacturing operation, is being built on another. For the intrepid, there are trails for all-terrain vehicles. There’s an R.V. park. The whole site has been wired for broadband. Elk have been imported from Kentucky for tourists to l

After more than five decades together, a lack of conversation leads to a divided house and a “gray divorce.”

Who celebrates her 52nd wedding anniversary and then, six months later, files for divorce? Me, it seems.