Elections

The 51 locations, next to Supercenters, proved too costly to be profitable, the retailer said.Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said Tuesday that it was shutting down its health care centers, a network that only last year it said it planned to expand.The retailer said in a blog post that its 51 health centers across five states would close. The centers were next to Supercenter locations. The plans won’t affect the more than 4,600 pharmacies and more than 3,000 vision centers within Walmart stores.Walmart started the health-care clinic initiative in 2019 in Dallas, Ga., with centers providing primary care, labs, X-rays and electrocardiograms, counseling, and dental, optical and hearing services. Many were in smaller towns where customers might lack access to quality care, and the company had said it was focused on affordability. In 2021, Walmart started offering a virtual option when it acquired MeMD, a telehealth provider.“This is a difficult decision, and like others, the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs create a lack of profitability that make the care business unsustainable for us at this time,” the company said Tuesday.Walmart said it was still deciding when it would close each center. In addition to Georgia, centers are in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Workers within the centers will be paid for 90 days and will be eligible to transfer to other Walmart or Sam’s Club locations, the company said.Offering health care is more difficult than selling consumer goods like laundry detergent and car parts, said David Silverman, a retail analyst at Fitch Ratings, noting the layers of government and insurance providers involved.“The attempts to enter these spaces and some of the failures of doing so really underscore the challenges and complexities of operating in the U.S. health care space,” Mr. Silverman said.In March 2023, Walmart said it planned to double its health center locations. It said that by the end of 2024, it expected to have more than 75 Walmart Health Centers and expand to states like Missouri and Arizona.In 2021, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase ended their high-profile joint health care venture, which sought to explore new ways to deliver health care to their employees. In March, Walgreens said it had closed 140 of its VillageMD clinics and planned to close 20 more. More

The Rent Guidelines Board will cast a preliminary vote on the level of rent increases that tenants in New York City’s one million stabilized apartments will face.The NewsOfficials in New York City will soon decide how much rents are allowed to go up across nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments.A nine-member panel, the Rent Guidelines Board, will probably vote on Tuesday evening to back modest increases. The preliminary vote may endorse a range of possible increases with a final vote on a specific number slated for later this spring. Any increase would affect leases beginning on Oct. 1.Tenants and landlords often clash at the annual vote to decide how much the rent on stabilized apartments can climb. Anna Watts for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The rent vote affects a lot of people.The nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments in the city are home to roughly a quarter of the population. Many of those apartments remain relatively affordable: The rent on a median, rent-stabilized unit is about $1,500, compared with $2,000 for the median, market-rate unit, city data shows.The annual vote is something of a microcosm of the fraught discourse around New York City’s housing crisis. Board meetings in recent years have been interrupted by protests.The panel’s decision aims to balance the interests of landlords and tenants. The vote, however, is a major source of tension between the opposing sides, with advocates for tenants calling for rents to be frozen or reduced every year and supporters of landlords calling for larger increases.Many landlords cast the board’s vote as existential. In 2019, the State Legislature eliminated many of the ways to raise rents on rent-stabilized units, including the so-called vacancy bonus, which allowed increases of up to 20 percent when a tenant moved out.The increases that the board approves, landlords say, are the only practical way to make enough money to maintain a rent-stabilized apartment. Many landlords say they are leaving units vacant because the increases haven’t been high enough in recent years to cover the cost of needed renovations and repairs.BackgroundThe board is appointed by the mayor, and its vote tends to reflect the priorities of City Hall. Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was more of an advocate for tenants, the board barely allowed any increases.During the tenure of Mayor Eric Adams, the board has backed increases every year, though costs of property ownership have also jumped significantly. Last year, the board allowed increases of 3 percent on one-year leases. On two-year leases, the board allowed increases of 2.75 percent on the first year and 3.2 percent on the second year.In 2022, the board allowed increases of 3.25 percent on one-year leases and 5 percent on two-year leases.What’s Next? The final vote.The board usually takes a second vote, which is final, a few weeks after the preliminary vote. In the interim, the board will likely be lobbied heavily by advocates for tenants and landlords and public officials. More

As the museum’s new building nears completion, shadowed by controversy, artists respond with new commissions.Princeton University has a long history of commissioning public art by the likes of Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, dating back to the 1960s. And when the Princeton University Art Museum opens to the public next year, at almost double the size of its original building, six new large-scale works by women and artists of color will have pride of place — visible beacons near the building’s perimeter, both indoors and out at this central crossroads on campus.The artworks include four site-specific commissions by Diana Al-Hadid, Nick Cave, Jane Irish and Tuan Andrew Nguyen and two acquisitions by Jun Kaneko and Rose B. Simpson.“From every access point toward the museum, there will be works of public art so that people can almost use them as visual markers of arrival,” James Steward, its director, said.“I was thinking about how to bring voices that maybe were not yet adequately represented on our campus,” Steward said. The new artworks help “break down the distinctions between indoors and outdoors,” he added, as part of the goal to enhance accessibility and engagement with the museum’s encyclopedic collection, some 115,000 objects. (The institution is renowned for its Chinese paintings, photography and pre-Columbian holdings.)Tuan Andrew Nguyen, untitled kinetic sculpture, 2024.Tuan Andrew Nguyen and James Cohan, New YorkThe 1966 building was demolished in 2021 to make way for the new one. The museum has an annual operating budget of $29 million (60 percent of which comes from endowment income) and has 120 employees, expected to grow to 180 by the opening in 2025.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

With the help of Joe Rogan, a social media trend with staying power emerged from a 2018 book, “The Carnivore Diet.”“Girl dinner” this is not.In a social media trend that won’t stop, ravenous meat eaters, mostly men, show themselves chomping on rib-eye steaks, bacon and innards.In a recent online video, a popular TikTok user who posts as @carnivoreray unveiled a new snack recipe. After sliding sheet pans packed with fatty bacon strips into the oven, he melted two sticks of butter from grass-fed cows. Once the bacon was crisp, he poured the melted butter into the sheet pans. Then he popped the concoction into the freezer.The next morning, the influencer bit into the frozen treat while filming himself for his roughly 170,000 TikTok followers. “This tastes like candy,” he said. (The person behind the account did not reply to requests for comment.)The video belongs to an enduring social media genre quarterbacked largely by muscular fellows who claim that a meat-heavy diet is the key to mental and physical well-being.A stricter version of high-fat, low-carb regimens like the Atkins diet and keto, the carnivore diet consists of meat, seafood and eggs — period. While some add dairy and a little fruit to the mix, the strictest proponents adhere to what they call B.B.B.E — that is, beef, bacon, butter and eggs.TikTok and Instagram are awash in videos of these men (and some women) feasting on a petting zoo’s worth of meat products. Some boast about having not consumed a vegetable in months. They also claim health benefits including drastic weight loss and sharpened mental acuity. Some of the so-called “meatfluencers” forgo not only carbs but also dishware, eating straight from the cutting board.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The judge in Donald J. Trump’s hush-money trial said Tuesday that the former president can attend the high school graduation of his youngest son, Barron, in Florida next month.For weeks, Mr. Trump had loudly complained outside the courtroom about the prospect of missing the ceremony on Friday, May 17, and had criticized the judge, Juan M. Merchan, for not immediately giving him permission to attend.But on Monday, before testimony restarted in Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in Lower Manhattan, Judge Merchan announced that he could have the day off from court.“I don’t think the May 17 date is a problem,” Judge Merchan said. It was not immediately clear whether the trial would pause for the day, or if Mr. Trump would be excused from attending the proceedings.Barron Trump, 18, attends a private high school near Mar-a-Lago, his father’s residence.Mr. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to a hush-money payment to a porn star who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with him. He has denied the encounter and pleaded not guilty. More

An effort to protect 30 percent of land and waters would count some commercial fishing zones as conserved areas.New details of the Biden administration’s signature conservation effort, made public this month amid a burst of other environmental announcements, have alarmed some scientists who study marine protected areas because the plan would count certain commercial fishing zones as conserved.The decision could have ripple effects around the world as nations work toward fulfilling a broader global commitment to safeguard 30 percent of the entire planet’s land, inland waters and seas. That effort has been hailed as historic, but the critical question of what, exactly, counts as conserved is still being decided.This early answer from the Biden administration is worrying, researchers say, because high-impact commercial fishing is incompatible with the goals of the efforts.“Saying that these areas that are touted to be for biodiversity conservation should also do double duty for fishing as well, especially highly impactful gears that are for large-scale commercial take, there’s just a cognitive dissonance there,” said Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, a marine biologist at Oregon State University who led a group of scientists that in 2021 published a guide for evaluating marine protected areas.The debate is unfolding amid a global biodiversity crisis that is speeding extinctions and eroding ecosystems, according to a landmark intergovernmental assessment. As the natural world degrades, its ability to give humans essentials like food and clean water also diminishes. The primary driver of biodiversity declines in the ocean, the assessment found, is overfishing. Climate change is an additional and ever-worsening threat.Fish are an important source of nutrition for billions of people around the world. Research shows that effectively conserving key areas is an key tool to keep stocks healthy while also protecting other ocean life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Modern cars are internet-connected and have hundreds of sensors. Lawmakers and regulators have concerns about what’s happening with all that data.In the American imagination, car keys and a driver’s license have long represented freedom, autonomy and privacy. But modern cars, which have hundreds of sensors, cameras and internet connectivity, are now potential spying machines acting in ways drivers do not completely understand.That has lawmakers and regulators concerned.On Tuesday, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts sent a letter to Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, urging the agency to investigate automakers for sharing drivers’ location information with the police. The senators, both Democrats, say this sharing can “seriously threaten Americans’ privacy” by revealing their visits to protests, health clinics, places of worship, support groups or other sensitive places.“As far-right politicians escalate their war on women, I’m especially concerned about cars revealing people who cross state lines to obtain an abortion,” Senator Wyden said in a statement.Government attention to the car industry is intensifying, experts say, because of the increased technological sophistication of modern cars.Investigators for the Government Accountability Office recently went car shopping, undercover, to see whether salespeople were overselling autonomous driving abilities. In a March report, the agency concluded that consumers don’t fully understand crash avoidance technologies and driver support systems, the improper use of which “can compromise their safety benefits and even pose a risk on the road.”The Federal Communications Commission and California lawmakers want to prevent mobile car apps from being used for stalking and harassment. The F.C.C. has proposed regulating automakers under the Safe Connections Act — aimed, originally, at phone carriers — while California is likely to pass a law that would accomplish the same thing, requiring car companies to cut off abusers’ remote access to victims’ cars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Suggesting that some Jewish students are “pro-genocide,” the Minnesota congresswoman seemed to further polarize an already polarizing debate.It was just one sentence, uttered to reporters who had gathered around Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota last week when she turned up at a Columbia University encampment to offer a show of support for pro-Palestinian protesters — among them, her daughter, a student activist — demonstrating against the Israeli attacks on Gaza.Ms. Omar, one of the leading pro-Palestinian voices in Congress, rejected the argument that the protests were antisemitic, noting that many of the participants were Jewish. “All Jewish kids” should be kept safe, she said, no matter which side they were on in the debate — or, as she framed it, “whether they’re pro-genocide or anti-genocide.”But with her formulation that Jews who support the Israeli military campaign are “pro-genocide,” Ms. Omar plunged into what has become an increasingly turbulent storm for many on the American left as it confronts questions about the extent to which antisemitism is shadowing demonstrations that have broken out on campuses from New York to Los Angeles.Ms. Omar is a Democrat and one of two Muslim women in the House, and she was elected with the endorsement of, among others, President Biden.“That phrasing is despicable,” said Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, who resigned from a Harvard antisemitism panel after the university was swept by protests against Israel.“I don’t know anyone who is pro-genocide,” said Mr. Wolpe, who said he was walking by an encampment at Harvard as he spoke on his cellphone. “In the course of condemning antisemitism, it displays antisemitism. Which is an astonishing paradox — I mean it’s a sad paradox.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More