The oil and gas giant Chevron will require some of its employees to receive coronavirus vaccinations, becoming the first major U.S. oil producer to announce that it was requiring field workers to be protected against the virus at a time when other large corporations are making similar demands on office workers.

The mandate applies to employees who travel internationally and expatriates, as well as the offshore work force in the Gulf of Mexico and some onshore support personnel, the company said on Monday. Chevron is the second-largest oil and gas producer in the United States after Exxon Mobil.

“As part of our fitness for duty safety standard, workers in certain jobs are required to be vaccinated against Covid-19,” a Chevron spokeswoman said in an email. “We will continue to carefully monitor the medical data and follow the guidance of health authorities in order to protect our work force.”

The news was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

This...

For New York City and its trillion-dollar economy, September was supposed to mark a return to normal, a moment when Broadway theaters reopened, stores and restaurants hummed, and tourists and office workers again filled the streets.

But that long-awaited milestone has been upended by the Delta variant of the coronavirus. One big company after another has postponed plans to come back to Manhattan’s soaring towers. Trade shows have been canceled. Some small businesses have had orders evaporate.

It is a setback for a city that has lagged behind the rest of the country in its economic recovery, with a 10.5 percent unemployment rate that is nearly twice the national average. Now, rather than seeing the fuller rebound it was counting on, New York is facing fresh challenges.

“The Delta variant is a meaningful threat to the city’s recovery,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “This is not going to be easy. It’s going to be a long time before...

Cathie Wood, the hottest fund manager on Wall Street, didn’t rise to prominence in the typical way. A common path to success for money managers is to land larger and larger accounts, transitioning from managing billions of dollars from wealthy individuals to handling trillions from pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds. Wood has taken the reverse route, explains The Times’s Matt Phillips in a big new profile of the fund manager.

Since leaving the world of traditional money management, Wood’s bold bets on Tesla, Robinhood and cryptocurrency have won her clients and followers among the masses of tech-loving, risk-seeking small investors who dove into the market over the past year or so. Her recent success is as much about her investment acumen as her willingness to go against the grain, an approach that has captured the anti-establishment mood of the markets. Can she keep it up?

How she got here: Wood, 65, used to manage money for pension funds at...

Ms. Wood says the Holy Spirit moved her to strike out on her own after an up-and-down career in money management. But it’s her belief in herself that won the Reddit crowd’s faith.

For New York City and its trillion-dollar economy, September was supposed to mark a return to normal, a moment when Broadway theaters reopened, stores and restaurants hummed, and tourists and office workers again filled the streets.

But that long-awaited milestone has been upended by the Delta variant of the coronavirus. One big company after another has postponed plans to come back to Manhattan’s soaring towers. Trade shows have been canceled. Some small businesses have had orders evaporate.

It is a setback for a city that has lagged behind the rest of the country in its economic recovery, with a 10.5 percent unemployment rate that is nearly twice the national average. Now, rather than seeing the fuller rebound it was counting on, New York is facing fresh challenges.

“The Delta variant is a meaningful threat to the city’s recovery,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “This is not going to be easy. It’s going to be a long time before...

When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months — and there’s no end in sight.

Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans don’t need to wear masks. Wait, they do.

At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain. In just the past week, federal health officials said they would begin offering booster shots to all Americans in the coming months. Days earlier, those officials had assured the public that the vaccines were holding strong against the Delta variant of the virus, and that boosters would not be necessary.

As early as Monday,...

China has promised to teach its most indebted companies a lesson. Just not yet.

Huarong Asset Management, the financial conglomerate that was once a poster child for China’s corporate excess, said Wednesday night that it would get financial assistance from a group of state-backed companies after months of silence about its future. The company also said it had made a $16 billion loss in 2020.

Citic Group and China Cinda Asset Management were among the five state-owned firms that will make a strategic investment, Huarong said without providing more details on how much money would be invested or when the deal would be completed.

Huarong also said it had no plans to restructure its debt but left unanswered the question of whether foreign and Chinese bondholders would have to accept significant losses on their investments.

Investors took the news to be a strong indication that the Chinese government was not yet ready to see the failure of a company so closely...

A California law that ensures gig workers are considered independent contractors, while affording them some limited benefits, is unconstitutional and unenforceable, a California Superior Court judge ruled Friday evening.

The decision is not likely to immediately affect the new law and is certain to face appeals from Uber and other so-called gig economy companies. It reopened the debate about whether drivers for ride-hailing services and delivery couriers are employees who deserve full benefits, or independent contractors who are responsible for their own businesses and benefits.

Last year’s Proposition 22, a ballot initiative backed by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig economy companies, carved out a third classification for workers, granting gig workers limited benefits while preventing them from being considered employees of the tech giants. The initiative was approved in November with more than 58 percent of the vote.

But drivers and the Service Employees...

General Motors said on Friday that it was expanding its recall of Chevrolet Bolt electric cars that have been found to be at risk of overheating and catching fire as a result of manufacturing defects.

The company said it was recalling Bolts from the 2020 through 2022 model years and a few 2019 Bolts that were not covered under a previous recall. The move means all 141,000 Bolts that G.M. has produced — going back to the 2017 model — are under recall.

The Bolt’s troubles are a setback from G.M. and its chief executive, Mary T. Barra, who is betting heavily that consumers will rapidly switch to electric vehicles in the years ahead. The company plans to spend $35 billion on electric and autonomous vehicles from 2020 to 2025, build four battery plants in the United States and end production of gasoline-powered cars and trucks by 2035.

G.M. said the move announced on Friday would cost the company $1 billion on top of the $800 million it had allocated for previous...

As federal investigators escalate their scrutiny of Tesla’s driver-assistance technology, another problem is emerging for the electric carmaker: complaints among customers that they have been sold an additional driver-assistance option that doesn’t operate as advertised.

Over the years, Tesla owners have paid as much as $10,000 for the package, called Full Self-Driving. F.S.D., which can be purchased as an extra on Tesla cars, is a collection of services that add to Tesla’s Autopilot, the driver-assistance technology that government investigators are taking a look at after a string of crashes.

Critics say F.S.D. hasn’t lived up to its name since its debut more than two years ago. It can help a car navigate off one highway and onto another, and respond to traffic lights and stop signs. It also includes a service for summoning a car out of a parking space or parking lot with a mobile app. But full self-driving? Not quite.

When Joel M. Young paid $6,000 for...

The cost of travel climbed this summer, but the Delta variant is weighing on demand. We looked into travel’s murky crystal ball to find out how prices will fare in the future.

Cyndy O’Brien, an emergency room nurse at Ocean Springs Hospital on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, could not believe her eyes as she arrived for work. There were people sprawled out in their cars gasping for air as three ambulances with gravely ill patients idled in the parking lot. Just inside the front doors, a crush of anxious people jostled to get the attention of an overwhelmed triage nurse.

“It’s like a war zone,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is the patient care coordinator at Singing River, a small health system near the Alabama border that includes Ocean Springs. “We are just barraged with patients and have nowhere to put them.”

The bottleneck, however, has little to do with a lack of space. Nearly 30 percent of Singing River’s 500 beds are empty. With 169 unfilled nursing positions, administrators must keep the beds empty.

Nursing shortages have long vexed hospitals. But in the year and a half since its ferocious debut in the United States, the coronavirus...

Una manera en la que los talibanes podrían intentar ganarse la confianza de los afganos es aparentar ser un gobierno legítimo en las redes sociales y, ante esa posibilidad, las compañías de internet intentan descifrar cómo manejar la situación.

Desde hace años, Facebook ha prohibido las cuentas relacionadas con los talibanes como parte de su política de tres niveles para “organizaciones peligrosas”. Además, la compañía dijo esta semana que continuaría eliminando las cuentas de talibanes y publicaciones que apoyen al grupo. Eso incluye una línea de ayuda para ciudadanos afganos de los talibanes en WhatsApp, de la cual Facebook es propietaria (los talibanes ahora controlan un país, pero no tienen permitido iniciar un grupo de Facebook).

Con base en las sanciones de Estados Unidos a los talibanes afganos, YouTube dijo que también eliminará cuentas que crea que son operadas por el grupo. Twitter no tiene una prohibición total, pero le dijo a CNN que cualquier...

In one video, a Taliban official reassured female health workers that they could keep their jobs. In another, militants told Sikhs, a minority religious group, that they were free and protected. Still others suggested a new lawfulness in Kabul, with Talib fighters holding looters and thieves at gunpoint.

The Taliban, who banned the internet the first time they controlled Afghanistan, have turned social media into a powerful tool to tame opposition and broadcast their messages. Now firmly in control of the country, they are using thousands of Twitter accounts — some official and others anonymous — to placate Afghanistan’s terrified but increasingly tech-savvy urban base.

The images of peace and stability projected by the Taliban contrast sharply with the scenes broadcast around the world of the chaotic American evacuation from the Kabul airport or footage of protesters being beaten and shot at. They demonstrate the digital powers the militants have honed over years...

PALO ALTO, Calif. — In 2014, Scott Hassan, known by some as the third Google founder, sent Allison Huynh, his wife of 13 years, a text message that their marriage was over and that he was moving out of their home.

Nearly seven years later, the pair are still locked in litigation over how to divide an estate with tech investments and prime California properties estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

A trial expected to start Monday will offer an unusual, public peek into the details of a big-money Silicon Valley divorce. They include Mr. Hassan’s failed attempt to persuade Ms. Huynh to sign a so-called postnuptial agreement and his admission that he started a website in her name to publicize embarrassing information from her past.

Technology billionaires have typically divorced quietly behind closed doors. Some of them more than a few times. While the sometimes unpleasant details of the ends of their marriages have often found their ways into the news, it...

The cutoff of federal unemployment benefits in much of the country was meant to bring a flood of workers back to the job market. So far, that flood looks more like a trickle.

A total of 26 states, all but one with Republican governors, have moved to end some or all of the expanded unemployment benefits that have been in place since the pandemic began. The governors, along with many business owners, have argued that the benefits discourage returning to work when many employers are struggling to hire.

Several recent studies, however, have concluded that the extra payments have played only a small role in this year’s labor shortages. And they found at most a modest increase in employment in states that abandoned the programs — most of them in June — even as millions of jobless workers have had to cut spending, potentially hurting local economies.

“The idea was that there were lots of jobs — it was just that people weren’t looking. That was the narrative,” said...

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has chosen Liz Shuler, its acting president since the death of Richard Trumka this month, to lead the federation until it holds elections next year.

Ms. Shuler had served as secretary-treasurer, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s second-ranking official, since 2009.

The decision to name Ms. Shuler president came at a meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council on Friday, which Ms. Shuler was obligated to call within a few weeks of Mr. Trumka’s death under the federation’s constitution. Ms. Shuler is the group’s first female president.

“I believe in my bones the labor movement is the single greatest organized force for progress,” Ms. Shuler said in a statement. “This is a moment for us to lead societal transformations — to leverage our power to bring women and people of color from the margins to the center — at work, in our unions and in our economy, and to be the center of gravity for incubating new ideas that will unleash unprecedented union growth.”

Mike Richards’s first and, as it turned out, last day of filming as the host of “Jeopardy!” began with a gathering that executives at the long-running quiz show hoped would symbolize a fresh start.

In a taped ceremony on Thursday at the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, Calif., Sony revealed that the “Jeopardy!” studio would be renamed for Alex Trebek, the beloved host who died last year. Mr. Richards smiled as cameras rolled and Mr. Trebek’s widow and children looked on.

Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Richards had quit his hosting gig, “Jeopardy!” production was placed on hold, and the show’s fans were struggling to understand how a television institution and staple of the American living room could have botched a succession plan after 37 years of stability and success.

Mr. Richards stepped down on Friday after revelations of offensive and sexist comments he made on a podcast several years ago, just nine days after Sony announced his new role with great...