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 local television behemoth Nexstar Media Group announced Friday that it had acquired The Hill, a Beltway political news website, for $130 million.

Nexstar, the largest operator of local TV stations in the country, said in a news release that the deal would expand its digital reach and coverage of political news. The deal also unites two companies that have sought, with mixed results, to present themselves as neutral arbiters in a partisan moment.

“I like to say that we’re as far to the left as the right will go and as far to the right as the left will go,” Jimmy Finkelstein, who took a controlling stake in The Hill in 2014, said in an interview. Nexstar, he added, is “very much interested in that fit — they’re very balanced.”

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...

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...

In the 1970s, when Gustave M. Hauser, an international lawyer, was chairman and chief executive of Warner Cable Communications, cable television was still very much an uninspiring local business in rural towns, providing little more than $5-a-month connections to homes that otherwise had no access to television.

Prodded by his boss, Steven J. Ross, Warner Communications’ iconoclastic chairman, Mr. Hauser undertook a bold experiment in Columbus, Ohio: building a service that helped usher in the modern era of multichannel digital cable television.

In December 1977, Warner unveiled QUBE, an experimental cable system offering a package of 30 themed channels that provided movies, sports, children’s programming and documentaries. The system not only offered customers content unavailable on broadcast television; it also introduced new technology to bring that content to them. QUBE’s innovations included the first set-top boxes and remote control devices for cable.

To...

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...

In the endless struggle to rein in high drug prices, one glaring failure has been grabbing the headlines: the exorbitant cost of drugs that need to be administered by physicians.

Such drugs were once a rarity. But they are now more than one-fifth of all Medicare drug spending and growing rapidly, thanks in part to the biotechnology revolution, which has yielded an array of drugs that must be injected, infused or inhaled.

One of them, an Alzheimer’s drug called Aduhelm, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June and is being priced by its maker, Biogen, at $56,000 annually. That’s roughly equivalent to the cost of 45 hours of home health care for an Alzheimer’s patient each week for an entire year.

The F.D.A.’s approval of Aduhelm has come under close scrutiny and protest. The agency has already reversed itself, narrowing the drug’s suggested use to those with early symptoms of dementia, as opposed to everyone with Alzheimer’s.

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 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.”

DETROIT — What do the men and women who design cars drive? What kind of machines do sheet-metal artists park in their garages? A recent Saturday morning at Pasteiner’s Auto Zone Hobbies on Woodward Avenue in metro Detroit provided some interesting answers.

Pasteiner’s is a meeting place for car lovers of all types, but automotive designers have a strong affinity for the smallish store and its parking lot. That’s true in large part because the owner, Steve Pasteiner Sr., created cars for 23 years in Buick and Chevrolet studios, achieving assistant chief designer status. After calling it quits, he opened the store, offering an abundance of automotive books, magazines, models and car-folk camaraderie.

“It was almost a selfish thing,” Mr. Pasteiner, 79, said. “I needed a place to go after retirement.”

The quest for legitimacy in the United States is leading Binance.com, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, to pursue an initial public offering of its American unit. But for a company founded on secrecy — as cryptocurrency firms typically are — the going could be slow and fitful.

This month, Brian Brooks, the chief executive of Binance.US, left the company after just three months on the job, citing “strategic differences.” Changpeng Zhao, the Chinese Canadian billionaire who owns Binance.com, had hired Mr. Brooks, a former regulator, to help the company gain a U.S. footing. Mr. Brooks left after a venture capital investment he was trying to put together for Binance.US fell through. The deal would have been the first step to a potential I.P.O., but some investors balked at the amount of control Mr. Zhao would retain over Binance.US.

Companies that deal in digital money are trying to grow up. Often started by lone programmers lugging laptops across the globe,...

President Biden is encouraging states with stubbornly high jobless rates to use federal aid dollars to extend benefits for unemployed workers after they are set to expire in early September, administration officials said on Thursday, in an effort to cushion a potential shock to some local economies as the Delta variant rattles the country.

Enhanced benefits for unemployed workers will run through Sept. 6 under the $1.9 trillion economic aid bill enacted in March. Those benefits include a $300 weekly supplement for traditional benefits paid by states, additional weeks of benefits for the long-term unemployed, and a special pandemic program meant to help so-called gig-economy workers who do not qualify for normal unemployment benefits. Those benefits are administered by states but paid for by the federal government. The bill also included $350 billion in relief funds for state, local and tribal governments.

Mr. Biden still believes it is appropriate for the $300...

The coronavirus pandemic appears to have unleashed a tidal wave of entrepreneurial activity, breaking the United States — at least temporarily — out of a decades-long start-up slump.

Americans filed paperwork to start 4.3 million businesses last year, according to data from the Census Bureau, a 24 percent increase from the year before and by far the most in the decade and a half that the government has kept track. Applications are on a pace to be even higher this year.

The surge is a striking and unexpected turnaround after a 40-year decline in U.S. entrepreneurship. In 1980, 12 percent of employers were new businesses; by 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, that share had fallen to 8 percent.

The prolonged decline worried economists, because start-ups are a key source of job growth, innovation and economic resiliency. A reversal of the trend could contribute to a more dynamic, productive economy that could more easily rebound from future...

To build on the momentum, Facebook on Thursday introduced a virtual-reality service called Horizon Workrooms. The product, which is free for Quest 2 owners to download, offers a virtual meeting room where people using the headsets can gather as if they are at an in-person work meeting. The participants join with a customizable cartoon avatar of themselves. Interactive virtual white boards line the walls so that people can write and draw things as in a physical conference room.

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 finalized.

Huarong also said that 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...

Toyota Motor, the world’s largest automaker, plans to cut production worldwide 40 percent in September because of a shortage of computer chips that the company had avoided being hurt by until now.

The move will affect 14 plants in Japan and reduce output by about 140,000 cars and trucks next month, the company said. In the United States, Toyota expects to produce about 80,000 fewer vehicles next month than it had previously planned. The company is also cutting production in Europe, China and other countries.

“Due to Covid-19 and unexpected events with our supply chain, Toyota is experiencing additional shortages that will affect production at most of our North American plants,” the company said in a statement. “While the situation remains fluid and complex, our manufacturing and supply chain teams have worked diligently to develop countermeasures to minimize the impact on production.”

The company is also expecting North American production in August to be...

WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission took new aim at Facebook on Thursday, beefing up its accusations that the company was a monopoly that illegally crushed competition, in an attempt to overcome the skepticism of a federal judge who threw out the agency’s original case two months ago.

The suit submitted Thursday contains the same overall arguments as the original. But the updated suit is much longer and includes more facts and analysis that the agency says better support the government’s allegations.

The agency had to refile the case after the judge overseeing it said in June that the government had not provided enough evidence that Facebook was a monopoly in social networking. The judge’s decision, and a similar one he made in a case against the company brought by more than 40 states, dealt a stunning blow to regulators’ attempts to rein in Big Tech.

His decision presented the first major test for Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair, who was only days into her...

Toyota Motor, the world’s largest automaker, plans to cut production worldwide 40 percent in September because of a shortage of computer chips that the company had avoided being hurt by until now.

The move will affect 14 plants in Japan and reduce output by about 140,000 cars and trucks next month, the company said. In the United States, Toyota expects to produce about 80,000 fewer vehicles next month than it had previously planned. The company is also cutting production in Europe, China and other countries.

“Due to Covid-19 and unexpected events with our supply chain, Toyota is experiencing additional shortages that will affect production at most of our North American plants,” the company said in a statement. “While the situation remains fluid and complex, our manufacturing and supply chain teams have worked diligently to develop countermeasures to minimize the impact on production.”

The company is also expecting North American production in August to be...