Retail sales dropped in July, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, showing signs that consumer spending was hampered amid an uneven economic recovery.

The 1.1 percent decline in sales last month, which followed an increase in spending in June, was bigger than the drop economists had expected and came as spending on homes and cars fell.

SEATTLE — Amazon has eclipsed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China, according to corporate and industry data, a milestone in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping that has changed how people buy everything from Teddy Grahams to teddy bears.

Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by the financial research firm FactSet. Walmart on Tuesday posted sales of $566 billion for the 12 months ending in July.

Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer, is the world’s top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China.

In racing past Walmart, Amazon has dethroned one of the most successful — and feared — companies of recent decades. Walmart perfected a thriving big-box model of retailing that squeezed every possible penny out of its costs, which drove down prices and...

When Kmart opened its first store, in Garden City, Mich., in 1962, the aim was to become an all-under-one-roof retailer. Americans’ shopping habits had gravitated toward the suburbs after World War II, and Kmart was going to cater to them.

Kmart last opened a new store in 2002; since then, it has all been closings. When it merged with Sears in 2005, Kmart had 2,085 locations. With the abrupt closing of the Astor Place Kmart in Manhattan last month, the number of open Kmart stores is down to 17.

For a time, the company’s real estate decisions worked well. But as shoppers moved farther into the suburbs, Kmart didn’t move with them. Kmart continued to build inside beltways and urban centers, even though its core customers were no longer there, a strategy that helped lead to the company’s tumble, retail experts say.

But the retailers’s two-decade slide has transformed the commercial real estate market in unexpected ways, bringing churches, truck washes and...

Retail sales dropped in July, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, showing signs that consumer spending was hampered amid an uneven economic recovery.

The 1.1 percent decline in sales last month, which followed an increase in spending in June, was bigger than the drop economists had expected and came as spending on homes and cars fell.

As Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s political career teetered, his brother, the TV host Chris Cuomo, kept silent, declining to address the matter on his CNN show and then leaving for what he described as a planned vacation.

On Monday, Chris Cuomo returned to prime time and spoke publicly for the first time about his brother’s stunning resignation — and the ethical headaches it created for him and his network.

“It was a unique situation, being a brother to a politician in a scandal and being part of the media,” Mr. Cuomo said in brief remarks toward the end of his 9 p.m. show. “I tried to do the right thing, and I just want you all to know that.”

He also said he had advised his brother to step down as New York’s governor. “While it was something I never imagined ever having to do,” he told viewers, “I did urge my brother to resign, when the time came.”

SIENA, Italy — Last month Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, acquired another distinction: Europe’s weakest lender.

The bank performed worse than any other in a test of its financial health by European regulators, the latest gloomy chapter in a long-running saga of ill-fated deals, financial shenanigans, criminal wrongdoing and even a mysterious death.

The stress test by regulators, which showed that a severe recession would wipe out the bank’s capital, has forced the Italian government to face an unpleasant truth: Monte dei Paschi’s five-and-a-half-century run is coming to an end. With prodding from Rome, UniCredit, one of Italy’s largest banks, said last month that it was in talks to buy Monte dei Paschi on the condition that the government keep all the bad loans.

Monte dei Paschi, founded in 1472, will probably live on as a brand name on bank branches in central Italy, and customers probably won’t notice much difference, at least at...

Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, the special purpose acquisition company run by the billionaire hedge-fund investor Bill Ackman, got sued this morning in a novel case that could have far-reaching implications for the SPAC industry.

The case, which is being argued by Robert Jackson, a former S.E.C. commissioner, and John Morley, a law professor at Yale, contends that Ackman’s SPAC isn’t an operating company, but is actually an investment company like Ackman’s funds, which should be regulated by the Investment Company Act of 1940. If certain SPACs were regulated as investment companies, much of the industry could be affected because it would make it harder for anyone in the investment business to participate in a SPAC.

SPACs are already under fire from regulators who have pledged to tighten protections for investors, and they face a rising number of class-action lawsuits by aggrieved shareholders. Around 600 SPACs have gone public over the past year and SPAC-linked...

George Brian McGee, a finance executive in Florida, was driving home in a Tesla Model S operating on Autopilot, a system that can steer, brake and accelerate a car on its own, when he dropped his phone during a call and bent down to look for it.

Neither he nor Autopilot noticed that the road was ending and the Model S drove past a stop sign and a flashing red light. The car smashed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a 22-year-old college student, Naibel Benavides.

One of a growing number of fatal accidents involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, Mr. McGee’s case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: He got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal accidents have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars.

“I was driving and dropped my...

The billionaire founder of Evergrande, China’s most indebted property developer, has stepped down from his position as chairman of the company’s main real estate arm, Hengda Real Estate Group, according to a notice filed to a government website on Tuesday.

The news that Xu Jiayin, the chairman, would be replaced by Zhao Changlong, a previous company director who will take over as general manager of the real estate arm, sent the developer’s shares falling by more than 4 percent.

Details of the management change at Hengda Real Estate Group were published on the National Enterprise Credit Information System, a government corporate information site. A spokesperson for Evergrande said Mr. Xu would remain chairman of Evergrande.

Evergrande is the latest Chinese corporate giant to fall under the microscope of regulators looking to rein in unruly corporate debt. One of the country’s most debt-saddled companies, it has as much as $300 billion in unpaid bills, loan and...

SIENA, Italy — Last month Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, acquired another distinction: Europe’s weakest lender.

The bank performed worse than any other in a test of its financial health by European regulators, the latest gloomy chapter in a long-running saga of ill-fated deals, financial shenanigans, criminal wrongdoing and even a mysterious death.

The stress test by regulators, which showed that a severe recession would wipe out the bank’s capital, has forced the Italian government to face an unpleasant truth: Monte dei Paschi’s five-and-a-half-century run is coming to an end. With prodding from Rome, UniCredit, one of Italy’s largest banks, said last month that it was in talks to buy Monte dei Paschi on the condition that the government keep all the bad loans.

Monte dei Paschi, founded in 1472, will probably live on as a brand name on bank branches in central Italy, and customers probably won’t notice much difference, at least at...

As Jerome H. Powell nears the end of his term as Federal Reserve chair, Ms. Yellen will have a say over whether he should stay on. Many progressive Democrats want him replaced.

SAN FRANCISCO — Soon after joining Twitter in 2019, Dantley Davis gathered his staff in a conference room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Twitter was too nice, he told the group, and he was there to change it.

Mr. Davis, the company’s new vice president of design, asked employees to go around the room, complimenting and critiquing one another. Tough criticism would help Twitter improve, he said. The barbs soon flew. Several attendees cried during the two-hour meeting, said three people who were there.

Mr. Davis, 43, has played a key role in a behind-the-scenes effort over the past two years to remake Twitter’s culture. The company had long been slow to build products, and under pressure from investors and users, executives landed on a diagnosis: Twitter’s collaborative environment had calcified, making workers reluctant to criticize one another. Mr. Davis, the company believed, was one of the answers to that problem.

The turmoil that followed...

Last month, federal authorities charged the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola, which had gone public in the summer of 2020, with defrauding investors. They were led there partly by the work of a little-known Wall Streeter named Nathan Anderson.

A stock researcher and investor, Mr. Anderson and his upstart firm, Hindenburg Research, are having a moment. In early August, the Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed the sports betting firm DraftKings after Hindenburg said in a June report that it had potentially enabled black-market betting. And shares of Lordstown Motors have fallen nearly 70 percent since Hindenburg said in March that the electric truck maker was hyping commercial interest for its vehicle. Federal authorities are investigating Lordstown’s claims.

Mr. Anderson’s five-person firm, which takes its name from the German airship that blew up in 1937, is a newbie in the world of finance. Founded in 2017, Hindenburg specializes in...

ISLE OF WIGHT, England — For the second year running, a hallowed rite for millions of people in Britain — decamping to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean — has been disrupted by the pandemic. The number of flights in and out of Britain are half their 2019 levels.

This year, the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England, has lured even more visitors to its sandy beaches, coastal walks and arcades. But pandemic restrictions, staff shortages and the often uncooperative British weather are challenging visitors and business owners this season.

TOKYO — Japan stepped back into economic growth in the second three months of 2021, but prospects for a more robust recovery looked dim as the country grappled with its worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began.

The country’s economy, the third-largest after the United States and China, grew at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent during the April-to-June period, recording a quarterly increase of 0.3 percent. The expansion followed a quarter-to-quarter drop of 0.9 percent in the previous three-month period.

Even as other major economies have roared back to life, Japan’s has been stuck in a cycle of growth and contraction as the country has struggled with a persistent spread of infections that has kept its shops, bars and restaurants under constricted schedules.

Currently, case levels in Japan are at record highs. The country reported almost 18,000 new infections on Sunday, with nearly 4,300 in Tokyo, which entered its fourth state of emergency in July....

Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine was supposed to be one of Africa’s most important weapons against the coronavirus.

The New Jersey-based company agreed to sell enough of its inexpensive single-shot vaccine to eventually inoculate a third of the continent’s residents. And the vaccine would be produced in part by a South African manufacturer, raising hopes that those doses would quickly go to Africans.

That has not happened.

South Africa is still waiting to receive the overwhelming majority of the 31 million vaccine doses it ordered from Johnson & Johnson. It has administered only about two million Johnson & Johnson shots. That is a key reason that fewer than 7 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated — and that the country was devastated by the Delta variant.

At the same time, Johnson & Johnson has been exporting millions of doses that were bottled and packaged in South Africa for distribution in Europe, according to executives at...

TOKYO — Japan stepped back into economic growth in the second three months of 2021, but prospects for a more robust recovery looked dim as the country grappled with its worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began.

The country’s economy, the third-largest after the United States and China, grew at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent during the April-to-June period, recording a quarterly increase of 0.3 percent. The expansion followed a quarter-to-quarter drop of 0.9 percent in the previous three-month period.

Even as other major economies have roared back to life, Japan’s has been stuck in a cycle of growth and contraction as the country has struggled with a persistent spread of infections that has kept its shops, bars and restaurants under constricted schedules.

Currently, case levels in Japan are at record highs. The country reported almost 18,000 new infections on Sunday, with nearly 4,300 in Tokyo, which entered its fourth state of emergency in July....

SAN FRANCISCO — Soon after joining Twitter in 2019, Dantley Davis gathered his staff in a conference room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Twitter was too nice, he told the group, and he was there to change it.

Mr. Davis, the company’s new vice president of design, asked employees to go around the room, complimenting and critiquing one another. Tough criticism would help Twitter improve, he said. The barbs soon flew. Several attendees cried during the two-hour meeting, said three people who were there.

Mr. Davis, 43, has played a key role in a behind-the-scenes effort over the past two years to remake Twitter’s culture. The company had long been slow to build products, and under pressure from investors and users, executives landed on a diagnosis: Twitter’s collaborative environment had calcified, making workers reluctant to criticize one another. Mr. Davis, the company believed, was one of the answers to that problem.

The turmoil that followed...

ISLE OF WIGHT, England — For the second year running, a hallowed rite for millions of people in Britain — decamping to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean — has been disrupted by the pandemic. The number of flights in and out of Britain are half their 2019 levels.

This year, the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England, has lured even more visitors to its sandy beaches, coastal walks and arcades. But pandemic restrictions, staff shortages and the often uncooperative British weather are challenging visitors and business owners this season.

Last month, federal authorities charged the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola, which had gone public in the summer of 2020, with defrauding investors. They were led there partly by the work of a little-known Wall Streeter named Nathan Anderson.

A stock researcher and investor, Mr. Anderson and his upstart firm, Hindenburg Research, are having a moment. In early August, the Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed the sports betting firm DraftKings after Hindenburg said in a June report that it had potentially enabled black-market betting. And shares of Lordstown Motors have fallen nearly 70 percent since Hindenburg said in March that the electric truck maker was hyping commercial interest for its vehicle. Federal authorities are investigating Lordstown’s claims.

Mr. Anderson’s five-person firm, which takes its name from the German airship that blew up in 1937, is a newbie in the world of finance. Founded in 2017, Hindenburg specializes in...

As Jerome H. Powell nears the end of his term as Federal Reserve chair, Ms. Yellen will have a say over whether he should stay on. Progressive Democrats want him replaced.

Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine was supposed to be one of Africa’s most important weapons against the coronavirus.

The New Jersey-based company agreed to sell enough of its inexpensive single-shot vaccine to eventually inoculate a third of the continent’s residents. And the vaccine would be produced in part by a South African manufacturer, raising hopes that those doses would quickly go to Africans.

That has not happened.

South Africa is still waiting to receive the overwhelming majority of the 31 million vaccine doses it ordered from Johnson & Johnson. It has administered only about two million Johnson & Johnson shots. That is a key reason that fewer than 7 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated — and that the country was devastated by the Delta variant.

At the same time, Johnson & Johnson has been exporting millions of doses that were bottled and packaged in South Africa for distribution in Europe, according to executives at...