Quick Bit

By Katherine Anne Long From The Seattle Times Amazon’s long-awaited Fresh grocery store in Bellevue, Wash., opened Thursday to crowds—and a twist. The company revealed in a surprise announcement earlier this week that the store is the company’s first full-size Fresh grocery equipped with cashierless technology, powered by a vast array of motion-aware ceiling cameras…

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration has sued to block the merger of two of the world’s largest insurance brokers, asserting the deal could eliminate competition, raise prices and hamper innovation for U.S. businesses, employers, and unions that use the companies’ services. The Justice Department on Wednesday announced the antitrust suit filed in federal court in Washington seeking…

Microsoft on Wednesday named Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella as its new chairman, in place of John Thompson. Nadella, who took over as CEO in 2014 from Steve Ballmer, has been instrumental in scaling up its business including billion-dollar acquisitions like LinkedIn, Nuance Communications, and ZeniMax. The company said Thompson, who took over as chairman…

Ford’s outlook for the second quarter is improving, as the automaker is seeing strong customer reservations for four of its new vehicles. Ford Motor Co. now anticipates its quarterly adjusted earnings before interest and taxes to top its expectations and be significantly better than the year-ago period. Although there’s still uncertainty around semiconductor supply, Ford…

Websites of major U.S. airline companies American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines faced an outage early on Thursday, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector. More than a thousand user reports indicated problems at Southwest Airlines, with over 400 user reports indicating the same for Delta Air Lines, according to Downdetector. That…

DETROIT—General Motors on Wednesday boosted its spending on electric and autonomous vehicles, pulled ahead plans for two U.S. battery plants and forecast stronger-than-expected second-quarter profits. The No. 1 U.S. automaker said it will now spend $35 billion through 2025 on electric vehicles, an increase of 75 percent from March 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic shut…

A Chinese national has pleaded guilty after being accused of cheating the federal government and banks to obtain tens of millions of COVID-19 relief loans meant for small businesses. He could be sentenced to up to 32 years in prison, the Justice Department said in a June 15 press release. The 37-year-old New York resident,…

investments in oil and gas companies and their development of new projects are coming under increasing scrutiny due to ESG Originally found on the Epoch Times Read More

DALLAS—Southwest Airlines said it was working Tuesday to restore normal operations after a technology-related issue interfered with flights for the second straight day. By midafternoon, the nation’s fourth-largest airline had canceled about 500 flights and delayed nearly 1,300 others, according to tracking service FlightAware. The combination of cancellations and delays affected about half of Southwest’s…