Business

Restaurant chain Hooters of America filed for bankruptcy protection in Texas on Monday, seeking to address its $376 million debt by selling all of its company-owned restaurants to a franchise group backed by the company’s founders. Hooters, like other casual dining restaurants, has struggled in recent years due to inflation, the high costs of labor and food and declining spending by cash-strapped American consumers. ...

Amazon on Monday released a new AI model that can take actions in a web browser on a user’s behalf, a move that puts it in more direct competition with OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies that have developed the so-called “agents.” The new model, called Nova Act, is designed to help developers build agents, or AI software that can complete multi-step tasks for ...

President Donald Trump commuted the criminal sentence of Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson on Friday, just hours before Watson was due to begin serving a 116-month prison term for a multi-million-dollar scheme that included falsely claiming the start-up had deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey, a senior White House official said. Watson had expected to surrender Friday afternoon to the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California, before he received word of ...

President Donald Trump moved Thursday to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions in agencies with national security missions across the federal government, citing authority granted him under a 1978 law. The order, signed without public fanfare and announced late Thursday, appears to touch most of the federal government. Affected agencies include the Departments of State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Health ...

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is betting that by rolling out a large enough portfolio of digital investment products, more consumers will be willing to pay a monthly subscription for its product suite. Subscribers to Robinhood Gold pay $5 a month or $50 a year for perks like 4% interest on uninvested cash, access to professional research, and no interest on the ...

The Federal Communications Commission has alerted the Walt Disney Company and its ABC unit that it will begin an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the media giant. The FCC, the agency that regulates the media and telecommunications industry, said in a letter dated Friday that it wants to “ensure that Disney and ABC have not been violating FCC equal employment opportunity ...

Lululemon beat Wall Street expectations for fiscal fourth-quarter earnings and revenue, but issued 2025 guidance that disappointed analysts. On an Thursday earnings call, CEO Calvin McDonald said the athleticwear company conducted a survey earlier this month that found that consumers are spending less due to economic and inflation concerns, resulting in lower U.S. traffic at Lululemon and industry peers. However, he said, ...

Investors have closely watched Nvidia’s week-long GPU Technology Conference (GTC) for news and updates from the dominant maker of chips that power artificial intelligence applications. The event comes at a pivotal time for Nvidia shares. After two years of monster gains, the stock is down 15% over the past month and 22% below the January all-time high. As part of the ...

Oil executives are warning that President Donald Trump’s tariffs and “drill, baby, drill” message have created uncertainty in energy markets that is already affecting investment. The executives, shielded by anonymity, bluntly criticized Trump in their responses to a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from March 12 to March 20. “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” ...

Dollar Tree said Wednesday that it’s gaining market share with higher-income consumers and could raise prices on some products to offset President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The discount retailer’s CEO, Michael Creedon, said the company is seeing “value-seeking behavior across all income groups.” While Dollar Tree has always relied on lower-income shoppers and gets about 50% of its business from middle-income consumers, sustained inflation ...