Us Housing Starts Slip In December

Two years ago, David Rosenberg’s dealership lots were virtually empty; cars would sell as soon as they arrived. Today, Rosenberg, president of DSR Motors, which has 12 dealerships across New England, says he’s offering up huge deals to get vehicles off the lots because he has so much inventory. Rosenberg has been forced to offer big price cuts for brands like Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) and Nissan, as well as some Subaru models.

In Nov. 2021, John William Pollard, a retiree who lives in Philadelphia, wrote a $84.83 check to Verizon to pay a phone bill. It was stolen in the mail. The amount was changed to $45,678.12, made out to a person named Olivia Wallace, and cashed, according to a legal complaint made on behalf of Pollard and his wife Patrice.

Meta Platforms Inc. was hit with a Norwegian complaint over its plans to use the images and posts of users on Facebook and Instagram to train artificial intelligence models. The process to opt-out breaches strict E. U. data protection rules and “has been made deliberately cumbersome by using deceptive design patterns and vague wording,” the Norwegian Consumer Council said in a statement Thursday. Meta has faced complaints in Europe for allegedly failing to get proper consent before collecting user data in order to target the ads users see.

NEW YORK — Eight former employees sued SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk, alleging that Musk ordered them fired after they challenged what they called rampant sexual harassment and a hostile “Animal House”-style work environment at the company. The employees, who filed suit in a California state court, detailed their complaints in a 2022 open letter to management they shared via a company intranet.

The National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group that represents music publishers and songwriters, filed a complaint with the U. S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday about Spotify Technology SA’s decision to provide audiobooks to subscribers, which resulted in reduced royalty payments to songwriters. The audiobooks addition gave Spotify leeway to reclassify its premium subscription offering as a “bundle.” Under a complicated system set by the U.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is getting into the exhibition business. The studio behind recent films like “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” and “The Garfield Movie” has acquired the distinctive theater chain Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the companies said Wednesday. Included in the deal is the genre film festival Fantastic Fest. Sony said it will continue to welcome content from all studios and distributors at the dine-in theaters. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Alamo Drafthouse was founded in 1997 as a single screen, family-owned repertory theater in Austin, Texas, and has grown to 35 locations in North America.