Author: palmbeachocean.com

All that cost-cutting at Amazon might be paying off. The company isn’t back to the torrid growth of bygone days but managed to beat Wall Street expectations on Thursday.Revenue in the second quarter rose 11 percent to $134.4 billion, the retailer said, better than the 9 percent it was achieving recently. That was about $3 billion more than analysts had been forecasting.Net income was 65 cents a share versus expectations of 35 cents. Last year, the company lost 20 cents a share in the quarter because of a slump in the value of its investment in Rivian, the electric truck…

The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than…

The Tampa Bay Rays were the best team in Major League Baseball over the first three months of the season. In July, they were the second worst.With 16 losses in 24 games, it was their worst month since 2007, the year before they dropped the “Devil” from their moniker. During this monthlong about-face, they went from leading the American League East by 6.5 games to trailing the upstart Baltimore Orioles by a game and a half.Yet, in the final hours before Tuesday’s trading deadline, there was no panic in the visiting clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, where Tampa Bay was getting…

Missed the GamesBeat Summit excitement? Don’t worry! Tune in now to catch all of the live and virtual sessions here. Xbox announced this week which games would be coming to Game Pass this week. While the latest wave doesn’t include any new games or launch day titles, it does add several new games to the service, including classic platformer titles, action side-scrollers and quiet adventure games. The games start coming to users today, and this first wave will last through the 15th of the month. The first title in the list is technically platformer Celeste, which Game Pass announced in…

Lois Libien, who broke ground in the 1960s as a female journalist in a largely male field but who attracted her widest readership by providing household hints in books and a nationally syndicated newspaper column, died on July 25 in River Vale, N.J. She was 87.Her death, at an assisted living center, where she had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease, was caused by renal failure, her daughter, Jenny Libien, said.In a varied career that included the authorship of two sexy novels and then, at age 62, a professional shift to psychotherapy, Ms. Libien (pronounced LIH-bee-en) was probably best known for…

Seiichi Morimura, who wrote a searing exposé of the Japanese Army’s secret biological warfare program in occupied China, describing how it forcibly infected thousands of prisoners with deadly pathogens, died on July 24 in Tokyo. He was 90.The announcement of his death by his publisher, Kadokawa, was cited in Japanese media.Mr. Morimura detailed the atrocities committed by the Japanese program — called Unit 731 — in a widely sold book, “Akuma no Hoshoku,” or “The Devil’s Gluttony” (1981). Among the horrors he described were vivisections performed without anesthesia on those who had been deliberately administered germs; doctors wanted to see…

Some newly reported clumps of cells growing in lab dishes have been hailed as the closest things to human embryos that scientists have ever made in the lab. These entities are human embryo models — masses of cells created from stem cells that mimic some properties of certain stages of embryo development. The achievement gives researchers a chance to look at human development beyond the first week or so, when an embryo must implant in the uterus to develop further. That post-implantation stage hadn’t been re-created in lab dishes — until now.  Six studies reported in June and July describe…

This weekend I have … a half-hour, and I want a wry comedy.‘Fisk’When to watch: Now, on Netflix.Kitty Flanagan cocreated and stars in this Australian comedy about a lawyer whose life collapses, so she finds herself working in a dinky suburban law firm. “Fisk” has a fun and offbeat style, not quite as strange as “Stath Lets Flats” but set in a similarly askew world populated by enchanting oddballs. It’s also the rare comedy to operate largely as a procedural, with new clients each episode. If you wish you could mash up “Boston Legal” and “The Office,” with an emphasis…

The NewsAccording to a post on the police department’s public safety site, officers in Pittsburgh found Huggins blocking traffic in a black S.U.V. on Friday just before 8:30 p.m. Huggins’s door was open, and the car had “a flat and shredded tire.”The police instructed Huggins to move his vehicle off the road, which he struggled to do. He failed field sobriety tests and was arrested.According to the criminal complaint, the police found a white bag full of empty beer cans on the floor of Huggins’s car. Another white bag full of cans was found in the trunk. When the police…

Editor’s take: While it’s nice to see the FCC doling out huge fines to companies that prey on the naive and waste more cautious people’s time, it’s hard to get overly excited about it. The scammers ultimately never pay the fines and often are overseas so there is little in the way of enforcement. These scammers have already been banned from telemarketing, yet here they are. However, that doesn’t mean the FCC should give up and not even try. In December 2022, the FCC proposed the biggest fine it has ever issued against a robocalling outfit – $299,997,000. The penalty…