Days into its experiment with bitcoin as legal tender, the government of El Salvador might as well sign up to become a member of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets. In its fixation with the cryptocurrency, in the language it uses, and in the kind of meme-stock momentum it wants to spark online, El Salvador is taking its cues directly from meme-stock traders.
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Madagascar is being hit by one of the modern world’s first climate change-induced famines—a disaster that underscores the profound unfairness of a planet heated up by carbon emissions.
Americans have more money to spend, but the Delta variant of the coronavirus is giving them fewer opportunities to spend it.
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Staff at Zoom, the video-conferencing app of choice during the Covid-19 pandemic, will no longer use Zoom quite so much. The company is preparing to send many of its own employees back to their workplaces, as part of what it calls a “hybrid” return-to-office approach.
Over the course of two Paralympic Games in London and Rio de Janeiro, Donna Fisher has come to expect a familiar sight. On the Games’ busiest days, a queue of athletes forms at 7am, each bringing a wheelchair with a wobbly wheel or a chipped running blade or some other kind of errant prosthesis, waiting for Fisher and her colleagues to open shop and mend their equipment.
When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine on Aug. 23, it had to include a pronunciation guide to the vaccine’s brand name: “Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee).”
The US government has told commercial airlines they have to supply planes and crews to transport Afghan evacuees under an arrangement made in 1952, just after the West airlifted supplies into a blockaded Berlin in the early years of the Cold War.
When Robinhood announced its first earnings as a public company on Aug. 18, the Redditors on the WallStreetBets forum barely raised a murmur.
The Biden administration has frozen the Afghanistan government’s holdings in US banks, preventing the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars—a major, if indeterminate, part of the country’s foreign reserves.
When the Taliban rode into Kabul and captured the presidential palace on Aug. 15, it marked the return to power of one of Toyota’s most loyal—and most regrettable—customers.
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The US consumer price index rose 0.5% in July—the lowest such month-on-month rise since February, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The tempered rate of inflation, which should allay the market’s fears of an overheated economy, owed a lot to a slowdown in the prices of used cars, which had galloped upwards in the spring and early summer.
Man-made climate change will set off intense, frequent heatwaves in South Asia over the coming decades, according to a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In tandem, the report said, the monsoon will strengthen over the subcontinent, leading to rain-fed flooding and humid heat stress, a combination of high temperature and moisture.
Sales of Moderna’s successful Covid-19 vaccine have earned the company so much cash that it is preparing to buy back $1 billion of its stock.
When the Paralympic Games begin in Tokyo on Aug. 24, more than a dozen athletes—sprinters, long-distance runners, cyclists, long-jumpers, table tennis players—will compete wearing prosthetics made by Össur, a company itself founded by an amputee.
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Old habits die hard. It’s easy to still think of Square as a tech company—not least because its name refers to the white credit-card readers it sells to vendors, or because its CEO, Jack Dorsey, is also the CEO of Twitter.
The UK’s furlough program appears scheduled to end right on time. But, as ever with Covid-19, conditions apply.
