Tim Fernholz

Qatar is facing day nine of a diplomatic embargo from its closest neighbors. The US ambassador has resigned. The Turks are sending in “military experts.” And the country is in a stand-off with neighbors like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Bahrain that is threatening the fight against ISIL and the broader norms that ensure security around the world.

Democrats in Virginia go to the polls today to choose their nominee for governor, but their choice may also help settle simmering tensions in the party that are distracting from its attempts to resist US president Donald Trump’s agenda.

Long Beach, California

Mojave Air and Space Port, California

For more than two years, Americans have been freer to travel and do business in Cuba than at any time in the previous five decades. Now, however, the Trump administration is considering restoring the restrictions on travel and trade that president Barack Obama relaxed in 2014. Insiders say the decision might be presented as a defense of human rights in Cuba, but will in reality be an attempt by Trump buy some support for his other Washington battles.

Now that’s a headline!

If you need to measure whether the pace of space activity is really increasing or if people just get excited about rockets, consider that for the first time in five years, three orbital rockets will launch today on three different continents—and all three are on commercial missions.

A spate of massive leaks showing the inner-workings of global tax evasion has given the public a window into how the super-wealthy—including celebrities, politicians, and criminals—leverage the globalization of finance to hide their wealth from the authorities.

The White House has started the clock. The re-negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which underpins $1.1. trillion in trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico, will start no later than August 16. But will it be a spruce-up or a gut renovation?

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s White House strategist, has been getting a lot of credit in Washington for the apocalyptic ideology dominating the new administration.

One of the world’s most promising new rocket companies successfully launched its first rocket to space from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula on May 25.

The last time the Congressional Budget Office scored the Republican health care bill back in March, it forced lawmakers to make major changes in order to prevent millions of Americans from losing their health coverage and lower premiums for the elderly.

There’s double-counting in US president Donald Trump’s budget—an elementary mistake worth $2 trillion. Want to see it for your own eyes? Let’s get this thing (pdf) open.

The Congressional Budget Office is tangible evidence that knowledge is indeed power.

One of the most revealing things in US president Donald Trump’s budget proposal, due out today, is its extravagant assumptions about economic growth. Even a budget few expect to be enacted needed a behind-the-scenes boost to deliver plausible results, as it effectively assumes a technological revolution bigger than any since World War II.

When US president Donald Trump arrived in Washington, promising to “drain the swamp,” he signed an order barring lobbyists from working in his administration on matters they had been paid to influence in the previous two years. But he has hired numerous former lobbyists and industry lawyers to work on their old portfolios, and he now refuses to disclose the extent of the practice.

Elise Warren came to Washington because she is tired of counting tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars every morning before opening her store.

The US Department of Justice has named Robert Mueller, a former FBI head, as a special counsel to oversee the bureau’s probe into Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.

Flying the biggest satellite that SpaceX has ever launched, weighing in at more than 6 metric tons, proved a routine piece of business for the company’s Falcon 9 rocket yesterday.

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean strongman, was pleased as punch on May 14 when his country shot a missile some 2,000 km (1,240 miles) into the air. The exercise may have demonstrated his country’s ability to launch nuclear weapons at targets like the US military base on the Pacific island of Guam, but it leaves a critical question: When will North Korea have a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the United States?

Ever since the election of US president Donald Trump, consumer surveyors have noticed a trend: A determining factor for Americans’ economic outlook is whether they are Democrats or Republicans.

In February, at the behest of the White House, NASA said it would consider adding two astronauts to the first integrated launch of its new Space Launch System rocket and Orion space capsule, planned for 2018. That NASA would even try to accommodate US presidential Donald Trump’s hope to see human passengers on what was meant to be an unmanned mission surprised many observers, given NASA’s traditionally deliberate and risk-reducing approach to human spaceflight.

After president Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey in the middle of an investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election, Americans immediately began to wonder who would pick up the torch—with some calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to examine the ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

The Falcon Heavy has been on Elon Musk’s mind for years: A rocket bigger than anything else currently in operation, only outstripped by the moon rockets of the Apollo program.