The year 2014 was not kind to Argentina’s economy. After defaulting on its debt, the country entered a recession, it still faces sky-high inflation, and the price of soybeans, its major commodity export, is falling. Something’s got to give. And tonight at midnight, something will.
The latest development in Russia’s neo-czarist trend comes with news that courts there have imprisoned the apparently apolitical younger brother of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in what seems like an effort to ensure his good behavior.
It’s been a surprisingly resurgent year for human activities in space, with governments and entrepreneurs pushing to make extra-terrestrial access cheaper, more lucrative and more important to daily life than it has ever been before. Here’s a look at the good and the bad in orbit and beyond.
Remember the exciting days when elections in Greece could leave the global economy shuddering? It might be back to the future in 2015.
If you flew a US airline over the holidays, you probably paid extra to stow your bag, or for some extra leg room. If you’re not a frequent flyer, you saw some of your fellow travelers board the plane before you in a special fast lane.
Tesla says that it can upgrade its first and now-discontinued model, the Roadster, to drive 400 miles on a single charge—the longest operating range yet for the company’s all-electric vehicles. But there are only about 2,500 vehicles in existence that can receive the upgrade.
All those Dutch sandwiches, double Irishes and Luxembourg, uh, lunchboxes that US multinational companies use to defer taxes and shift profits abroad are expected to be re-empowered today when the Senate votes to enact a one-year tax extension package.
President Obama is getting a lot of flack today for backing a spending bill that rolled back a rule intended to prevent the next financial crisis and gutted campaign finance restrictions. But he hasn’t gotten enough credit for quashing an enormous tax giveaway to business that would have blown up the deficit.
You know the story: An emerging market brimming with potential really starts hitting it, generating growth and prosperity, but as it moves into the middle of the global economic table, things slow down. Hopes for future wealth diminish. It’s trapped.
The momentum behind a $1.1 trillion spending bill designed to avert a US government shutdown appears inexorable—excellent news for Wall Street, which is counting on the legislation to help it roll back some of the more restrictive regulations imposed after the 2008 financial crisis.
You should always be a little suspicious of a bipartisan deal in US politics, and the spending bill unveiled last night by US lawmakers is no exception: It ought to avoid the economic problems of a government shutdown, but a back-room deal between the parties also lifted caps on campaign finance, allowing the wealthy to donate an additional $680,400 to their political party each year.
With the release of the Senate investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, we now know more about the program than ever before. Besides the fact that the coercive so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” weren’t effective, we more about know how much it cost US taxpayers to run a global network of torture sites.
A wide-ranging US Senate investigation into the CIA’s tactics in the so-called War on Terror confirms the use of torture to interrogate captives at black sites around the world—and shows that it was only in spite of this cruelty that the US was able to find and kill the architect of the 9/11 attacks.
For starters, let’s be clear: The odds are against Orion going to Mars.
US gasoline prices are reaching their lowest levels since 2010, and we can expect them to keep falling in the near future as oil prices continue to slump—which makes this a fantastic time to raise the US federal gas tax.
The US, UK, and Australia are in the midst of heated corporate tax debates right now. Conservative policymakers are taking the lead, but their different conclusions show more than the traditional right-wing principles at play.
Baksheesh. Payola. Tea money. Bribes transcend culture, and according to a new review of 15 years of foreign bribery prosecutions, they also fly under the radar of most government officials. And even when caught, they result in weak punishments that take an average of seven years to be assigned—usually through settlements and fines that amount to less than the profit resulting from the bribe.
Zenefits, a startup that uses free human resources software to help market its insurance brokerage business, has been banned in the state of Utah for not charging enough money.
Who was the best soccer player in the world in 2014?
It’s the time of the year when many Americans feel compelled to donate to a charity abroad—and many find themselves in a quandary about where, and how, to send their money. Recent research and controversies can sometimes make it seem that donations to the poor around the world don’t really help at at all.
As is traditional, the US Congress is flirting with a government shutdown 10 days before it must approve a spending plan for the year.
When SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, challenged a patent for landing reusable rockets at sea owned by rival Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the motivation wasn’t entirely clear: While SpaceX had been investing heavily to develop reusable rockets, it hadn’t announced any kind of sea landing platform.
With Sony’s decision not to renew its sponsorship of the World Cup, could it be that the world’s most controversial sporting association is finally feeling the heat over decades of corruption allegations?
Few were surprised today when Darren Wilson, a white police officer who gunned down an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, was not indicted by the grand jury tasked to judge whether a criminal case could be made against him.
