It’s hard to remember, but up until the final months of his first campaign for president, Barack Obama, his staff, and bien pensant opinion expected him to focus on foreign policy: Extricating the US from unpopular Middle Eastern wars and pivoting to the Pacific.
The rules being considered for commercial drone flight have been leaked by US airspace regulators. While they’re mostly common sense—like keeping your drone within sight—one requirement is likely to have the fledgling industry up in arms: Drone operators must train as aircraft pilots.
The Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn executives who banded together behind Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform lobby have yet to see a payoff on the money and political capital they’ve spent to influence the debate in Washington. If they needed another reminder of that, they got it this week, when president Obama took executive action on the issue.
Angela Navarro, an unauthorized immigrant from Honduras to the US, has been in the news for seeking refuge in a Philadelphia church to avoid deportation, which would take her away from her husband and children, all US citizens. She has something in common with most other unauthorized immigrants: She’s lived in the US for more than a decade.
Like space itself, the satellite-communications business can be a rather inhospitable environment.
The US government is mulling a plan to increase its investment in broadband at public schools and libraries by $1.5 billion, at the cost of a small increase in telephone service fees.
It’s a digital world, but when researchers look to where emerging markets are making a growing impact on information exchange, their eyes are drawn to printed publications. Newspapers, magazines and other dead-tree matter are the fastest-growing source of information exchanges from emerging markets to wealthy economies, according to a new study funded by the global shipper DHL.
If the spending habits of American political operatives are an indicator, Uber may be right about its ability to expand the car service market beyond current use.
US president Barack Obama’s endorsement of regulating the internet like a public utility has garnered praise from open internet activists—and plenty of enmity from the biggest telecom companies. The internet service providers are worried about more than being unable to play favorites with internet traffic: They fear the government will tell them how much money they can make from their services.
The White House has put its weight behind a plan to treat the internet like a public utility, akin to water, electricity and telephone services.
Like snowflakes, no two tax-avoiding corporate structures are the same.
After the US bailed out the insurance conglomerate AIG in 2008, the company’s employees kept to business as usual—which included setting up complex tax structures to avoid taxes in Europe and Japan.
Leaked documents are revealing how multinational corporations use the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg as a financial way-station to avoid taxes.
The hedge fund behind Argentina’s default stepped up its pressure on the recalcitrant nation yesterday by asking US courts to stop an Argentine lawyer from leaving the US, take away his passport, and force him to give a deposition.
It’s been a big year for direct outreach to US voters by political campaigns, but in the 10 toss-up states where control of the US legislature will be decided in today’s elections, no demographic has captured the attention of candidate representatives the way white women have.
TO: Quartz election desk
How bad was last week for the commercial space industry? Two prominent launch disasters—a Virgin Galactic test flight that killed a pilot and injured another, and a failed Orbital Sciences contract mission that destroyed a $266 million rocket and payload—have dampened a wave of optimism about the burgeoning industry.
The map above shows the volume of phone calls between countries around the world, and it’s one way of measuring information flows around the world—it’s part of an index of global connectedness developed by business researchers and sponsored by shipper DHL.
The commercial space industry had its second major accident this week when Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo dropped from the airplane that carried it some 50,000 feet over the Mojave desert. In a test flight, the space plane’s rocket engines ignited—and then something went wrong, destroying the spacecraft, reportedly killing one of its pilots, and leaving the other in serious condition.
This is the final weekend before the 2014 US midterm elections, and Americans will see plenty of political ads, have their doors knocked on by canvassers and their phones called by volunteers. Who is paying for all this? As is traditional, the largest source of US campaign funding is the financial sector.
Apple’s new payments business and its in-the-news competitor, MCX, have something in common: They’re both built on the aging financial infrastructure (paywall) of credit-card networks and bank transfers—as though you were trying to build the worldwide web on telegraph wires.
The explosion of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket at the Wallops Island launch facility last night was something to see—even if you’re seeing with radio waves. These animations, provided by Baron Weather, show how debris and smoke from the accident were visible at a weather station in Dover, Delaware, over 100 miles away.
An Antares rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded shortly after launching tonight, in the first failure of a commercial space mission hired by the US space agency, NASA.
