There’s just over a month to go before the 2014 US elections, and that means candidates and their allies will unload a blitz of last-minute spending—especially to advertise in contested districts—in an election season that already has cost at least $1.2 billion. Where does the money come from and why does it matter?
The European Union will unveil the preliminary results of a probe into Apple’s international profit-shifting that could end with a multi-billion-euro fine for the company, just as it celebrates the successful launch of its new line of iPhones.
The taped meetings between Federal Reserve examiners and Goldman Sachs executives show the stultifying office politics that could bring ruin to a financial system.
The US is one of the easiest places in the world for criminals to hide behind a shell company, but despite pressure from anti-corruption activists that require companies to identify their true owners, secrecy is still the order of the day. Some states, like Delaware and Nevada, have created a virtual cottage industry hiding behind corporate screens.
Free traders in Germany have a problem: They can’t escape the scourge of America’s chlorinated chickens.
A welder’s torch in Los Angeles ignited a fire in the timbers of an old wharf that have been soaking in tar and seawater since World War II, and firefighters are struggling to put out the stubborn conflagration.
Today, a resupply capsule docked at the International Space Station with a cargo of supplies and research material, including some nice plants and a 3d printer. This the fourth commercial resupply mission from SpaceX, and during the launch two days ago observers got a somewhat unusual view: The inside of a liquid oxygen tank inside the rocket, beamed live back to earth from 217 km in space.
The recent spate of tax inversions—US companies merging with a foreign firm, then moving their headquarters overseas to avoid American taxes—has the Obama administration worked up about the eroding US tax base. After giving up on all hope that Congress will act expeditiously, the Treasury department has changed the way it interprets tax law in an attempt to unilaterally “make inversions substantially less economically appealing,” in the technocratic language of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
Stock buybacks are big. Are they bad?
For all the barbarity of ISIL and the focus on the military campaign against them, security analysts say the group doesn’t have the capability to directly attack the US—its threat is regional disruption. But US intelligence officials have spent the last week dropping hints about another al Qaeda off-shoot that does aim to attack Western countries at home, and it operates in ISIL’s backyard.
This week, US lawmakers voted to arm and train “vetted” Syrian rebels as part of the US efforts to fight the extremist group ISIL.
The International Space Station, which will mark its 16th year in orbit this year, cost an estimated $150 billion to build and maintain (with $75 billion invested by the US alone), but private companies have only spent $14,505 on research performed in the station’s orbital laboratory.
The cloud can be a scary place, whether you’re a celebrity with risqué photos or a bank with $10 billion in assets.
The private space race is heating up, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin inking a deal designed to set back the ambitions of Tesla founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Barack Obama says that there aren’t going to be US combat troops fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. His top generals say, well, maybe there will be.
The United States will go from space hitch-hiker, dependent on Russia to visit the International Space Station and other points orbital, to the proud owner of not one but two viable space craft in 2017.
In the maze of private networks that makes up your global internet, getting from here to there isn’t always as straightforward as it seems.
Venture capital investor Bill Gurley—whose money is in companies like Uber, Zillow and OpenTable—offered the Wall Street Journal a warning yesterday about his industry:
Today, we learn that one of the titans of our new economy—Peter Thiel, a PayPal founder and tech investor—shares the same views on competition as one of his most illustrious predecessors, John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil. They don’t like it.
If there’s one trend you can count on without fail, it’s that emerging markets out-grow wealthy ones—they’ve got more people, lower labor costs and, thanks to global knowledge and capital flows, access to the expertise and investment needed to drive up productivity to incredible levels. The results have included China’s growth miracle (and a commensurate plunge in extreme poverty), and the BRICS investment craze—as well as plenty of nervous collar-pulling in the wealthy West’s capitals.
Law enforcement officials swarmed Los Angeles’ fashion district yesterday, seizing $65 million in cash and bank accounts they say is part of a massive scheme to launder drug money.
This week, thanks to survey of people across 44 countries, the PewResearch Global Attitudes project informed us that the global public is downbeat about the economy. While this is true, and important, it turns out it isn’t surprising: People are always pretty glum, or at least as long as Pew’s been collecting data, and their outlook is actually improving, in a barely perceptible way.
Tim Wu, who invented net neutrality—at least the term for it—just lost a political battle with the giants of the internet.
The Apple Watch is here, and it is impressive enough that investors are selling out of US watchmakers on the news.
