IF SPENDING IS a measure of what matters, then the people of the developing world place a high value on brains. While private spending on education has not budged in real terms in the rich world in the past ten years, in China and India it has more than doubled. The Chinese now spend 5%…
When detectives in a Phoenix suburb arrested a warehouse worker in a murder investigation last December, they credited a new technique with breaking open the case after other leads went cold. The police told the suspect, Jorge Molina, they had data tracking his phone to the site where a man was shot nine months earlier.…
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal set the IRS a new deadline of April 23 to hand over President Donald Trump’s tax returns before potentially resorting to other legal options. Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, sent a second letter to the Internal Revenue Service on Saturday, asking for six years of Trump’s personal and…
Less than a month after its grand opening, New York City's 28-acre Hudson Yards megadevelopment is still having to contend with a controversy over its financing methods. The $25 billion complex, which covers an entire avenue and stretches four city blocks on Manhattan's west side, relied on a pool of funds generated by foreign visa…
JULIAN ASSANGE, hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London on April 11th after nearly seven years of self-imposed confinement, pale and hirsute, was not a pleasant house-guest. He is alleged to have smeared faeces on the wall of the embassy and neglected his cat, among other uncouth behaviour, according to Ecuador’s exasperated foreign minister.…
President Trump last week urged Kevin McAleenan, whom he was about to name as acting secretary of homeland security, to close the southwestern border despite having just said that he was delaying a decision on the step for a year, according to three people briefed about the conversation. It was not clear what Mr. Trump…
It’s 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon at Chuck E. Cheese, and a mother and grandmother are bouncing a confused-looking toddler while a costumed mascot sings and dances near the entrance to the restaurant, which is tucked in the corner between Old Navy and Burlington Coat Factory in a Central Massachusetts mall. The only other customers…
Travis Kalanick's name appears a total of 13 times in Uber's IPO prospectus. But the cofounder and former CEO of Uber appears many more times, if you read between the lines of the company's S-1 filed on Thursday. And for the most part, it seems, he's there to serve as a punching bag. The 300-page…
THERE ARE more than a few echoes of the Nixon era in the presidency of Donald Trump. Monetary reverberations are among them. Facing re-election in 1972, Richard Nixon felt he needed a strong economy at his back, and made a habit of haranguing Arthur Burns, the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time. Burns…
WASHINGTON — The United States has charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of conspiring to hack a computer as part of the 2010 release of reams of secret American documents, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday, putting him just one flight away from being in American custody after years of seclusion in the Ecuadorean embassy in…
