In the News
At the start of November, more than 20 humanitarian groups issued a warning that Yemen had just six weeks of food aid remaining for the 7 million people in that country facing famine. The desperate alarm was caused by a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia, preventing medical supplies and food from entering the country.
Now, a month later, that blockade is still in effect, and there's a growing chorus of international voices calling for Saudi Arabia to allow the flow of goods to resume.
"We have a data problem," Keith Ellison says. He's talking about mergers, like yesterday's proposed purchase of Aetna by CVS, or this summer's between Amazon and Whole Foods. "We don't collect and have enough information that will help do the evaluation as to whether or not a given merger that takes place actually yielded the benefits that were promised." So the Minnesota Democrat and co-chair of the DNC is going to try to fix that — along with the newly formed Congressional Antitrust Caucus.
I remember all too well hearing the term "net neutrality" for the first time. My mind always records for posterity the times when I make a fool of myself.
It was in 1999, at one of those then-ubiquitous conferences that attracted hundreds of techies in the midst of the dot-com boom, that I got my first lesson on the topic. Standing in line with a group of tech stalwarts, I was asked if my publication, then Forbes, would be interested in a column on net neutrality.
I answered, "I doubt it." Then, when someone asked "Why not?," I made the mistake of trying to answer.
When Heather Purcell urged her boss, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), to address an insidious form of sexual assault called stealthing, the term for non-consensual condom removal had yet to become part of the popular lexicon. Though the congressional aide only learned the word from research published in April by Yale Law grad Alexandra Brodsky, she was already painfully aware of what it meant.
The 2016 election will be remembered largely as a crisis at the intersection of social media, private political financing, freedoms of expression, and geopolitics. Depending on who you ask, we are suffering from either too much democracy or too little, from an elite political class that has grown too insular and paternalistic or a populist wave that has laid waste to orderly electoral process.
Republicans and major technology firms who support a tax overhaul have touted reforms that they say will bring offshore profits back into the country, boosting U.S. tax revenue and benefiting the economy.
But critics are skeptical of those claims, doubting that both the House and Senate versions of the tax bill give companies like Apple the incentive to bring money into the U.S. over the long term.
One of the central pieces of the Republican plan is a one-time lower rate on foreign income repatriated to the United States.
For weeks, Facebook has been under intense scrutiny in Washington after revelations about Russian attempts to use the platform to influence the 2016 elections. Now, some lawmakers are talking about turning that scrutiny into action.
The Pentagon more than doubled US refueling support for the Saudi-led mission in Yemen over the past year, a spokeswoman told Al-Monitor, despite mounting public and congressional concerns about the operation.
Silicon Valley has changed the way we get around, the way we communicate, and the very way we live. While Forrester Research estimates technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation will eliminate 7% of all U.S. jobs by 2025, those numbers belie the advantages those technologies can bring society.
The U.S. House unanimously passed a non-binding resolution Monday asserting U.S. military assistance to Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen's Shiite rebels is not covered by previous war authorizations.