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It was a good week to be on a government payroll and a bad one to be paying for it. Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the last several days in case you missed them. Too tired to go to work? The Australian government has your back! Michele Duffy,
In January 2021, two months before US inflation took off, a reporter asked Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell how much inflation the Fed was willing to tolerate. Powell acted like he’d never heard of inflation— like it was crazy to even ask. He dismissed the notion of inflation entirely and said it was
In 1938 the airline business was brand new— only 35 years had passed since the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk. Hardly anyone had even seen an airplane. A coast-to-coast round trip cost about $260, half the price of a new car, so passengers were mostly very wealthy. The airlines were small,
The two most recent inflation reports both showed the same thing: prices in the US are 3.4% higher than they were a year ago. And the politicians could hardly contain themselves. After the first report, the White House’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, declared that inflation is “clearly decelerating.” After the second, Jason
It all started because the students wanted better quality education… and more teachers. Many schools in France are overcrowded. Some lack teachers. Buildings are crumbing. So, two weeks ago, students at a high school outside Paris blocked the entrance to their own school to protest these conditions. And the movement caught on; students
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but splits her time between Mexico and Panama.] The first thing I noticed at Seoul’s Incheon airport was the luggage. People had just left their suitcases sitting there— against pillars, next to benches, by the exits— and
It was a big week for creative problem-solving. Britain fixed a failed government energy company by starting a second, Canada is balancing its budget by renaming the spending, and Boston paid $335,000 to call itself racist and failed. Here are a few of the most absurd stories in case you missed them. Britain
Michael Walters had just started his first full-time job out of university when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. His doctors in Auckland, New Zealand, tried several rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy. None of it worked. Then they told him about CAR-T, a treatment that takes a patient’s own
Eight years ago in the summer of 2018, an automated monitoring system at the US government’s Social Security Agency flagged a questionable transaction and immediately forwarded it to a human worker at the agency to investigate. It took more than a year for a Social Security employee to look into it. And it
Earlier this year, Paramount agreed to buy Warner Bros. for $110 billion. As with any merger that size, the US Justice Department reviewed it to make sure it wouldn’t hurt competition or consumers. Federal regulators approved the deal a few months later, and that should have been the final hurdle. But not in
Every September, world leaders take turns at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and give pointless speeches. If they really cared about CO2 emissions, they’d skip the event entirely, because the only thing coming out of their mouths is lies and hot air. But a few days ago
Chinese President Xi Jinping landed at Joint Base Andrews Wednesday for a three-day state visit, and Donald Trump was waiting for him at the foot of the red carpet. That’s highly unusual. US presidents typically receive foreign leaders at the White House. In fact, with the exception of popes, no president had met
Song Jian was very good at math. He was one of China’s top missile scientists, and his specialty was the equations that steer a rocket to its target. In 1978 Song traveled to Helsinki for an engineering conference, where he came across researchers applying the same kind of math to human beings. Their
Some time in the middle of the second century AD, on the shores of the extremely picturesque Lake Iznik in modern-day Turkey at the site of the ancient city of Nicaea, a boy named Cassius Dio was born into a locally prominent family. His father was a Roman politician, his mother was Greek,
At a time in my life which now seems centuries ago, I was once a young lieutenant, barely a year out of West Point, and I had recently been assigned to lead an electronic warfare platoon. Whenever my unit wasn’t deployed or in the field, most of my duty days were spent in