Bloomberg Poland’s new leaders are eroding the country’s democratic record through laws that give the government new powers, three US senators said in a letter to Prime Minister Beata Szydlo. The dispatch by Senators John McCain, Benjamin Cardin and Richard Durbin follows an unprecedented move by the European Union’s executive last month to start a probe into whether rule of ...

PYONGYANG / AP The United States and Japan have already announced plans for new sanctions over North Korea’s recent nuclear test and rocket launch, and the UN Security Council is likely to deliver more soon. Cross-border tensions with Seoul are escalating quickly and even China is starting to sound more like an angry neighbour than a comrade-in-arms. But with a ...

Bloomberg Democrats pushed for Congress to vote upon a Supreme Court nominee from President Barack Obama, sharpening a fight with Republican leaders who said they won’t consider a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia until after the 2016 election. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in a Twitter message, said Obama will occupy the White House until January. “It’s his job to nominate ...

Bernie Sanders, greedy for power to punish people he considers greedy, has occasioned 2016’s best joke (reported in Bloomberg Businessweek): “In the Bernie Sanders drinking game, every time he mentions a free government program, you drink someone else’s beer.” But neither Sanders’ nor Hillary Clinton’s hostility to the First Amendment is amusing. Both have voted to do something never done ...

As information and technology (IT) advances and the world moves steadily towards the digital economy, challenges grow tenaciously with similar pace, posing serious difficulties that should be addressed to keep hackers at bay. Cyber-threats have been growing across key sectors such as financial services, oil and gas, technology, government, retail, construction, healthcare, among others. With resolve to enhance the cyber ...

Imagine if Ford remotely disabled the engine on your new F-150 pickup because you chose to have the door locks fixed at a corner garage rather than a dealership. Sound absurd? Not if you’re Apple. Since 2014, the world’s most profitable smartphone company has — without warning — permanently disabled some iPhones that had their home buttons replaced by repair ...

Did the Great Recession inflict permanent damage on the US economy? Or was it just a deep hole that took a long time to climb out of? Evidence now says that it was mostly the latter. Based on how fast the US recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the speed hasn’t been too different from ...

Indonesia’s move to open the doors wider to foreign investment could help spark growth in Southeast Asia’s largest economy. But with significant restrictions remaining in place for a range of sectors, the effect may be more of a pop rather than a “big bang,” analysts say. Announcing the changes on Thursday as part of the Jokowi administration’s 10th economic stimulus ...

The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst in three-quarters of a century, but thanks to timely interventions from Washington, the US avoided an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression. That’s the standard line, and I think it’s mostly right (although the story’s different in Europe). But what about the Panic of 1893? How has the US ...

There were two Republican debates on Saturday night, just as there are two Republican nomination battles right now. One of them is the reality TV show, starring Donald Trump. That one is amazingly entertaining, although it has less to do with how to govern the nation than “The Bachelor” has to do with real love and romance. Trump lies: No ...