From hungry migrant peasant to rock-star president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has played many roles over the years. Even so, taking the defendant’s chair in Latin America’s biggest political graft scandal will be a first. Lula has vehemently denied the charges — he’s accused of taking some $1.1 million in bribes disguised as home improvements from a contractor …

  The muscle behind the U.S. economic expansion is the same as the recovery’s weakness, and it lies in one word: Mexico. Since the low in December 2009, employment in the U.S. has increased by 13.6 million workers. Forty-three percent of that growth, or 5.9 million workers, came from Hispanics — some born in the U.S., others immigrants. Mexico is …

  The longer I work in the news media, the more I notice a problem with the way economics interacts with the world at large. Just to cite one example, economists often don’t take politics into account. As a result, econ models leave out important pieces, and the advice of economists often falls on deaf ears or is seen as …