Chicago / Bloomberg Most people in Chicago’s City Hall probably recall a moment of clarity, a little voice whispering, this can’t last. Maybe it came in 1979, when the city’s schools nearly went broke. Maybe it came in the late 1990s, when no one funded the teachers’ pensions. Or maybe, finally, it came this month, when the nation’s third-largest public …

Bloomberg The New York investor Robert Mercer, whose hedge fund avoided an estimated $6 billion in taxes through trades the Internal Revenue Service is challenging, has been funding a group that’s paying for an unrelated Tea Party lawsuit against the tax agency. Mercer’s family foundation gave $500,000 in 2014 to a group called Citizens for Self Governance, according to a …

WASHINGTON / AFP The United States and Cuba will sign a bilateral agreement authorising up to 110 scheduled daily commercial flights to Havana and nine other destinations on the communist island. The deal restores regular flights between the two countries for the first time in more than half a century. Once the accord is signed, US authorities will immediately invite …