Capitol Hill has an idea to save money. This year’s National Defense Authorization Act—which designates the Pentagon’s budget and expenditure—suggests that the Army may want to assign a program executive office to gather open-source intelligence. The assumption verges on the audacious. Is Congress suggesting that publicly-available material may be better than some military resources? By […]
The UK was once Starbucks’ beachhead in Europe. But its European invasion may be crumbling as weak economic prospects call into question a consumer-discretionary business surrounded by thug-like competition. Rumors are circulating that it is prepared to offload its UK business, even after it slogged through the pandemic. Starbucks has denied rumors that it is […]
The international outcry over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been so great that the major Hollywood studios had little choice but to abandon the Russian market, at least temporarily. The race to the exit was started by Disney, with Warner Brothers, Sony, and Paramount following suit. Other media-related departures include Netflix, Discovery, and Amazon. The […]
Bad Blood is the story of the rise-and-fall of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup that was set on revolutionizing healthcare. As a case study, the book should become required reading in every business-school entrepreneur program. Theranos’ founder, Elizabeth Holmes, dropped out of Stanford to commercialize a portable blood-testing unit. Instead, she was indicted on fraud […]
Authorities in Hong Kong are seeing new twists on securities fraud. In the latest wave of “pump and dump” schemes involving micro-cap stocks, fraudsters appear to be targeting investors in distant jurisdictions, such as Singapore and Macau. These stock-price manipulators are commonly abetted by WhatsApp and even lace their pitch with faux romance. According to […]
Zoobia Shahnaz is a name that you may read about again. In December 2017, she was arrested in New York on a string of terrorist-finance charges. The federal indictment clarifies that she purchased Bitcoin with fraudulently obtained credit cards, wiring the proceeds to ISIS-related groups in Pakistan. The case spotlights a hole in the global […]
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