Physicists don’t know much about dark matter. They can’t agree on what it’s made of, how much a single particle weighs, or the best way to construct a Play-Doh diorama of it. (How would you do it? Dark matter is invisible—light doesn’t interact with it at all.) Nobody has ever ...
Read More »Behind a Key Anti-Labor Case, a Web of Conservative Donors
Advertisement In the summer of 2016, government workers in Illinois received a mailing that offered them tips on how to leave their union. By paying a so-called fair-share fee instead of standard union dues, the mailing said, they would no longer be bound by union rules and could not be ...
Read More »Common Sense: With AT&T and Time Warner, Battle Lines Form for an Epic Antitrust Case
Advertisement If the government goes to court to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, as seems increasingly likely, it may well be the antitrust case of the decade, even without the claims of presidential meddling that have already engulfed the deal in partisan controversy. A lawsuit by the ...
Read More »Why a New York Court Case Has Rattled Turkey’s President
The conversations caught on wiretaps planted by the Turkish police are alleged to show a conspiracy to help Iran skirt American sanctions by trading gold for gas. The recordings also suggest that the plotters aimed to please one man: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the prime minister of Turkey, now the ...
Read More »Volkswagen Executive Pleads Guilty in Diesel Emissions Case
DETROIT — A Volkswagen executive pleaded guilty on Friday to federal charges arising from a continuing investigation into the automaker’s diesel emissions scandal. The charges against the executive, Oliver Schmidt, stem from his role in Volkswagen’s decade-long scheme to rig diesel cars with devices that circumvented federal emissions tests. Mr. ...
Read More »Stakes for Exxon in Sanctions Case Go Far Beyond a $2 Million Fine
WASHINGTON — The $ 2 million fine that the Treasury Department levied on Exxon Mobil this week for violating sanctions against Russia is just a sliver of the oil company’s $ 7.8 billion in profit last year. But Exxon has decided nonetheless to wage a legal battle — one that ...
Read More »Malware Case Is Major Blow for the N.S.A.
WASHINGTON — Since August, when a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers announced that it was auctioning off highly classified National Security Agency hacking tools, a low-grade panic has seized the nation’s largest intelligence agency. In April, when the Shadow Brokers dumped dozens of the agency’s software exploits on ...
Read More »The Interpreter: How Does Populism Turn Authoritarian? Venezuela Is a Case in Point
The Interpreter By MAX FISHER and AMANDA TAUB When Hugo Chávez took power in Venezuela nearly 20 years ago, the leftist populism he championed was supposed to save democracy. Instead, it has led to democracy’s implosion in the country, marked this past week by an attack on the independence of ...
Read More »Former A.I.G. Executives Reach Settlement in Accounting Fraud Case
DealBook Maurice Greenberg, right, the former chief of A.I.G., with David Boies, his lawyer, leaving New York State Supreme Court in 2016. Louis Lanzano for The New York Times By RANDALL SMITH Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chief executive of American International Group, reached an unexpected settlement ending a tumultuous, ...
Read More »U.S. Prosecutors Outline Case Against Mexican Drug Lord El Chapo
By ALAN FEUER and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM January 20, 2017 After eluding prosecution in the United States for decades and escaping from prison twice in Mexico, the crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, appeared on Friday in federal court in Brooklyn and pleaded not guilty to charges that he had overseen ...
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