It was a lifetime ambition for 22-year-old Joseph Rivers to arrive in Los Angeles and become a big name in the music business.And he nearly made it…until a team of DEA agents put a stop to everything by snatching his life savings without even charging him with a crime.The aspiring businessman from the outskirts of Detroit had managed to scrape together $16,000 and was finally on the train to...Read More

Last year, a city in North Texas banned fracking. State lawmakers want to make sure that never happens again.On Monday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law that prohibits bans of hydraulic fracturing altogether and makes it much harder for municipal and county governments to control where oil and gas wells can be drilled. Similar efforts are cropping up in states including New Mexico, Ohio, C...Read More

Is cash still king? Based on data from the Federal Reserve Board, you might think so. The Fed routinely tracks M1, which covers cash plus checking deposits. In March, the cash component of M1 had a face value of $1.3 trillion, a record high.About $1 trillion of that $1.3 trillion is in $100 bills. Another $300 million is in denominations of $500, $1,000, $5,000 and even a gasp-provoking $10,000. (...Read More

In late 2013, Cisco chief executive John Chambers used a portentous phrase while telling analysts that sales in emerging markets were spiraling downward, forcing the networking equipment company to cut its three- to five-year revenue growth target: "We're the canary in the coal mine."… Cisco was just the latest victim of globalization, the tantalizing but perilous business prin...Read More

Cuba has for several years had a promising therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer. The 55-year trade embargo led by the US made sure that Cuba was mostly where it stayed. Until—maybe—now.The Obama administration has, of course, been trying to normalize relations with the island nation. And last month, during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's visit to Havana, Roswell Park Cancer Institu...Read More

Home solar and other off-grid technology is about to have its day. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk's announcement April 30 that his company would market $3,000 home batteries that can store solar power for nighttime use is just the latest twist in the rapid evolution of systems that will let homes and businesses unplug from utility companies.Tesla's $3,000 price point surprised experts at...Read More

The country's rapidly growing marijuana industry has a tax problem. Even as more states embrace legal marijuana, shops say they are being forced to pay crippling federal income taxes because of a decades-old law aimed at preventing drug dealers from claiming their smuggling costs and couriers as business expenses on their tax returns.Congress passed that law in 1982 after a cocaine and methamp...Read More

Econet Wireless is now allowing group savings on its mobile money platform, EcoCash, a development the company says will reduce risks associated with cash handling.The EcoCash Savings Club will earn interest on "all pooled funds" each month.Saving groups can appoint a chairperson who will undertake the opening of the account while approving members will also be selected from the group.Sa...Read More

If you ever wanted to give our nation's central bank a piece of your mind, now is your chance.That's because Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is hiring … and she's taking applications from everyone who wants to apply.On Jan. 16, the Federal Reserve Board announced it is creating a "Community Advisory Council." – Uncommon Wisdom Daily, May 1, 2015Faux transparenc...Read More

When is a gun not just a gun? When it's also constitutionally protected free speech.That is the legal argument being made by Cody Wilson, a Texas man who gained attention two years ago by posting what are believed to be the world's first online instructions for how to build a 3-D printable gun. Mr. Wilson's files for what he called the Liberator, a single-shot pistol mostly made of pla...Read More

The government doesn't need a warrant to search cellphone tower location records, a federal appeals court in Atlanta has ruled. In a potentially wide-ranging ruling, the court said that because cellphone owners technically "volunteer" their location to providers when they make phone calls, law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to track an individual's location. – B...Read More

The Federal Reserve said on Monday that the Justice Department was conducting a criminal investigation into the disclosure of confidential information in 2012 about a crucial meeting of the Fed committee that sets monetary policy.The Fed acknowledged the investigation in a letter to House Republicans who are pressing for information about the leak and the Fed's internal inquiry at the timeR...Read More

The spectacular crash of Corinthian Colleges after years of systematically deceiving thousands of students into enrolling into low-quality, high-cost education programs has once again raised questions about how the for-profit college industry staved off stronger rules governing the $1.4 billion per year in federal loans that helped keep Corinthian afloat.Some hints emerged today in the giant chain...Read More

The International Monetary Fund is close to declaring China's yuan fairly valued for the first time in more than a decade, a milestone in the country's efforts to open its economy that would blunt U.S. criticism of Beijing's currency policy. The fund's reassessment of the yuan—set to be made official in IMF reports on China's economy due out in the coming months—fol...Read More

It might sound like complete nonsense until you do a little bit of historical research. People often assume that community policing has always been around, that without police society itself would crumble. Few realize that the model of policing that we know today in the United States has its origins in slave patrols.The sort of propaganda that many of us are raised to believe has led us to imagine...Read More

Don't hold your breath, but future historians may look back on 2015 as the year that the renewable energy ascendancy began, the moment when the world started to move decisively away from its reliance on fossil fuels. Those fuels – oil, natural gas, and coal – will, of course, continue to dominate the energy landscape for years to come, adding billions of tons of heat-trapping carbo...Read More

Senate Republicans have launched the opening salvo in a battle over government surveillance powers, introducing a bill to preserve intact the National Security Agency's authority to store and search domestic telephone records…Legal authority for the program, contained in Section 215 of the Patriot Act, is set to expire June 1. That has set off a race between lawmakers who want to preserv...Read More

If you value privacy and want to encrypt your cellphone to keep hackers and other snoops from rifling through your personal business then you are aiding terrorists. At least that's what the top prosecutor in New York City said recently when discussing new encryption software released by Apple and Googlethat is specifically for the operating systems on cellphones.Manhattan District Attorney Cyr...Read More

BEIJING – When Li Nanyang flew here from Hong Kong two years ago, she brought something eagerly anticipated by many Chinese historians and thinkers: several dozen copies of her father's memoir. In it, Li Rui, a 98-year-old retired Communist Party official, offered an unvarnished, insider's account of his experiences in the leadership.But as Ms. Li passed through customs at the airpor...Read More

It's official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don't own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world's largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don't own their t...Read More