A couple of weeks ago, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt suggested on Twitter that everyone will be on the internet by 2020. For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, ...

China’s looking increasingly shaky. Yesterday’s manufacturing data showed that new export orders are shrinking. The purchasing managers’ index out today from HSBC and Markit confirmed the drop. Today’s ...

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the head of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa Federation, has been a busy man in recent years. Known for leading one of the country’s bloodiest and most successful narco-trafficking ...

Computers chips, internet connections, people—they just keep getting faster. But not horses. Winning times at the Kentucky Derby, the premiere American horse race, haven’t fallen since the 1950s. Finishing ...

The essay is perhaps the most daunting part of college applications, alongside standardized tests. SATs and essays essentially act as bookends to the admissions process. While students will not be let ...

It may seem crass to think of a bachelor’s degree simply as a financial investment. Yet, with the cost of US college tuition increasing rapidly—and interest rates on student loans following suit—it seems ...

What to watch for today The European Central Bank announces its latest interest rate call at 8.30 a.m. ET. Most analysts expect the ECB to cut rates from their current 0.75% level, already the lowest target ...

On Tuesday, April 30, we wrote about a report from two environmental groups that named Bank of America as the biggest financier of companies that operate US coal-fired power plants and mine coal through ...

Bo Jiang, a Chinese research scientist who worked at a NASA facility and was suspected of stealing secrets, is expected to plead guilty today–not for espionage, but for downloading porn on his work computer. ...

President Barack Obama is visiting Mexico today, and he doesn’t really want to talk about drugs. That’s not just because of the awkwardness caused by Mexico’s new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, restricting ...

The outsize profits of Goldman Sachs have been a political hot potato in the United States ever since the financial crisis. But now the firm known to its detractors as the “vampire squid” has landed right ...

Weighty threats, harsh words. As the death toll from a collapsed building outside Dhaka tops 400, the European Union warned Bangladesh that it may face trade sanctions and Pope Francis condemned the practice ...

What to watch for today The European Central Bank announces its latest interest rate call. Most analysts suspect the ECB will cut rates from their current 0.75% level, already the target the bank has ever ...

Could severe water shortages short-circuit the US shale gas boom? With 64% of the country in drought, water is looming as the next hot-button issue in the debate over hydrofracturing, also known as fracking, ...

Normally, it would be a great day for Uli Hoeness, the German soccer star of the seventies and now president of Bayern Munich—perhaps the best soccer club in Europe, which beat Barcelona today and advanced ...

In a surprising move, the US insurance arm of the Netherlands’ ING Groep priced its IPO today at $19.50, which is lower than the share range it had announced earlier. But it increased the size of the offering ...

1. Facebook may have just set a record for becoming a bloated corporate behemoth in the shortest amount of time. Facebook’s revenue is up 38% from a year ago, to $1.46 billion. But that hardly matters ...

Good morning, Quartz readers! What to watch for today The European Central Bank announces its latest interest rate call. Most analysts suspect the ECB could cut rates from their current 0.75% level—already ...

The numbers: Ok. Quarterly profit rose  8.7% to $312 million, excluding extraordinary items, compared to the first quarter of 2012. Sales rose more than 38% to $1.46 billion. Shares slipped in after hours ...

Some of the smartest investors in the world have been talking up Mexico in recent months. And retail investments have been following suit. For instance on its recent earnings call, ETF giant BlackRock ...

The numbers: The US’s second-largest payments network today reported net income of $766 million, a 12% increase from a year earlier, but below analyst expectations. Shares were down 2.3% in afternoon trading. ...

Updated at 4 pm ET. Another electric car startup has run out of juice. Coda Automotive said today that it has filed for bankruptcy, spelling the end for a unique California-China electric car collaboration. ...

In a mushy ad posted on YouTube last night, JC Penney is pleading for its former customers to come back.

UBS surprised the market yesterday with its better-than-expected profit for the first quarter. The Swiss bank has been restructuring—including cutting 10,000 jobs–to focus more on its crown jewel wealth ...

The numbers: Drug retail chain CVS Caremark beat analyst estimates, reporting a higher net income of $956 million on revenue of $30.76 billion. CVS shares were up by about 1.2% today. What’s interesting: ...

Reliance Jio Infocomm yesterday announced a tie-up with Vodafone and several other telecom companies to lay a 100 Gbps (gigabit-per-second) fiber-optic cable between the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. ...

A video of South African leader Nelson Mandela was released this week to show that he was “in good shape.” Instead, the image of a frail and dazed Mandela garnered reactions like this one, from top comedian Trevor ...

Suntech belatedly released its 2012 earnings today, illustrating why last year’s performance foretold the Chinese solar giant’s present troubles.  (If you haven’t been following the Suntech saga, here’s ...

The rap against wind energy is that it’s fickle, generating massive amounts of electricity one hour and next to nothing the next. That plays havoc with the power grid and the problem is only growing as ...

Journalists (including ourselves) and banks have been quick to gush about the ways in which cellphones and other mobile devices are bringing banking to those with little access to bank accounts, particularly ...

A new report from Citizen Lab, a Canadian research center, shows surveillance software sold by FinFisher, a “governmental IT intrusion” company owned by the UK-registered Gamma International, is now active ...

The numbers: Awesome. Net income for the three quarters ending in March (Japan’s fiscal Q4) was ¥48.7 billion ($500 million), up from ¥14.0 billion the previous quarter. Net operating revenue jumped to ...

UK purchasing managers’ index hints that the island nation’s economic fortunes are increasingly decoupled from those of the euro zone, where  conditions continue to worsen. At 49.8, the UK’s April PMI ...

Norway is not what you would call a hotbed for hedge funds. Due to restrictive regulatory requirements and an almost uniformly long-only focused investor-community, there are only a handful of hedge funds ...

Mexico appears to be erupting over president Enrique Peña Nieto’s sweeping education reforms. In many regions, the dissent has turned violent as teachers and students take to the streets. In the Mexican ...

What to watch for today Many markets are closed for May Day. It’s international worker’s day, or labor day, depending on the country you’re in, and that means stock exchanges from Frankfurt to Shanghai ...

1. What great de-leveraging? Americans have tempered their appetite for debt in the aftermath of the financial crisis, except when it comes to student debt. Over the last few years the outstanding amount ...

Nuclear war? Stepped up sanctions? For all the rhetoric and drama of the past few months, for Chinese traders at the border with North Korea, it’s still business as usual. “Look at all the trucks out there ...

Golden Week came early this year in Hong Kong. The Labour Day holiday during the week of May 1 has traditionally been one of three national holidays when mainland Chinese tourists flock to the tax-free ...

High hopes ride on the European Central Bank, which is set to make its latest monetary policy announcement on Thursday. Despite the fact that poor economic data continues to flow out of the euro zone, ...

A minor pedestrian collision in a small town in Myanmar led to rioting and nine injuries on Tuesday, proof that Myanmar’s fraught religious and ethnic relations are still at a boiling point. Police were ...

General Motors has pulled advertisements for its new Chevrolet Trax SUV because the soundtrack features racially insensitive references to China and other Asian countries, according to the South China ...

Manufacturing in China is not what it used to be. Struggling to break even in the face of rising wages, companies are eyeing up China’s neighbours for a better alternative, and Wednesday’s official manufacturing ...

What to watch for today Markets closed for May Day. It’s international worker’s day, or labor day, depending on the country you’re in, and that means stock exchanges from Frankfurt to Shanghai will be ...

It’s natural for governments to be protective of their homegrown companies, but the French can be particularly touchy. And it doesn’t seem to matter what the product is: From bottled water to yogurt to ...

Good morning, Quartz readers! What to watch for today Many markets closed for May Day. It’s international worker’s day, or labor day, depending on the country you’re in, and that means stock exchanges ...

German beer sales hit their lowest level in two decades during the first quarter.  And bad weather was definitely part of the issue. (Beer consumption is closely tied to weather. If it’s too chilly, people ...

As the saying goes—when things seem too good to be true, they often are. And so it is with tax haven secrecy. For decades, government officials in Washington, London, and other Western nations were in ...