Economy | ANALYSIS
Households to take hit from tax hike
by Tomoko Otake
The consumption tax increase will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people’s financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the hike's impact.
Politics & Diplomacy Aug 4, 2013
NSA leaks allow Wyden chance at privacy debate
by David A. Fahrenthold
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill: For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy. But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret. Wyden’s outrage, he said, stemmed from top-secret information ...
Business Jul 28, 2013
DuckDuckGo chief spills on search engine wars
by Timothy B. Lee
AltaVista, one of the leading search engines of the 1990s, has died. It was 18 years old. It had languished for years before its owner, Yahoo, finally pulled the plug. Silicon Valley is littered with the graves of firms that tried and failed to ...
World | Focus Jul 18, 2013
Germans direct NSA ire at Merkel
by Michael Birnbaum
German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in a society where the government kept a Big Brother eye on its citizens. Now, critics say, she has assented to similar practices — this time coming from the U.S., not East Germany’s fearsome secret police. Revelations about ...
Business Jul 7, 2013
Britain to Google: Fix privacy policy or face legal action
by Hayley Tsukayama
Google is facing increased pressure over its privacy policies, as British regulators ordered the tech giant Friday to give users more insight into how the information it collects on them is used. European regulators have become more critical of Google’s business practices in the ...
World Jun 10, 2013
Source of U.S. intel leak reveals his identity
A 29-year-old government contractor out himself on Sunday as the source of bombshell leaks of U.S. monitoring of Internet users and phone records.
World Jun 10, 2013
U.S. intelligence chief seeks criminal probe into leaks about PRISM
U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper asks the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the leaks about its electronic surveillance programs.