After spending seven months investigating whether China is engaged in unfair trade practices, the Trump administration announced March 22 that it will impose tariffs on as much as US$60 billion in Chinese imports. The tariffs are meant to address two problems: intellectual property theft by China and a steep and persistent trade deficit. As an...
This sentence begins the best article you will ever read. Chances are you thought that last statement might be sarcasm. Sarcasm, as linguist Robert Gibbs noted, includes “words used to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning of a sentence.” A form of irony, it also tends to be directed...
Day after day, we’re bombarded with so many media messages that rarely do we stop to think about what they’re telling us to think, do or feel. Much has been written about the unrealistic beauty standards women have been held to. Female actresses, models and TV personalities are overwhelmingly thin, which has had a detrimental...
The latest shoe has dropped on Facebook: Private data on 50 million users found its way to a shadowy research outfit, Global Science Research, and then on to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm launched by former White House adviser Steve Bannon. Zuckerberg has come out with a mea culpa for this latest breach of...
When Americans hear some pundits projecting a “blue wave” in the 2018 midterm elections, they understand that this is a prediction of a big Democratic victory. Blue of course symbolizes the Democratic party, while red represents the GOP. This might seem like a long-standing tradition, but it isn’t. While writing my forthcoming book “On Color,”...
United States President Donald Trump is not the first to complain about intellectual property (IP) theft by Chinese companies but ironically it was US companies’ use of China’s resources that led to the development of its powerhouse of patents. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, western firms like Apple and Intel made large...
A student movement against gun violence is receiving sustained news coverage and was instrumental in building momentum around the March For Our Lives Rally Saturday March 24 in Washington D.C. and other U.S. cities. Students are using social and news media to build momentum and advocate for legislation in the wake of a Feb. 14...
Donald Trump’s opponents have long been waiting for some sort of scandal to bring him down, and they may think they have finally found it in pornographic film star Stormy Daniels. Daniels alleges she had an extramarital affair with Donald Trump in 2006 and was subsequently paid off by a Trump lawyer to stay silent...
Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that WILLIAM McFARLAND pled guilty today to one count of wire fraud in connection with a scheme to defraud investors in a company controlled by McFARLAND, Fyre Media Inc. (“Fyre Media”), as well as its subsidiary (“Fyre Festival LLC”), which...
It’s an extraordinary tale with a whiff of Banksy about it, although surprisingly, he was not involved. In a landmark ruling, 21 New York street artists have sued and won US$6.7m in damages from the owner of a building who destroyed their graffiti when he had the building demolished. Following a three-week trial in November,...
