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BY ELISABETH BRAW Ordinarily, the Arctic is perceived as a sleepy region where nothing much happens. Well, this week something happened, and not just the continued climate change that is causing irreparable damage to this delicate part of the world.

BY JAMES PETHOKOUKIS Amazon founder Jeff Bezos turned 38 in January 2002, and many of what turned out to be the company’s biggest accomplishments — Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, Kindle — were still in the future. Amazon’s market capitalization

BY ELISABETH BRAW Yesterday brought the extremely odd news that a Ryanair flight between Athens and Vilnius, carrying much the usual Ryanair crowd, had been forced to land in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. Why would Belarusian authorities mess with

BY KYLE POMERLEAU Lawmakers are currently negotiating the details of an infrastructure package. Lawmakers want to avoid adding significantly to the debt but are split on the best method to raise revenue for the new spending. The Biden administration and

BY WILLIAM C. GREENWALT Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is under pressure from within his party to hold down defense spending, so he has advocated focusing less on the defense top line and more on the value of

BY MICHAEL ROSEN Earlier this month, the White House dropped an intellectual property bombshell, announcing that it was relaxing the Donald Trump administration’s opposition to suspending patent rights related to COVID-19 vaccines. As we previously noted, United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine

BY BILL HAMMOND New York’s hospitals remained near the bottom of two quality report cards issued last week. In an update to Hospital Compare, a consumer guide from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the state’s hospitals received an

BY E.J. McMAHON Today was the (rescheduled) deadline for filing 2020 federal income tax returns, which makes this New York’s third annual SALT-Free Income Tax Day. By midnight tonight, most Empire State residents will have been reminded once again that—despite

BY E.J. McMAHON New York’s spending on public elementary and secondary education reached $25,139 per pupil during the 2018-19 school year, once again surpassing all states in the latest U.S. Census annual data. The Empire State’s public schools spent 91 percent more than

BY PETER WARREN School budget votes proposing an average increase in per pupil spending of 4.2 percent were overwhelmingly approved in state-wide voting held yesterday, with all but five of 685 individual budget votes succeeding. New York’s tax cap law did flex

BY E.J. McMAHON Private-sector employment in New York increased faster than the nationwide recovery rate in the month of April, according to the state’s latest monthly jobs report. The April count of private-sector employment was estimated at 7.4 million jobs, up

BY E.J. McMAHON Barely a year after Governor Cuomo declared the state was “broke” due to the pandemic, New York’s budget is bursting with cash—fueling enormous spending hikes, as shown in the financial plan update released today by Governor Cuomo’s Division

BY E.J. McMAHON Since the late 1960s, New York’s primary export to the rest of the nation has been people, as reflected in federal data tracking population flows within and between states. The Empire State has lost a net 1,585,770 residents to

President Joe Biden is promising Tribal leaders and Native American entrepreneurs two new executive orders next month that aim to speed on-reservation economic development and to recognize Tribes’ civil regulatory jurisdiction over their own economies. The first executive order instructs

Despite Niagara Falls State Park’s plan to spend nearly $30 million to rebuild its visitors center, activists want that structure removed from the parkscape altogether and relocated across the street or elsewhere.  The placement of the structure makes it difficult

U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, released the following statement on today’s announcement that Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice will soon convene the first White House

National Congress of American Indians President Fawn Sharp has been invited to join 40 world leaders at the White House Leaders Summit on Climate April 22-23. The virtual summit is a key milestone on the road to the UN Climate

The National Congress of American Indians today applauded the White House nomination of Bryan Newland as Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior. His nomination now goes before the U.S. Senate. NCAI urged swift confirmation of Newland’s