China has long wanted a Nobel prize. Now that it has one, its leaders are furious. The Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China’s dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemned the award.
When Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko hit the big screen in the 1987 film Wall Street, it caused a sensation. Gekko’s slick bravado and “greed is good” mantra were appallingly entrancing. But something else captivated audiences: the convincing way the movie captured the underbelly of ’80s cash-fueled gluttony. Twenty-three years later, a sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (September 24), and Gekko still fascinates—as do the real-life insider-trading crimes committed by Wall Street titans. Here, eight of the most famous cases to make headlines.
The chart below compares baseball teams’ payroll spending over the last decade with their won-loss record. Several teams with modest payrolls have done well this season, but over the last decade as a whole, the relationship between salaries and wins has been strong.
This week, Mexico commemorated the 200th anniversary of the beginning of its War of Independence. In September of 1810, a Mexican priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla uttered a call to arms against the Spanish, later known as the Grito de Dolores (“Cry of Dolores”). Soon after began a series of battles with the Spanish that would build into a war that lasted over a decade, eventually resulting in independence.
