MUNICH (Reuters) – Language learning app Babbel hopes to join the ranks of ‘unicorn’ tech startups with a market valuation of around $1.5 billion when it opens the German autumn listing season. The German firm competes with Pittsburgh-based Duolingo, whose shares rallied in its U.S. stock market debut in July and is now valued at […]

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Swedish mobile phone directory and caller identification service Truecaller on Wednesday said it planned to list its Class B shares on Nasdaq Stockholm. Depending on market conditions, the listing is expected to be completed during the fourth quarter of this year, the company said in a statement. Nami Zarringhalam and Alan Mamedi, who […]

By making an expanded child tax credit available for one year to all but the wealthiest households, the Biden administration is aiming both to strike a major blow against child poverty and to create a political constituency to guarantee the benefit’s longevity. Polling, however, finds the child benefits have lagged in popularity. A new YouGov/American […]

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Latin American e-commerce company MercadoLibre Inc and venture capital fund Kaszek on Monday announced the creation of a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to invest in digital businesses in Latin America. The company, dubbed Meli Kaszek Pioneer, has already applied for registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an […]

DUESSELDORF (Reuters) – German property group Vonovia SE on Monday ditched a requirement for a majority of shareholders to back its takeover bid for Deutsche Wohnen SE, in a move CEO Rolf Buch said meant the deal could no longer fail.FILE PHOTO: Rolf Buch, CEO of German real estate company Vonovia, before the annual general […]

The war in Afghanistan wasn’t a failure. It was a massive success — for those who made a fortune off it. Consider the case of Hikmatullah Shadman, who was just a teenager when American Special Forces rolled into Kandahar on the heels of Sept. 11. They hired him as an interpreter, paying him up to […]

Produced by ‘Sway’ Imagine a world in which Google and Amazon join together to form an all-knowing corporate juggernaut that could program our every movement. Author Dave Eggers has contemplated such a future in his latest dystopian novel “The Every.” Eggers, who limits his own use of technology to the bare minimum, says he was […]

There are many reasons to fear an impending Chinese attack on Taiwan: Intensified Chinese aerial activity. High-profile Pentagon warnings. Rapid Chinese military modernization. President Xi Jinping’s escalating rhetoric. But despite what recent feverish discussion in foreign policy and military circles is suggesting, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan isn’t one of them. Some critics of President […]

The U.S. falls behind on vaccinations As of Thursday, the U.S. ranks last among the Group of 7 nations for the percentage of its population that has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, just behind Japan. Some 62.16 percent of Japanese people were at least partly vaccinated, compared to 61.94 percent of […]

Good morning, and welcome to the first issue of my newsletter (you are reading the web version), a place where I hope to discuss the obsessions, ideas and thought processes that have shaped and guided my career. If you subscribe to my podcast, “The Argument,” you know that I spend a lot of my time […]