Last week there were several events that convinced me that one of the great tech bubbles inflating right now is around what people have agreed to call “Big Data.”...

President Barack Obama said on Friday the United States will fulfill its pledge to pull troops out of Iraq by the end of the year...

Euphoria in Libya over the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was tempered on Friday by frictions and confusion over where and when to bury the former strongman, as well as a formal request by the United Nations for an inquiry into the final moments before his violent, messy demise while in the custody of the fighters who captured him...

It’s hard to dispute that Rick Perry’s he-hired-an-illegal-immigrant attack on Mitt Romney was a cheap shot. It’s even harder to dispute that it worked beautifully...

The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo ?re chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society...

Like Pat Tillman before them, up to 40,000 US soldiers don't believe in God. Meet the man who would bring secular wisdom to their ranks...

Steve Jobs might have believed in some kind of afterlife—he was a Buddhist, after all. So if he’s out there somewhere, still watching, you have to imagine that he’s not in a particularly good mood today. Either that, or he’s just glad he got out right before the you-know-what hit the fan...

There are no smoke-filled backrooms in cyberspace — or even a spot for a simple hallway conversation.

So some lobbyists are shocked these days to walk into congressional offices and find staffers communicating not by phone but through Facebook. They’re surprised to witness members of Congress transfixed by their iPhones while updating their Twitter feeds. They’re puzzled to hear government officials suggest “meeting” by Google-chat...

Kudzu, the “plant that ate the South” has met a pest that eats it and is just as voracious. Trouble is, the so-called “kudzu bug” is also fond of another East Asian transplant that is big money for American farmers: soybeans...

In an elaborate prisoner exchange that could roil Middle East politics, an Israeli soldier held for more than five years by the militant Palestinian group Hamas was swapped on Tuesday for hundreds of Palestinians who have spent many years in Israeli jails, all them freed to jubilant welcomes tinged with bitterness and grief...