In a blanket assault against seven mob families in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island, the F.B.I. and local authorities began arresting close to 130 people on Thursday on charges including murder, racketeering and extortion, federal law enforcement officials said...

Goldman Sachs executives have long been among the most richly paid on Wall Street in the best of times. They are now poised to reap a windfall that was sown in the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008. Nearly 36 million stock options were granted to employees in December 2008 — 10 times the amount issued the previous year — when the stock was trading at $78.78. Since those uncertain days, Goldman’s business has roared back and its share price has more than doubled, closing on Tuesday at nearly $175...

Ni Pin believes in the United States. He's lived here for almost 20 years. His three children were born here. And, unlike many Americans, he thinks that even in the middle of the Rust Belt, there's hope for manufacturing in this country. Ni runs the U.S. operations of a Chinese company called Wanxiang International, an auto parts giant with worldwide revenue of $8 billion. Over the past decade, Wanxiang America has purchased or invested in more than 20 U.S. firms and now employs more Americans - 5,000 at last count - than any other Chinese company...

In the end, Joe Lieberman decided he didn’t need any more tsuris. Not that the Connecticut senator would describe his decision to retire with that Yiddish term. He will offer a more philosophical explanation when he makes the official announcement Wednesday, a move that a Lieberman aide confirmed to The Daily Beast...

Garry Trudeau and Charlie Rose discuss the strip and 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective.

Power in Tunisia changed hands for the second time in 24 hours on Saturday morning, and street fighting continued in the aftermath of former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s flight from the country, raising new questions about the shape of the next government here and who might lead it. The uprising that toppled Mr. Ben Ali continued after his exit with sporadic rioting and gunfire around the capital on Friday night, and there were reports of continuing unrest on Saturday around the country. Soldiers, police officers and young men with guns kept the streets of downtown Tunis under a tight lockdown. Clouds of smoke from the burning and looting of a major supermarket hung over the bleached city skyline. Residents huddled in their homes for fear of the police...

Last spring, Dow Jones launched a new service called Lexicon, which sends real-time financial news to professional investors. This in itself is not surprising. The company behind The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires made its name by publishing the kind of news that moves the stock market. But many of the professional investors subscribing to Lexicon aren’t human—they’re algorithms, the lines of code that govern an increasing amount of global trading activity—and they don’t read news the way humans do. They don’t need their information delivered in the form of a story or even in sentences. They just want data—the hard, actionable information that those words represent...

On April 9, 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion 4th Marines, awoke at a military base captured from the Iraqis a few miles from the center of Baghdad, which was still held by the enemy. It had been twenty days since the invasion of Iraq began, and McCoy had some personal chores to take care of—washing his socks, for one. Afterward, he walked over to a group of marines under his command who were defacing a mural of Saddam Hussein. As I watched, he picked up a sledgehammer and struck a few blows himself. The men cheered. Then he began preparing for the serious business of the day: leading the battalion into the heart of the city. He expected a house-to-house brawl that would last several days...

It would take 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it in its full glory. Astronomers have released the largest digital image of the night sky ever made, to be mined for future discoveries. It is actually a collection of millions of images taken since 1998 with a 2.5-metre telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The project, called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is now in its third phase...

President Obama offered the nation’s condolences on Wednesday to the victims of the shootings here, calling on Americans to draw a lesson from the lives of the fallen and the actions of the heroes, and to usher in a new era of civility in their honor. The president directly confronted the political debate that erupted after the rampage, urging people of all beliefs not to use the tragedy to turn on one another. He did not cast blame on Republicans or Democrats, but asked people to “sharpen our instincts for empathy.”...