With a net worth of $20 billion and degrees from MIT and UC Berkeley, mathematician and Renaissance Technologies founder Jim Simons is often dubbed the “world’s smartest billionaire.” The quantitative investor got his start trading commodities while working on his PhD at Berkeley and after two decades working in mathematics, launched his hedge fund in […]

If you were a southern Italian peasant around the turn of the 20th century, your life was pretty rough. The feudal system had officially ended with the unification of Italy a few decades earlier. But most laborers probably didn’t notice the difference. The vast majority of southern Italians were farm workers. But the landlords who […]

President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that will allow Russia to impose sanctions on foreigners found guilty of violating its citizens’ human rights. On Friday, Putin inked an order that will allow authorities to impose embargoes against individuals from any country for committing offenses against Russian citizens.