Angus Deaton, a British-U.S. professor at Princeton University, won the Nobel Economics Prize Monday for groundbreaking work on poverty and promptly warned that inequality is becoming a serious global threat. The 69-year-old academic, who has spent more than 30 years in the United States, was honored for using household surveys to show how consumers, particularly the poor, decide what to buy and...

Lotte Group chairman Shin Dong-bin on Monday slammed his father and elder brother for dragging him into another family spat over the company’s management and putting the 90 trillion won ($79 billion) business empire in danger. “Let me tell you one thing about what happened over the weekend,” the chairman said in a news conference at Lotte Duty Free Store’s logistics center in Incheon, referring ...

Tunisian civil society groups won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping rescue the only democracy that emerged from the Arab Spring, in a hugely symbolic show of support for the country after a wave of jihadist attacks. The Nobel panel said the award to the National Dialogue Quartet was intended as an “encouragement to the Tunisian people” and as a beacon to the wartorn Middle East, north Africa and...

Korean securities companies are waging a fierce competition to take over KDB Daewoo Securities Co., one of the nation’s leading brokerages, in a deal that could come as a game changer for the industry. The Korea Development Bank, a state-run policy lender, is seeking to sell off its stake in brokerage unit KDB Daewoo Securities as part of the government’s privatization plan. A successful buye...

A South Korean environment policy professor was elected to lead a U.N. panel on climate change, Seoul's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday, touting the election as an opportunity to enhance the nation's influence in the global efforts to tackle environmental challenges. Lee Hoe-sung, professor at Korea University’s Graduate School of Energy and Environment Policy and Technology, will succeed Rajend...

Twitter is embracing Jack Dorsey as its CEO in hopes that its once-spurned cofounder can hatch a plan to expand the short messaging service’s audience and end nearly a decade of financial losses. The hiring revealed Monday in a regulatory filing ends Twitter’s three-month search for a new leader. It marks Dorsey’s second stint as CEO since he helped start the San Francisco company more than nine...

Portugal’s ruling center-right coalition won a general election Sunday seen as a referendum on its austerity policies, although it may not hold onto its absolute majority in parliament, near-complete results showed. Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s “Portugal Ahead” coalition took 39.16 percent of the vote, according to results from more than three-quarters of constituencies, with the opposit...

Guns, jewelry and guitars may not immediately seem the most obvious items to sell together in one shop. But such is the way of life in Roseburg, Oregon, where a 26-year-old gunman killed nine people on Thursday at a community college in the latest armed massacre which has revived debate in the United States about stiffer gun controls. A day later, the store was doing a brisk trade with men and ...

Russia’s dramatic entry Wednesday into the Syrian war put the United States on the back foot once again and left Washington struggling to regain the military and diplomatic initiative. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was in New York trying to coordinate with his Kremlin opposite number Sergei Lavrov, a Russian officer contacted the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. His message was simple: Russian ...

Ralph Lauren is handing off his title as CEO of the fashion and home decor empire that he founded nearly 50 years ago. The New York-based company announced Tuesday that Stefan Larsson, the global president of Gap’s thriving low-price Old Navy chain, will take on the role. The change will be effective in November, and Larsson will report to Lauren who will continue to drive the company’s vision a...

Scientists on Monday announced "the strongest evidence yet" of liquid water on Mars, raising the distant prospect of microscopic life on the Red Planet. Experts at NASA hailed the findings, made with the U.S. space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and said they were "revolutionizing our understanding" of Earth's neighbor. "Mars is not the dry, arid planet we thought of in the past," Jim Gr...

Volkswagen's new boss began trying to pull the embattled carmaker out of the wreckage of a pollution test rigging scandal Saturday, as the United States and Switzerland halted the sale of the group's new diesel cars. The 62-year-old former Porsche chief Matthias Mueller was tapped Friday to replace Martin Winterkorn, who resigned over stunning revelations by US environmental authorities that the...

How many iPhones can Apple Inc. sell? With the company hitting new sales records with each annual release, that’s a question facing chief executive officer Tim Cook as the latest batch of handsets hits stores on Friday around the world. The latest models, following last year’s hugely popular design overhaul that added bigger screens, may not match the success of previous releases, according to a...

Volkswagen’s worldwide pollution cheating has been exposed in large part thanks to independent campaigners, a growing force in the scrutiny of multinationals whose activities can escape the gaze of official regulators. The revelations shaking Volkswagen, the world’s biggest automobile manufacturer by sales with a workforce of 590,000 people, can be traced to the work of the U.S.-based group Inte...

After nearly two decades including a botched initial investigation and series of trials, a movie and a reinvestigation, the murder that took place at a fast-food joint in Itaewon returned to the spotlight Wednesday with the extradition of the key U.S. suspect. Arthur John Patterson, handcuffed and donned in all white, arrived at In­cheon International Airport to face charges of murdering 22-year...