As the ball drops, minimum-wage workers in New York will see a pay rise.
The minimum wage is going up around the state on Dec. 31.
The highest wages will be in New York City, where fast-food workers and employees of businesses with 11 or more people will see their minimum hourly pay go up to $15 from $13.
That will make New York City join Seattle and San Francisco as the major American cities to have hit that benchmark.
For minimum-wage workers, the bump is a cause of celebration. But some business owners are more stressed as they try to figure out how to adjust to higher labor costs.
Estonia moves to digital government
Estonia, a Baltic nation of 1.3 million people, is engaged in an ambitious project to make government administration completely digital to reduce bureaucracy, increase transparency and boost economic growth. As more countries shift their services online, Estonia's experiment offers a glimpse of how interacting with the state might be for future generations.
Need a prescription? It's online. Need someone at City Hall? No lines there - or even at the Department of Motor Vehicles! On the school front, parents can see whether their children's homework was done on time.
Estonia has created one platform that supports electronic authentication and digital signatures to enable paperless communications across both the private and public sectors.
There are still a few things that you can't do electronically in Estonia: marry, divorce or transfer property - and that's only because the government has decided it was important to turn up in person for some big life events.
This spring, government aims to go even further. If Oskar had been born a few months later, he would have been registered automatically, with his parents receiving an email welcoming him into the nation.
Australian trader guilty of "spoofing"
An Australian commodities trader pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in Chicago to manipulating market prices by placing orders in the millions of dollars, then canceling them within milliseconds so that he could sell smaller orders at a profit.
Jiongsheng "Jim" Zhao pleaded guilty to one count of spoofing in a deal with prosecutors, who say that from 2012 to 2016, the 31-year-old executed trades on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange online from Sydney.
Spoofing carries a maximum 10-year prison term, but Zhao's lawyer, Theodore Poulos, told U.S. District Judge John Tharp during Wednesday's hearing that he and prosecutors planned to recommend a one-year sentence. With time served in Australia awaiting extradition to the U.S., that means Zhao could only serve a few more months behind bars.
Zhao is due to be sentenced July 19. In the meantime, he will be allowed to return to Australia.
Zhao was arrested in Australia in January in what the U.S. Justice Department said was "the largest futures market criminal enforcement action" in the department's history. At least seven others were charged around the same time. But Poulos told the judge Wednesday that his client made a comparatively small profit, $21,000, from illegal trades.
The Justice Department had highlighted Navinder Singh Sarao's case along with Zhao's. Sarao made over $12 million in market-manipulation schemes and helped trigger a 2010 "flash crash" from his parents' suburban London home that wiped tens of billions of dollars off the value of U.S. stocks. He pleaded guilty in 2016.
Estonia moves to digital government
Estonia, a Baltic nation of 1.3 million people, is engaged in an ambitious project to make government administration completely digital to reduce bureaucracy, increase transparency and boost economic growth. As more countries shift their services online, Estonia's experiment offers a glimpse of how interacting with the state might be for future generations.
Need a prescription? It's online. Need someone at City Hall? No lines there - or even at the Department of Motor Vehicles! On the school front, parents can see whether their children's homework was done on time.
Estonia has created one platform that supports electronic authentication and digital signatures to enable paperless communications across both the private and public sectors.
There are still a few things that you can't do electronically in Estonia: marry, divorce or transfer property - and that's only because the government has decided it was important to turn up in person for some big life events.
This spring, government aims to go even further. If Oskar had been born a few months later, he would have been registered automatically, with his parents receiving an email welcoming him into the nation.