Free Republic

U.S. policy used to jam up GPS. Now, those signals beam into your pocket.Shortly after the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000, a new type of Silicon Valley start-up began to crop up: companies specializing in GPS chips. At the time, GPS — the Global Positioning System, a constellation of satellites that provide location and time to receivers on Earth, courtesy of the American taxpayer — was still relatively niche for everyday people. This small handful of companies was founded on the basis of two gambles. One was that, like any other chip, GPS chips — at the time,...

The world is facing the prospect of a dramatic shortfall in food production as rising energy prices cascade through global agriculture, the CEO of Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International says. "I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest," said Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of the Oslo-based company. "I’m afraid we’re going to have a food crisis." Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Holsether said that the sharp rise in energy prices this summer and autumn had already...