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Payments to Social Security recipients may increase a bit more than expected in 2024, but an advocacy group says they'll still fall short of what retirees need. The Senior Citizens League said Wednesday that the Social Security cost of living adjustment, or COLA, will likely be 3.2% for 2024. That would add about $57 to monthly benefits, raising them to $1,790 for the average recipient, according to the group's estimates. The cost of living adjustment is calculated based on an average of the inflation readings for the months of July, August and September. Specifically, it's based on the Consumer Price...

People walk past the building that houses the offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London, March 20, 2018. Share WASHINGTON — Long before its controversial roles in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, Cambridge Analytica influenced elections in Africa. The data mining company, under fire for its alleged use of 50 million Facebook accounts to shape campaign messages for then-candidate Donald Trump, also played a role in elections in Kenya and Nigeria, according to new reports. The company's first involvement in Africa dates to the general election in South Africa in 1994. That election marked the end of...

Steve Bannon tried to distance himself from the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Thursday, claiming: “I didn’t even know anything about the Facebook mining.” Bannon is a former vice-president and board member of the political consultancy, which he agreed he “put together.” He claimed to a conference in New York that neither he nor Cambridge Analytica had anything to do with “dirty tricks” in the use of information harvested from Facebook to make computer models to sway elections. Besides, he said, “Facebook data is for sale all over the world”. {snip} He blamed any “dirty tricks” on Cambridge Analytica’s parent company,...

After the Army, Clark signs up as businessman Doors open for retired general Retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s business resume reads as if it belongs to an upwardly mobile executive who’s had his nose to the grindstone for three decades. In the three years since he left the Army, Clark has signed on as an adviser or director with more than half a dozen companies, written two books, worked as a CNN pundit and launched a campaign to become president of the United States. The common denominator: He was working with a government he knows inside out. The information that...