“Jeff Bezos becomes the world's second richest person”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now the second richest person on Earth Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now the second richest person on Earth. The latest tally by Bloomberg's Billionaires Index shows Bezos is now worth about $75.6 billion. He added $1.5 billion to his net worth after Amazon gained $9 billion in market value during trading hours Wednesday. The company received a generous stock bump after a Barclay's analyst declared Amazon will "likely to be one of the first trillion-dollar market cap companies." Its shares hit a record high shortly after. Amazon's stock has been on fire lately -- it's grown more than 16% over the last year. Amazon isn't Bezos's only venture. He also owns space exploration company Blue Origin. Its goal is to eventually take people on "space tourism" trips and to deliver satellites into orbit for corporate climates. So far, the company has only conducted test flights. Bezos leapfrogged investing guru Warren Buffett and Spanish fashion tycoon Amancio Ortega, who are worth $74.9 billion and $74.2 billion respectively, to take the number two spot. Topping the richest-person list is still Bill Gates. As founder and CEO of Microsoft, Gates has amassed an $86 billion fortune. It's pretty well established that segregation (separation because of wealth or race, etc.) limits access to jobs, education, public services and other resources for people in high-poverty neighborhoods. But how does economic and racial segregation in a handful of neighborhoods affect the rest of a metropolitan area? The Urban Institute analyzed data from the 100 most populous metro areas (U.S.) in the 1990, 2000 and 2010 censuses and found that less segregated regions had higher average incomes and educational attainment and lower homicide rates. And despite efforts to integrate schools and neighborhoods, the report concludes that the United States remains "starkly segregated" by race and income. That leads to worse regional outcomes on the whole. The report argues that more inclusion builds safer, smarter and richer regions. When people have access to safer neighborhoods and better schools, their educational attainment and job prospects improve, benefiting the entire population of a region. Steady, high-paying jobs increase individual incomes, which means cash flows back into communities through home ownership, taxes and consumer spending.

In Other News The most expensive part of doing business in outer space is getting there. The private space flight company SpaceX thinks it can change all that, and it's about to face a big test of its technology. On Thursday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a communications satellite from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using a rocket stage that has already been to space and back. SpaceX is betting that this kind of recycled rocket will soon lower its costs and revolutionize space flight. They come from places like Vietnam, China, Mexico and Guatemala, lured by promises of better-paying jobs and legal immigration. Instead, they're smuggled into the U.S., forced to work around the clock as bussers, wait staff and cooks, and housed in cramped living quarters. For this, they must pay exorbitant fees that become an insurmountable debt, even as their pay is often withheld, stolen or unfairly docked. In restaurants, bars and food trucks across America, many workers are entrapped in a form of modern slavery. That's according to a new report by Polaris, an organization that fights human trafficking and helps survivors. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/29/521971468/in-u-s-restaurants-bars-and-food-trucks-modern-slavery-persists