China's smog taints economy, health

BEIJING — When a thick quilt of smog enveloped swaths of China earlier this month, it set in motion a costly chain reaction...

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Crazy Alien Weather: Lightning-Filled Rocket Dust Storms of Mars

Scientists have modeled the internal workings of lightning-filled “rocket dust storms” on Mars that rise at speeds 100 times faster than ordinary storms and inject dust high into the Martian atmosphere.The Red Planet is a very dry and dusty place, with global storms that sometimes obscure the entire surface. Satellites orbiting Mars have seen persistent dust layers reaching very high altitudes,...

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Fox News, Palin cutting ties

NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Channel is parting ways with former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, ending her three-year tenure as a contributor on the network.While Palin’s time at Fox was occasionally rocky, the network’s news executive, Bill Shine, said Friday that “we have thoroughly enjoyed our association” with her.“We wish her the best in her future endeavors,” said Shine, Fox’s...

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40 Years After Roe v. Wade, Thousands March to Oppose Abortion

Drew Angerer/The New York TimesPro-life activists made their way down Constitution Avenue toward the Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington on Friday. WASHINGTON — Three days after the 40th anniversary of the decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion, tens of thousands of abortion opponents from around the country came to the National Mall on Friday...

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Labor Relations Board Rulings Could Be Undone

By ruling that Mr. Obama’s three recess appointments last January were illegal, the federal appeals court ruling, if upheld, would leave the board with just one member, short of the quorum needed to issue any rulings. The Obama administration could appeal the court ruling, but no announcement was made on Friday. If the Supreme Court were to uphold Friday’s ruling, issued by the United States...

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Palmdale woman accused of torturing her children

Neighbors of a Palmdale woman charged with assaulting and torturing two of her children said Thursday that they never even realized...

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Cellphone Chips Will Remake the Server World. <em>Period</em>.

Facebook recently ran an experiment. Inside a test lab, somewhere behind the scenes at the world’s most popular network, engineers sidled up to a computer server loaded with software that typically drives the Facebook website and started messing with the CPU.Every processor includes something called a cache — a place to temporarily store data without sending it all the way back to a machine’s...

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Voice of Te’o prankster? Couric plays voicemails

NEW YORK (AP) — The person Manti Te’o says was pretending to be his online girlfriend told the Notre Dame linebacker “I love you” in voicemails that were played during his interview with Katie Couric.Taped earlier this week and broadcast Thursday, the hour-long talk show featured three voicemails that Te‘o claims were left for him last year. Te’o said they were from the person he believed to be Lennay...

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The New Old Age Blog: Time to Recognize Mild Cognitive Disorder?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published and periodically updated by the American Psychiatric Association, is one of those documents few laypeople ever read, but many of us are affected by.It can make it easier or harder to get an insurance company or Medicare to cover treatments, for example. It factors into a variety of legal and governmental decisions.And on a personal...

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DealBook: S.E.C. Pick Is Ex-Prosecutor, in Signal to Wall Street

9:13 p.m. | Updated The White House delivered a strong message to Wall Street on Thursday, taking the unusual step of choosing two former prosecutors as top financial regulators.But translating that message into action will not be easy, given the complexities of the market and Wall Street’s aggressive nature.At a short White House ceremony, President Obama named Mary Jo White, the first female United...

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California unions grow, bucking U.S. trend

The latest snapshot of the U.S. working class shows that unions are in trouble, their ranks thinning amid a backlash against...

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Lookin' Hot in the Cold: Technical Outerwear for Winter

Winter outerwear has come a long way from the clammy straight-jackets your mom would wrap around you every time you wanted to go outside.Every year, we see jackets, shells, bibs and pants that are more breathable, lighter, stretchier, and just plain better-looking than last year's crop. We sifted through the countless options on the racks and selected a dozen or...

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The New Old Age Blog: Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis

When the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness —...

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DealBook: Commerzbank to Cut Up to 6,000 Jobs

LONDON – Commerzbank, the second-largest lender in Germany, is planning to cut up to 6,000 jobs in a bid to increase earnings, joining other European banks that have announced restructuring plans in recent months.The bank said on Thursday that it expected to eliminate 4,000 to 6,000 jobs by 2016, or 7 to 10 percent of its work force.The layoffs will affect Commerzbank’s global operations, particularly...

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Dodgers near TV rights deal with Time Warner Cable

The Los Angeles Dodgers have negotiated a long-term television deal that would pay the team $7 billion to $8 billion, a move...

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Falling Photos Force Us to Face Our Fundamental Fears

Kerry Skarbakka wants to capture the feeling you get when you’re about to eat it — wrecking your bike, tripping down the stairs, falling off a ladder — and you know it. The ground comes flying up and for a split second you’re resigned to letting events take their course. To do that, he voluntarily throws himself off of things and takes a photo in midair.He sets up these falling photos by scoping...

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“Cyborg Foundation” wins $100K Focus Forward prize

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Spanish director Rafel Duran Torrent has won the $ 100,000 cash prize in the Focus Forward Filmmaker Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. The awards, the most lucrative ever given to short documentaries, went to five different shorts, with the top one being Duran Torrent’s “Cyborg Foundation.”The director will also be invited to a Sundance Institute ShortsLab program...

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The New Old Age Blog: Study Links Cognitive Deficits, Hearing Loss

There’s another reason to be concerned about hearing loss — one of the most common health conditions in older adults and one of the most widely undertreated. A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine suggests that elderly people with compromised hearing are at risk of developing cognitive deficits — problems with memory and thinking — sooner than those whose hearing is intact.The study...

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McDonald's December Sales Help Fourth-Quarter Profit

(Reuters) - McDonald's Corp reported an unexpected rise in sales in December at established U.S. restaurants, helping to lift its fourth-quarter profit above analysts estimates. The world's largest restaurant chain on Wednesday said sales at U.S. eateries open at least 13 months rose 0.9 percent in December, compared with an average estimate compiled by Consensus Metrix calling for a 1.78...

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County official calls car leasing contract procedure 'embarrassing'

Auditors reviewing a $1.75-million car leasing contract given to a company with a politically connected lobbying firm found...

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Fitness Trackers Are Long on Hype, Short on Credibility

We are awash in personal data trackers. There are wristbands, headbands, watches, smart scales, helmets and even forks to help us track our weight, heart rate, blood pressure and glucose level while logging how far we walk and how many calories we burn. All this information is supposed to give us behavior-morphing insights into our personal health habits.Trouble is, no one can say for sure...

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