All I know is that everyone’s really mad about this JP Morgan mess. What on earth happened? A JP Morgan trader, Bruno Iksil, has been accumulating a giant bet on U.S. corporate bonds. He used derivatives to do it, and he messed up the bet and lost $2 billion for the bank. He could end up losing $1…

Game Over for the Climate MAY 9, 2012 GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If…

ATHENS—Two years after Europe bailed Greece out to protect the euro, the rescue has become a debacle that threatens to unravel the common currency. After Greece's May 6 elections left pro-bailout parties too weakened to govern the country, more elections are likely in June, with no guarantee a…

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the…

Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse Mordechai Jungreis, right, walks his mentally disabled son, 16, home from school in Brooklyn. James Estrin/The New York Times The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested…

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MAY 9, 2012 Loreta Randall and her husband, Bill Hunt, walking their dogs on their property in Belize. Debra Wilkes Gray for The New York Times THEY might have to contend with a monsoon season. Their electricity may go out on a regular basis. And they probably won’t have the choices they once had at…

Many years after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines began scrutinizing the costs — and the customers. For many years, Steven Rothstein, left, and Jacques Vroom held lifetime… (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles…) There are frequent fliers, and then there are people…

Radical hackers took up Hotz’s fight, although he never considered himself a cause. Illustration by Ron Kurniawan In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He…

A Regime’s Tight Grip on AIDS MAY 7, 2012 Juan Carlos Miranda, an AIDS patient, with Dr. Victor Maracha at an AIDS treatment sanitarium near Havana. Jose Goitia for The New York Times HAVANA — Yudelsy García O’Connor, the first baby known to have been born with H.I.V. in Cuba , is not merely still…

A Rival for Owens, and Questions of What If Eulace Peacock, far right, beating Jesse Owens, center, in 1935. Bettmann/Corbis A new PBS documentary details the life of Jesse Owens before and after his historic performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Laurens Grant’s film hits many familiar themes and…

Honey, I Got a Year’s Worth of Tuna Fish MAY 3, 2012 The Yoder family with some of their stockpile. Danielle Levitt for The New York Times Forty-five minutes before midnight on a wintry Tuesday evening, Cathy Yoder and Monica Knight, a pair of 30-something Boise women who run a popular coupon blog…

Illustration by Charlie Powell. In March 2009, Golan Levin, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s interdisciplinary STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, invited an enigmatic and famed computer programmer known to the virtual world only as “Why the Lucky Stiff” or “_why”—no, not a typo—to speak at a…

Horse_ebooks became a bona fide internet celebrity when organizers of ROFLCON, the premier conference on internet pop culture, asked in January: "Anyone know how we might be able to get in touch with @horse_ebooks?" Horse_ebooks has 40,000 Twitter followers and a wildly passionate fanbase, but…

ADVERTISE JOBS HOMES APARTMENTS MORTGAGE RATES CARS AUTO DEALER ADS CLASSIFIEDS SHOPPING & CIRCULARS Follow Detroit Free Press: Local Weather Detroit, MI Friday 53 ° /38 ° Saturday 59 ° /45 ° Sunday 55 ° /43 ° Monday 61 ° /39 ° More Weather presented by Video How stores handle transgender bathroom…

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a…

U.S. News Man Murdered by Grindr Date Was Cannibalism Victim: Police Pilar Melendez opinion Politics Trump Took a Reckless Gamble Even Reagan Passed Up Michael Tomasky Politics Non-Partisan, but Not Neutral Iraq Tells Trump GTFO After Soleimani Strike Erin Banco, Christopher Dickey, Asawin Suebsaeng…

Let’s start by talking about the Curator’s Code . This was introduced by Maria Popova as a way to standardize attribution in content aggregation. You were at South by Southwest when she introduced it and you later wrote about it . Why do you think something like this is important, as far as defining…

The debt collector on the other end of the phone gave Oswaldo Campos an ultimatum: Pay $219 a month toward his more than $20,000 in defaulted student loans, or Pioneer Credit Recovery, a contractor with the U.S. Education Department, would confiscate his pay. Campos, disabled from liver disease,…

We are unlikely to ever know all the details of the birth of the AIDS epidemic. But a series of recent genetic discoveries have shed new light on it, starting with the moment when a connection from chimp to human changed the course of history. We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of…

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36 Hours in Vieques A child leaps off an old pier in the main town of Esperanza. Laura Magruder for The New York Times THE mascot of Vieques seems to be the coquí, a tiny frog whose image adorns everything from T-shirts to hot sauce bottles. Yet, given the island’s rapid metamorphosis from Navy…