The unemployment rate fell to 5.4%.Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters US unemployment has fallen to its lowest since 2008 after the economy added 223,000 jobs in April taking the unemployment rate down to 5.4% – close to the rate the Federal Reserve considers to be effective full employment. The jobless…

Wednesday, May 6, 2015 Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday introduced legislation to break up the nation’s biggest banks in order to safeguard the economy and prevent another costly taxpayer bailout. Rep. Brad Sherman proposed a companion bill in the House. “No single financial institution should have…

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced legislation to prevent members of Congress from using official funds for first-class airfare. Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) said luxury air travel is "especially wasteful," while Congress has yet to eliminate the federal deficit.…

Rigid sales quotas at Wells Fargo Bank have driven employees to open unauthorized accounts for customers, sticking them with bogus fees and damaging their credit, according to a city of Los Angeles lawsuit that echoes a Times investigation . The civil complaint, filed Monday in state court in Los…

First in a series. Part 2 here . Part 3 here . Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record. But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words…

Eric Kim Contributor Eric Kim is co-founder and CEO of RushOrder , an L.A.-based mobile food ordering startup. Editor’s note: Eric Kim is co-founder and CEO of RushOrder , an L.A.-based mobile food ordering startup. To say that recent capital inflows in the food-ordering space have been growing…

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By Andrew Thompson You can play a slot machine in Las Vegas before you’ve even reached baggage claim: there are tiny slots parlors in every terminal of McCarran International Airport. Once you pick up your rental car, you can stop for gas and play slots at a convenience store. And that’s all before…

Who was Aaron Swartz? I never met him, though I’ve had dealings with friends of his over the years. The outline of his biography is a matter of public record: teenaged computer whizz gets rich, becomes a political activist and ends up in his 20s facing decades in jail for murky charges related to…

The most ambitious project unveiled by Google this year isn’t a smartphone, website, or autonomous, suborbital balloon from the Google X lab. You can’t hold it, or download it, or share it instantly with friends. In fact, the first part of it probably won’t exist for at least three years. But you…

Artificial intelligence scares people

[youtube:http://youtu.be/XkfBWAJ7kbI] Snugly situated in an industrial section of Oakland, California, is Next Thing Co., a team of nine artists and engineers who are pursuing the dream of a lower cost single-board computer. Today they’ve unveiled their progress on Kickstarter , offering a $9…

The kids are not all right. As the millennial generation starts to reach its 30s, many of these ‘80s and ‘90s kids are having kids of their own, and recent surveys show one in five millennial parents is living in poverty . That’s the result of a combination of rising costs for raising children ,…

Author Published on Apr 4, 2015 Share News Fix Screen shot from the April 1 video at 16th and Capp showing a baton strike. (Video by Ben Hardy) Given the national Black Lives Matter movement and recent text-messaging scandal involving the San Francisco Police Department, strained police-community…

Entrepreneurs typically spend most waking moments obsessed with work. So would it make sense to just move into the office? In a new space for entrepreneurship built at the University of Utah, students working on a startup have the option to live in a sleeping pod in the middle of a larger…

For those seeking to censor information online, the weakest link is often precisely that—the humble hyperlink. Censoring or imposing costs or conditions on linking to information can be just as effective, and often easier, than controlling the information at its source. But without the freedom to…

Department leadership and the Fraternal Order of Police are poor spokespersons for your average police officer. That doesn't mean you'll like what we have to say. Nicholas Kamm / Getty Images On my first day of police academy at Queens College in 1999, I, along with 1,400 other young men and women…

The cult of personality around Elon Musk suggests how desperately we need a climate hero. Credit Photograph by Tim Rue/Bloomberg/Getty Last week, at the Tesla design studio in Hawthorne, California, Elon Musk , the company’s C.E.O., unveiled a new battery pack for the home. Curvilinear and sleek,…

The High Line has raised property prices, forcing many small businesses and middle-income residents out of the area.Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP W hen construction on New York City’s famous High Line began in 2006 , the project to turn a remnant of the industrial age into a post-industrial garden…

These wonderfully symmetrical plants show the fractal nature of math, physics and the universe. Could this be evidence of sacred geometry? “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” -Albert Einstein

Little did I know that one my favourite piazzas in Romania was hiding a secret beneath its modern European facade. I’d heard rumours that Piata Libertati (Liberty Square) in the city of Timisoara was the site of a magnificent Turkish bath during the Ottoman era (1552-1716). But I’d never seen any…

Photographer: Eva O'Leary for Bloomberg Businessweek Photographer: Eva O'Leary for Bloomberg Businessweek In a Boston basement that houses a new kind of vocational training school, Katy Feng says she’s working harder than she ever did at Dartmouth College. The 22-year-old graduated last year with a…

May 7, 2015 I am thinking of returning my Apple Watch It should be stated that I am not a watch guy. The Apple Watch was the first watch that I have purchased for myself since the sundial watch I bought as a gag in the eighth grade. In my past life as an acrobat and a clown it was not very practical…

We've seen a lot of hype around heart rate monitoring. Where are we with understanding how to measure heart health? Today, we know very little about heart performance. Most of the measurements we take are under specific circumstances, like when your doctor takes your blood pressure. I'm hoping that…

A Tulare, California well is pumped on April 24, 2015. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images California is running on groundwater right now. As the state has cut down on surface water deliveries from rivers and reservoirs, farmers and municipal water suppliers have reacted by sucking more and more out of…

Earth-orbiting satellites traditionally weighed as much as trucks, but in recent years space has been filling up with satellites smaller than a minifridge for educational, research, and defense uses. Unlike larger satellites, which can carry a heavy cache of fuel, these small satellites are often…

This article is the first in a series exploring the effects that unconscious racial biases have on the criminal justice system in the United States. While this article reports on evidence of those biases, subsequent essays will propose ways to mitigate their effects. Long before Officer Darren…

At May's Nails Salon on West 14th Street in Manhattan, a customer gets a neck massage while her nails dry. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The women begin to arrive just before 8 a.m., every day and without fail, until there are thickets of young Asian and Hispanic women on nearly every…

Workers around the globe have been finding it harder to juggle the demands of work and the rest of life in the past five years, a new report shows, with many working longer hours, deciding to delay or forgo having children, discontinuing education, or struggling to pay tuition for their children.…

Flight path over Baltimore -- screen capture from Flightradar24.com by Pete Cimbolic This piece was originally posted on MSNBC.com It all started with a simple Twitter query from a Baltimore man: “Anyone know who has been flying the light plane in circles above the city for the last few nights?”…

A couple years ago, NASA and DHS unveiled a portable radar unit based on technology used to monitor spacecraft. This radar unit, though, would be used closer to home—to find people burried under rubble. In the first real-world demonstration of its use, the device helped save 4 men trapped under…

So there's a study floating around online that says that once you hit the ripe old age of 33, you're basically done discovering new artists. The study was done by collecting information based on the listening habits of U.S. Spotify users, alongside information from Echo Nest . The above chart…

The Republican Senate majority leader from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, walks back to his office from the Senate floor prior to a procedural vote on the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act.Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA The US Senate on Thursday advanced legislation that would allow Congress to review a…

893 SHARES Like Pocket We all know there’s only one way to beat procrastination: suck it up and to get the hell on with it. But like most of life’s challenges, being told just what to do is often as unhelpful as it is obvious. The shock of diving into our work and the dissonance that arises between…

According to press reports, the German intelligence service BND ended internet monitoring for the US National Security Agency at the start of the week. Only information from faxes and phone calls is still being sent on. The "Süddeutsche Zeitung" website reported overnight on Thursday that the German…

“THE development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warns. Elon Musk fears that the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, may be the biggest existential threat humanity faces. Bill Gates urges people to beware of it. Dread that the…

According to a recent study, “badly tuned” cars and trucks are huge polluters. Though they makeup just one quarter of the vehicles on the road, they’re responsible for most vehicular air pollution. Air pollution is linked to a host of health ailments, many of which can be fatal. From asthma in…