In Soldier’s Hearing, Afghans Tell of Horror

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — Through a live video feed from half a world away in Afghanistan, in an extraordinary night court session, descriptions of chaos and horror poured into a military courtroom here as if from an open spigot. Lois Silver/FR 170774 Associated Press, via Associated PressIn a courtroom sketch, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, lower right, is shown during testimony on...

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Yale Graduates Seek a Degree in Hip-Hop

IT started with confusion over a Cam’ron lyric. In 2009, Tom Lehman, a computer programmer, was puzzled by the line, “80 holes in your shirt: there, your own Jamaican clothes” in the rap song “Family Ties.” What were “Jamaican clothes,” he wondered? A friend from Yale, Mahbod Moghadam, guessed that the lyric referred to the tattered clothing worn by impoverished Jamaicans. That turned...

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The New Old Age Blog: The Emotional Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

Let’s talk about the emotional aftermath of the storm that left tens of thousands of older people on the East Coast without power, bunkered down in their homes, chilled to the bone and out of touch with the outside world.Let’s name the feelings they may have experienced. Fear. Despair. Hopelessness. Anxiety. Panic.Linda Leest and her staff at Services Now for Adult Persons in Queens heard this...

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The New Old Age Blog: The Emotional Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

Let’s talk about the emotional aftermath of the storm that left tens of thousands of older people on the East Coast without power, bunkered down in their homes, chilled to the bone and out of touch with the outside world.Let’s name the feelings they may have experienced. Fear. Despair. Hopelessness. Anxiety. Panic.Linda Leest and her staff at Services Now for Adult Persons in Queens heard this...

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Hurricane Sandy and the Disaster-Preparedness Economy

Jeffrey Phelps for The New York TimesAn assembly line at a Generac Power Systems plant. Generac makes residential generators, coveted items in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. FOLKS here don’t wish disaster on their fellow Americans. They didn’t pray for Hurricane Sandy to come grinding up the East Coast, tearing lives apart and plunging millions into darkness. But the fact is, disasters are good...

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Citing Affair, Petraeus Resigns as C.I.A. Director

The sudden development came just days after President Obama won re-election to a second term. Mr. Petraeus, a highly decorated general who had led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had been expected to remain in the president’s administration. Instead, Mr. Petraeus said in the statement that the president accepted his resignation on Friday after he had informed him of his indiscretion a day...

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Groupon Earnings Miss Expectations on Weakness in Europe

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Groupon reported financial results late Thursday that fell short of Wall Street’s already cautious expectations, as the daily-deal company failed to turn around its struggling European business. Groupon also confirmed that it had laid off about 80 employees, mainly in sales, as part of an effort to automate the way it handles its deals. The company’s shares...

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Advertising: Help Remedies Tries to Cure Ailments in Small Doses

DISAPPOINTED voters, runners with blisters and headache sufferers alike are getting some unexpected relief from a pop-up pharmacy that opened this week in the nation’s capital. The “help shop,” which offers low-dose drugs for everyday woes, is the idea of Help Remedies, a start-up company that sells minimalist white packets directed at single medical issues like nausea, headache or insomnia....

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Advertising: Help Remedies Tries to Cure Ailments in Small Doses

DISAPPOINTED voters, runners with blisters and headache sufferers alike are getting some unexpected relief from a pop-up pharmacy that opened this week in the nation’s capital. The “help shop,” which offers low-dose drugs for everyday woes, is the idea of Help Remedies, a start-up company that sells minimalist white packets directed at single medical issues like nausea, headache or insomnia....

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Your Money: After the Storm: Managing Your Homeowner’s Claim

Tom Mihalek/ReutersMark Baronowski shoveled sand from the living room of a beach front property in Bay Head, N.J., last week. Many victims of Hurricane Sandy are novices when it comes to catastrophic insurance claims. There is a sort of honeymoon period that occurs after a big storm like Hurricane Sandy, when insurance executives appear on the local news offering reassuring words. Their brightly...

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A Transfer of Power Begins in China

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DealBook: Priceline.com Agrees to Buy Kayak for $1.8 Billion

Just months after going public, Kayak Software has been snapped up by a rival.On Thursday,Priceline.com, a travel company from an earlier Internet age, announced that it would buy Kayak, its younger competitor, for $1.8 billion.Under the terms of the cash-and-stock deal, Priceline agreed to pay $40 a share. The price represents a 29 percent premium over Kayak’s closing price of $31 a share on Thursday....

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Doctor and Patient: Comparative Effectiveness Studies Lack Impact

“Comparative effectiveness” studies, which compare one treatment for a particular illness against another to determine which works better, have received a lot of attention and billions of dollars in federal support in the last few years. But when I mentioned comparative effectiveness research recently to a colleague who I know is particularly interested in treatments and the clinical trials behind...

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Doctor and Patient: Comparative Effectiveness Studies Lack Impact

“Comparative effectiveness” studies, which compare one treatment for a particular illness against another to determine which works better, have received a lot of attention and billions of dollars in federal support in the last few years. But when I mentioned comparative effectiveness research recently to a colleague who I know is particularly interested in treatments and the clinical trials behind...

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News Analysis: For Obama, Housing Policy Presents Second-Term Headaches

A second-term president may be just the person to tackle America’s housing problems.When President Obama first came into office, home prices were crashing, foreclosures were soaring and the previous Bush administration had just initiated the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed entities that agree to repay mortgages if the original borrower defaults.With the market in shambles...

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Obama’s Other ‘Cliff’ Is in Foreign Policy

For all the talk of a “fiscal cliff” threatening the nation’s finances, President Obama also faces a foreign policy cliff of sorts, with a welter of national security issues that he put on the back burner during the campaign now clamoring for his attention. Atop that list, administration officials and foreign policy experts say, is the bloody civil war in Syria and the standoff with Iran...

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Massive Open Online Courses Are Multiplying at a Rapid Pace

Clockwise, from top left: an online course in circuits and electronics with an M.I.T. professor (edX); statistics, Stanford (Udacity); machine learning, Stanford (Coursera); organic chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana (Coursera). IN late September, as workers applied joint compound to new office walls, hoodie-clad colleagues who had just met were working together on deadline. Film editors, code-writing...

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A Collective Effort to Save Decades of Research at N.Y.U.

The calls started coming in late on Tuesday and early Wednesday: offers of dry ice, freezer space, coolers. By the end of Thursday there were dozens more: A researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College would clear 1,000 tanks to save threatened zebra fish; another, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, promised to replace some genetically altered mice that were lost; and a doctor at the Children’s Hospital...

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