December 21, 2012

After an uproar over privacy concerns, Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom, said the service would revert to its previous user agreement.

Marijuana can be smelled in suburban backyards in neighborhoods from Hollywood to Topanga Canyon as dusk falls — what in other places is known as the cocktail hour.

The New York Stock Exchange once had a monopoly on stock trading, but is no longer the center of the financial world.

An acquisition that made sense for a flagging New York Stock Exchange and a newcomer with heft in the derivatives market.

IntercontinentalExchange’s $8.2 billion takeover of the New York Stock Exchange illustrates starkly how trading in commodities and derivatives has become much more lucrative than trading in the shares of companies.

Significant gaps in the F.B.I.’s database of criminal and mental health records allow thousands of people to buy firearms every year who should be barred from doing so.

Cluster bombs are impossible to use precisely, and the victims of such attacks describe them as collective punishment against populations that side with the rebels.

Financial markets and credit rating agencies are closely watching both the talks on the fiscal impasse and the raising of the debt ceiling.

President Obama, conceding that a “grand bargain” for deficit reduction with Speaker John A. Boehner is unlikely, called for Congress to approve a more modest measure by year’s end.

The appointment of Senator John Kerry, an established Obama loyalist, to be secretary of state is likely to further centralize decisions in the White House.

With a new generation of princesses and a new generation of visitors thronging to see them, Disney World had only one option: more.

After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association implicated violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement — not guns — in a rash of mass shootings.