Slim majority supports L.A. sales tax increase

A Los Angeles sales tax hike being promoted as vital to preserving public safety and helping end years of budget deficits is...

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Evernote Hack Exposes User Data, Forces Extensive Password Resets

Evernote joins Twitter, Apple, and Facebook on the list of tech companies hacked in recent weeks.Evernote “has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service,” according to a statement posted on the company’s website earlier today. “As a precaution to protect your data, we...

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Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal

VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped...

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England Develops a Voracious Appetite for a New Diet

LONDON — Visitors to England right now, be warned. The big topic on people’s minds — from cabdrivers to corporate executives — is not Kate Middleton’s increasingly visible baby bump (though the craze does involve the size of one’s waistline), but rather a best-selling diet book that has sent the British into a fasting frenzy. “The Fast Diet,” published in mid-January in Britain, could do...

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DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned....

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Bell jurors ordered to begin anew after panelist is dismissed

After nearly five days of deliberations, jurors in the Bell corruption trial were ordered Thursday to begin anew after a member...

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Getting Crafty: Why Coders Should Try Quilting and Origami

Printmaking, origami, and bookbinding sound like activities on the day’s arts-and-crafts agenda at camp, not a developer conference. That is, unless you’re Heroku, the Salesforce-owned app platform, which pointedly included crafting demonstrations at its recent Waza 2013 conference in San Francisco yesterday. While the crafts made the event fun and provided respite from lengthy workshop lectures,...

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Well: A Rainbow of Root Vegetables

This week’s Recipes for Health is as much a treat for the eyes as the palate. Colorful root vegetables from bright orange carrots and red scallions to purple and yellow potatoes and pale green leeks will add color and flavor to your table.Since root vegetables and tubers keep well and can be cooked up into something delicious even after they have begun to go limp in the refrigerator, this week’s Recipes...

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Pictures From the Week in Business

Shari Lanning, assistant professor of anatomy at Ross University in the West Indies, a veterinary college, led a discussion with students as Georgia the dog was examined for a pain evaluation. They don’t teach much at veterinary school about bears, particularly the figurative kind, although debt as large and scary as any grizzly shadows most vet school grads, usually for decades. Nor is there much...

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Jury in Bell corruption trial may be deadlocked

A court spokeswoman said Thursday the jury in the Bell corruption case appears to be deadlocked.“The jurors may be at an impasse,”...

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This Electronic Temporary Tattoo Will Soon Be Tracking Your Health

FitBit too bulky? Why not glue a sensor array to your skin?The quantified self goes nanoscale with a stick-on silicon electrode network that could not only change the way we measure health metrics, but could enable a new form of user interface. And the researchers behind it aim to have the device available in the next few weeks through a spinoff company, MC10.The development takes wearable...

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Doctor and Patient: Why Failing Med Students Don’t Get Failing Grades

Tall and dark-haired, the third-year medical student always seemed to be the first to arrive at the hospital and the last to leave, her white coat perpetually weighed down by the books and notes she jammed into the pockets. She appeared totally absorbed by her work, even exhausted at times, and said little to anyone around her.Except when she got frustrated.I first noticed her when I overheard her...

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High & Low Finance: Report Lays Out Plan to Reduce Government Role in Home Financing

Can the American mortgage market ever function again without Uncle Sam guaranteeing that lenders will be repaid? It is amazing just how few people think it can. “For the foreseeable future, there is simply not enough capacity on the balance sheets of U.S. banks to allow a reliance on depository institutions as the sole source of liquidity for the mortgage market,” stated a report on...

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Race for L.A. city controller heats up

A previously low-profile race for Los Angeles city controller has begun to heat up as opponents of City Councilman Dennis Zine...

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Samsung Wallet Is Just Like Passbook, But on Android

Samsung Wallet, a newly announced Android app that looks and works a lot like Apple’s Passbook app for the iPhone, will surely add to the accusations that the Korean company rips off Cupertino at every opportunity.Like Passbook, Wallet is a designed as a central repository for your digital gift certificates, coupons, tickets, travel details and boarding passes. And, like Passbook, it will...

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Global Health: After Measles Success, Rwanda to Get Rubella Vaccine

Rwanda has been so successful at fighting measles that next month it will be the first country to get donor support to move to the next stage — fighting rubella too. On March 11, it will hold a nationwide three-day vaccination campaign with a combined measles-rubella vaccine, hoping to reach nearly five million children up to age 14. It will then integrate the dual vaccine into its national...

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Penney Reports Big Loss for Fourth Quarter

NEW YORK (AP) — Boy, it just wasn't J.C. Penney's year. The mid-priced department store chain on Wednesday reported another much larger-than-expected loss in the fiscal fourth quarter on a nearly 30 percent plunge in revenue in the latest sign that shoppers aren't happy with the changes it's made in the past year. The results mark a full year of massive quarterly losses and revenue...

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Gaza militants break cease-fire with rocket attack into Israel

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Music Sales Have Biggest Jump in MP3 Age

Music sales are going up for the first time in 14 years and piracy is going down, largely because it is stupid-easy to hear any song you want without being a digital thief.“The music industry has adapted to the internet world, learned how to meet the needs of consumers and monetised the digital marketplace,” according to IFPI executive Frances Moore. Two reports released...

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