Grappling with months or even years of unemployment, some older Americans are tapping into the one safety net that's meant not to be tapped into: social security. Motoko Rich, national economics reporter for our partner The New York Times, recently profiled 62-year-old Palm Springs resident Clare Keany. Clare lost her job in 2008 and never found a full-time replacement. 

As Syrian government forces shelled rebel-held cities over the weekend, the main opposition group — the Syrian National Council — picked a new leader to make the council appear more secular, more democratic, and more appealing to religious and ethnic minorities. But Amr Al Azm, a former member of the Syrian National Council and a professor of history at Shawnee State University, feels that the decision to appoint Sieda is a compromise that benefits no one.

Greek elections next Sunday and last Saturday's euro zone agreement to bail out Spain’s banks are likely to drive markets this week, and the Romney campaign has seized on Obama's recent gaffe about the private economy to paint the president as out of touch with the realities of the economy.

In barely a decade and a half, Google has become an extension of our brains: with mobile devices and computers we can have the answer to a question before we complete a sentence. Google searches are a prosthetic memory, but they also may constitute an MRI of our collective personality – especially some of it's more disturbing aspects. The research of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard, focused on voting patterns and racial prejudice in Google searches.

When we think about who liars and cheaters are in our society, we might think of politicians, bankers or lawyers. But if you really look at your own behavior, you are probably not too far behind.

Displays of bipartisanship in Congress are increasingly rare, and as the United States approaches another presidential election, the noise from super PAC-funded ads has become something of an unending background soundtrack to the campaigns.

The physics journal Physical Review A has recently published a paper whose lead author is only 18-years-old. Ari Dyckovsky recently graduated from high-school, but his recent work on quantum entanglement may set the stage for the next generation of quantum computers.

A Reuters report published on Thursday exposed Aubrey McClendon’s long and brazen use of company money for personal business — including family vacations to Amsterdam and Paris. McClendon even devoted a unit of Chesapeake, called AKM Operations, to managing his personal business.

Over the weekend, Attorney General Eric Holder announced two investigations into the leaks: one for the Stuxnet operation in Iran and one for the now well-known drone program. Takeaway Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich discusses how these investigations could play out.

Since the turn of the century, as black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington took the national stage, African-American politicians have wrestled over the best strategy for black communities to gain political power. Fredrick Harris argues that President Obama's coalition-style politics, similar to those of Martin Luther King, Jr., are doing little to help the black community.

Nobel Prize winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz responds to the bailout of Spanish banks. His new book is called the "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future."

Could it be that the Mexican people have finally had enough with the drug wars in Mexico? Enough to scrap the current policy of pitting the Mexican army against the drug lords and cartels? Certainly the three candidates running for President seem ready to toss out what the incumbent Filipe Calderón has been doing for nearly five years. The three candidates running for president say they want a major shift in strategy, if not a total reversal.