Protests Erupt After Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York TimesEgyptians in central Cairo ran from tear gas during clashes with the police on Friday. Protesters took to the streets in several cities. More Photos »CAIRO — Protests erupted across Egypt on Friday, as opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed with his supporters over a presidential edict that gave him unchecked authority and polarized an already divided...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Having a Beer With a Smartphone

Drinking beer used to be simple. But the exploding popularity of craft beer over the past several years has changed that, giving beer drinkers a new world of possibilities — and a range of hard decisions. Predictably, the ever-expanding roster of oatmeal stouts and vanilla porters has been accompanied by the creation of dozens of beer-related apps. These include local guides to the best pints,...

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York TimesA voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese. Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising...

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York TimesA voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese. Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising...

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New Zealand Wants a Hollywood Put on Its Map

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Standing by his desk in New Zealand’s distinctive round Parliament building, known locally as the Beehive, Prime Minister John Key proudly brandished an ornately engraved sword. It was used, he said, by Frodo Baggins, the protagonist of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and in the films it possesses magical powers that cause it to glow blue in the presence of goblins. ...

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Israeli Troops Kill a Palestinian in Shooting That Tests Cease-Fire

Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesAfter the Cease-Fire: Palestinians and Israelis returned to a semblance of normal life after eight days of lethal conflict between Israel and Hamas.GAZA — Health officials said on Friday that a 20-year-old Palestinian was killed and nine others wounded in a clash with Israeli soldiers in the southeast Gaza Strip, testing the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel after wild...

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Bits Blog: Amazon’s Diminishing Discounts

Is it just my imagination, or is the price of physical books on Amazon going up? I have no evidence beyond what I see as I browse through the retailer’s virtual shelves, where I have routinely been noticing books selling for the same price they cost in the rest of the world. Selling at full price is not the sort of value proposition that propelled Amazon to its current perch as one of the country’s...

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Documents Show F.D.A.’s Failures in Meningitis Outbreak

Newly released documents add vivid detail to the emerging portrait of the Food and Drug Administration’s ineffective and halting efforts to regulate a Massachusetts company implicated in a national meningitis outbreak that has sickened nearly 500 people and killed 34. In the documents, released on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency would threaten to bring...

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Documents Show F.D.A.’s Failures in Meningitis Outbreak

Newly released documents add vivid detail to the emerging portrait of the Food and Drug Administration’s ineffective and halting efforts to regulate a Massachusetts company implicated in a national meningitis outbreak that has sickened nearly 500 people and killed 34. In the documents, released on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency would threaten to bring...

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The Lede Blog: Vignettes of Black Friday

With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks o...

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Israel and Hamas Maintain Cease-Fire, After Push by the U.S. and Egypt

CAIRO — A cease-fire agreed to under intense Egyptian and American pressure between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas to halt eight days of bloody conflict seemed to be holding on Thursday, averting a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip without resolving the underlying disputes. With Israeli forces still massed on the Gaza border, a tentative calm in the fighting...

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H.P.’s Misstep Shows Risk in the Push for Big Ideas

When Hewlett-Packard spent roughly $10 billion on the software company Autonomy, it thought it was buying a slice of the future — investing in the hot trend of big data. But the deal turned out to be a debacle, and not only because H.P. wrote down $5 billion of the purchase. The ill-fated marriage of the companies is a lesson for H.P. and other older technology giants as they throw billions...

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York TimesThis strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer. Filling for 2 strudels: 1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants,...

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York TimesThis strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer. Filling for 2 strudels: 1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants,...

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Tool Kit: Online Shopping Tips for the Holidays

Some people may be looking forward to leaving Thanksgiving dinner before the pie is served to join the Black Friday rush, which will begin during dinnertime Thursday, earlier than ever, at stores like Sears, Walmart and Lord & Taylor. But for those who prefer to stay for the pie course, avoid the lines and freezing temperatures and shop from the comfort of their homes, there are just...

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Fighting Continues as U.S. Seeks Truce in Gaza

JERUSALEM — To a backdrop of airstrikes and mounting casualties, American efforts to negotiate a cease-fire in the latest Gaza fighting between Israel and Hamas continued on Wednesday but the struggle to achieve even a brief pause in the fighting emphasized the obstacles to finding any lasting solution. Israeli airstrikes overnight continued into Wednesday morning, hitting government buildings,...

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For Web Images, Creating New Technology to Seek and Find

STANFORD, Calif. — You may think you can find almost anything on the Internet. But even as images and video rapidly come to dominate the Web, search engines can ordinarily find a given image only if the text entered by a searcher matches the text with which it was labeled. And the labels can be unreliable, unhelpful (“fuzzy” instead of “rabbit”) or simply nonexistent. To eliminate...

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