Headlines on 2019-08-20

Your front door is the gateway to your home, so it needs to be well protected. Whether you’re watching for trouble-makers, monitoring for parcel deliveries, waiting for friends to visit, or hiding from that weird neighbor who keeps asking to borrow your lawn mower, these dual-purpose video surveillance systems will help you keep an eye out. If your house has existing low-voltage doorbell wiring, take advantage of it for uninterrupted service. If it doesn’t, we can recommend a battery-powered...

Russia gets most of the attention when it comes to malicious use of social media by state actors. The protests in Hong Kong have made clear China is using the same playbook.

Since Woodbury, N.J., began the nation's first mandatory curbside recycling program, the industry is in trouble. China has stopped taking all the plastic so facilities are overwhelmed.

People are hotly divided about many gun restrictions — but not on extreme risk protection orders. They allow police to temporarily take guns from people seen to be a risk to themselves or others.

Netvue markets its Belle video doorbell as the first to be powered by an artificial intelligence that enables it to remember and associate names with faces (so it can learn to greet your guests by name) and instruct delivery people where they should leave packages. But in my experience, this home security device simply annoyed anyone who stepped foot on my porch. The Belle’s AI sounds great on paper, but it just doesn’t work in execution. It’s largely designed to give delivery people...

EU officials and Irish leaders have rejected Boris Johnson's request to remove the Northern Ireland backstop from the Brexit deal.

NYPD fires officer who used banned choke hold in Garner case. China is accused of using fake social media accounts to try to disrupt Hong Kong protests. And, poll results on red flag gun laws.

Though tobacco ads have been banned from TV for about 50 years, the marketing of electronic cigarettes isn't constrained by the law. Public health advocates consider that a loophole that hurts kids.

Economists have long criticized summer vacation as economically inefficient. But one has come to its defense.

Warm temperatures have Californians again bracing for wildfires. But to better prepare, the residents of Ventura say they need a clearer picture of what went wrong in the destructive 2017 Thomas Fire.

In high school, in the late 90s, my friends and I played hooky and drove to Flint, Michigan, where we heard there was going to be a strike at the Delphi plant, an auto parts supplier to General Motors. We got there just in time to see the men walking out, marching slowly in horizontal lines, joined at the arms. Some of them were singing. An audience stood outside the plant gates, watching silently, and for a moment, everything held still. Later, I learned that 5,800 men and women had struck the...

In 2008, Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters housed engineers from Facebook and coders from Google. Everything was optimized for the web, from the talking points to the logo—the simple, minimal, now iconic Obama “O.” The candidate’s graphic designers even made use of a new typeface, Gotham, which was so well suited to social media that the Discovery Networks and SNL later folded it into their own branding. A decade later, the minimalist, startup-y aesthetic Obama pioneered during his first...