Some new mothers may not have much time to celebrate Mother's Day this weekend, as the U.S. is still the only industrialized country not to mandate paid leave for parents of newborns.

The National Partnership for Women & Families created the timeline below to show...

Apple's iTunes music store turned 10 last month, marking a rocky decade in the music industry as digital downloads shouldered out physical album sales.

People are buying more units of music than ever — even though digital downloads of singles greatly outpace those of albums. Meanwhile, sales...

The U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate, with 2.2 million people, or nearly 1 in 100 behind bars. Rising immigration detentions and the disastrous "war on drugs" have helped push inmate numbers to record highs in recent decades. While this growing,

Vacations have been shown to benefit sleep, improve mental health and productivity year-round, cut the risk of heart attack and strengthen connections with loved ones — all good reasons take Stress Awareness Month as a chance to plan one. The problem is, the U.S. doesn't guarantee...

Roger Ebert wasn't afraid to take an unpopular stand. The legendary film critic, who died Thursday after his cancer returned, described "A Clockwork Orange" as "a paranoid right-wing fantasy" and knocked the "sophomoric satire and cheap shots" of "Blue Velvet."

Even when ripping apart beloved classics, Ebert...

Justice Anthony Kennedy invoked the children of gay parents this week during the Supreme Court hearing on Proposition 8, California's gay marriage ban.

"They want their parents to have full recognition and legal status," he said. "The voice of those children is considerable in this case, don't you...

As Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to "lean in" and seek leadership roles, she points out one reason the tug between work and family affects men and women differently. No one can be present everywhere all the time, and men traditionally haven't tried to be. Sandberg tells overextended women...

The Iraq war has cost the United States $1.7 trillion — in addition to catastrophic human, social and political losses — and that number could climb to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades, according to the Costs of War Project.

One cost...

New York City's ban on giant sodas was struck down by a judge this week, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed to appeal the ruling. Bloomberg, who pioneered the 2008 requirement that chain restaurants post calorie counts on their menus, sees the soda law as another way...

The February jobs report released Friday showed the unemployment rate at 7.7 percent, its lowest level in four years. Job gains were better than expected in the last snapshot of the job market before the federal spending sequester began on March 1. Employment rose for college graduates as...

If President Barack Obama approves the Keystone XL project, the 875-mile pipeline extension from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada, through Nebraska could create an array of environmental problems. It could also provide jobs for some of the 12 million unemployed Americans -- hundreds...

Are speed and quality really sacrificed when people work from home, as Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer said to explain her new ban on telecommuting? It depends on the employee, the company and the job, so pointing to any one study to argue either way is not very useful....

Sequestration could cost thousands of teachers their jobs, according to a grim report the White House released Sunday. That's just one possible impact of the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to kick in Friday unless Congress reaches an increasingly unlikely deficit reduction deal that includes added...

The version of the Violence Against Women Act that House Republicans unveiled Friday is not the same bill the Senate passed 78 to 22 last week. Gone are protections for LGBT victims, and a provision to help Native American women seek justice is watered down.

In 1999, "Shakespeare in Love" picked up seven Oscars, beating out Steven Spielberg's World War II epic "Saving Private Ryan" for Best Picture. It also earned a place in history as one of the worst Best Pictures of all time — according to user ratings on IMDB, where...

Most people who own iPhones use them as their alarm clock — making it all too easy to check email one last time before falling asleep and hard to ever feel unplugged from work and social networks.

Several years ago my boss, Arianna Huffington, passed out from exhaustion...

NRA chief Wayne LaPierre issued a strange warning to Americans in a Daily Caller op-ed Wednesday, suggesting that guns will protect us against everything from terrorism to natural disasters. It's not the first time he has used fact-free scare tactics to encourage people to join the...

Most people in the world will celebrate this Valentine's Day in countries that do not recognize gay marriage. Still, the number of people who live in countries with full marriage equality is much higher than it was in 2000, when it was zero.

The Netherlands became the...

Last year, the Oxford Dictionary Online added a bunch of popular words including lolz, ridic and vajazzle, but there are still some feelings and experiences no English word can quite describe. Here are some foreign words that might help you convey all the nuances of your love or...

When Australia passed a parental leave law in 2010, it left the U.S. as the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns. Most of the rest of the world has paid maternity leave policies, too; Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea are the...