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Houston's air quality improved dramatically over the past decade, but the city is still short of meeting the latest smog standards. Getting there isn't simply a matter of cracking down more on the petrochemical industry — the city needs to deal with cars on its sprawling roads, and bad air blowing from out of town.

This week, the European Union gave some of its member nations more time to meet deficit-reduction targets — in other words, to ease back on austerity. The programs have crushed growth and sent European unemployment to a record high 12 percent.

One of the longest labor strikes has finally come to an end. After nearly 10 years, hospitality workers at Chicago's Congress Plaza Hotel have put down the picket signs. But getting back to work might not be so easy.

There are more than 130 million smartphones in the U.S., but none read: assembled in the USA. Motorola's flagship device, Moto X, will be the first smartphone assembled in the U.S. Motorola Mobility, which is owned by Google, has already begun hiring for the plant based in Fort Worth, Texas.

Arvind Mahankali, a 13-year-old from Bayside, N.Y., won the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday after correctly spelling "knaidel." It's a yiddish term of German origin meaning "dumpling." Mahankali had stumbled on German words two years in a row. This year, he said, "the German curse has turned into in a German blessing."

As humans have cut into Brazil's forests, the toucan population has taken a dive. The trees, in turn, have changed, too: Without large-billed birds to eat fruit with big seeds, only trees with small seeds thrive. Eventually, one scientist says, "the impacts on the forest could be quite dramatic."

Interest rates on government-backed college loans are set to double July 1 — unless Congress agrees on a fix before then. The president is expected to urge Congress on Friday to block that increase.

Reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, who covered Bulger for years for The Boston Globe, have a book out about the career criminal. Bulger was wanted for 19 murders when he was captured by the FBI in 2011. Jury selection for his trial begins June 6.

With the right chemistry, cement can take on some of the properties of a metal, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Chris Benmore, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, explains why a semiconducting cement might be useful.

The new edition of the DSM, the so-called "Bible" of psychiatry, is out. But many psychiatrists and psychologists say the manual's approach is outdated, boxing mental illness into discrete categories like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, when very little is known about the underlying causes of disease.