Samantha Raphelson

It's been a decade since the financial crisis drove up the unemployment rate in the U.S. and forced people in the prime of their careers to give up looking for work.

Even today, as employers add jobs at a furious pace, the workforce participation rate still hasn't recovered. And now researchers think they know one reason why: the opioid crisis.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, there was a world leader who signaled his desire to create a new branch of the military: the space force.

OK, it wasn't a long time ago, and it was right here on Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy.

In an address to the West Point football team at the White House earlier this month, President Trump expressed an idea to add a "space force" military branch that would conduct warfighting missions beyond Earth's atmosphere.

Updated at 6:22 p.m. ET

The 17-year-old who is accused of opening fire at a Texas high school on Friday, killing at least 10 people and wounding 13 others, has been charged with capital murder and aggravated assault.

Updated at 10:18 p.m.

Lava continued to spew out of cracks in the ground Sunday night after increased activity at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano last week, which destroyed at least 26 homes and forced more than 1,700 people to evacuate.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge released two new photos of the newest addition to the royal family, Prince Louis, on Sunday.

A bombing inside a mosque in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday killed at least 14 people and wounded dozens more, Afghan officials said.

The blast took place during afternoon prayers at the mosque in the city of Khost, the capital of the province of the same name. The mosque was also being used as a voter registration center for parliamentary elections set for October, marking the latest in a series of attacks on election-related facilities.

Dan Martin is chief of engineering services for the Department of Veterans Affairs' Northern Indiana Health Care System, but for more than a year, he hasn't had much to do. He says he has been designated to work at a remote VA office with no work assignments, ever since he raised the alarm on what he believed were fraudulently awarded contracts for new water filtration systems in local VA hospitals.

Scientists now think they understand why so many viruses seem able to exist in widely varying ecosystems on Earth.

There are an enormous number of viruses that get sucked up into the outer atmosphere and then fall out of the sky and scatter across the globe, according to new research published in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal.

The U.S. Geological Survey released a report Wednesday predicting that there could be dire consequences if a major earthquake hits the second-largest fault in Northern California.

The USGS simulated a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on the Hayward Fault, which runs up and down the East Bay Area through Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward, Fremont and Milpitas. The results show that an earthquake of that scale could kill up to 800 people and cause more than $100 billion in total damage.

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

It's a common refrain touted by gun rights advocates, who argue that using guns in self-defense can help save lives. But what is the actual number of defensive gun uses?

An Atlantic Ocean current that helps regulate the global climate has reached an 1,000-year low, according to two new studies in the journal Nature.

While scientists disagree about what's behind the sluggish ocean current, the shift could mean bad news for the climate. The Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation [AMOC] – often called the conveyor belt of the ocean – exchanges warm water from the equator with cold water in the Arctic.

Updated on Sunday at 10:00 a.m. ET

Hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, parents and victims rallied in Washington, D.C., and across the country on Saturday to demand tougher gun control measures, part of a wave of political activism among students and others impacted by school shootings.

If you've ever tried to catch an Uber on a rainy day during rush hour or after the ball drops on New Year's Eve, you're familiar with dynamic pricing. That's when the price of a ride costs more or less depending on the demand for drivers.

The pricing strategy has long been used by other sectors of the travel industry, such as airlines and hotels, to balance supply and demand, and last month, a luxury restaurant in London rolled out a similar model.

Lawmakers in the United Kingdom are debating a new tax on disposable cups in an effort to cut down on waste.

While the so-called "latte levy" is controversial, the goal is to replicate the success of Britain's tax on plastic bags; their use has declined by 80 percent since the tax was introduced in 2015. Proponents of the tax say it would encourage people to carry around their own reusable cups rather than use disposable ones, which in their current form are difficult to recycle.

Palestinian Christians attacked the convoy of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem during a visit to Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday to protest the church's controversial property sales to Jewish and Israeli buyers.

The number of migrants who died crossing the Mediterranean Sea surpassed 3,000 for the fourth year in a row, despite an overall drop in the number of refugees making the journey.

The International Organization for Migration has called the Mediterranean "by far the world's deadliest border," as more than 33,000 migrants have died at sea trying to enter Europe since 2000.

Updated at 1:07 p.m. ET

President Trump insisted Saturday that he is "a very stable genius," following the recent publication of a book that raises questions about his mental state and fitness for office.

Speaking to reporters at Camp David on Saturday, Trump called Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, "a fraud" and reiterated his earlier claim on Twitter that Wolff is not trustworthy.

The Douglas County Sheriff's office south of Denver says a suspect fired more than 100 rounds in a shooting that killed one police officer and wounded four others, along with two civilians, on Sunday morning.

The officers were shot after responding to an initial report of domestic violence at the Copper Canyon Apartments just after 5 a.m., Sheriff Tony Spurlock said in a news conference.

Over 26 hours and across 39 time zones, the world is celebrating the end of 2017.

New Year's celebrations kicked off in Samoa, Christmas Island and New Zealand as those countries were the first where the clock struck midnight. Here in the U.S., many events are set to occur under heightened security, including in Las Vegas, which is still reeling from the deadliest mass shooting in the nation's modern history three months ago.

Author Peter Zheutlin never wanted a dog, let alone a rescue. He had always believed, as a lot of people do, that rescue dogs are damaged goods.

Now Zheutlin can't imagine life without a dog, and he's become so driven by the issue of stray dogs that he's written two books about it. He tells Here & Now's Lisa Mullins the number of stray dogs has "cascaded out of control" in some parts of the U.S.

The family of a 19-year-old food delivery worker was not eligible for any kind of worker's compensation last month after their son was struck and killed by a dump truck.

Twenty-nine-year-old Cyntoia Brown has been locked up in a Tennessee prison for 13 years, after she was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery in the killing of a man who hired her as a prostitute when she was 16.

At trial, Brown's lawyers argued she was a runaway who was raped, abused and forced into prostitution by a man known as "Kut Throat." She will be eligible for parole after she turns 69.

Seventy-five years ago this week, scientists from the University of Chicago created the first controlled, self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, a feat that was essential in the development of an atomic bomb during World War II.

Enrico Fermi and his team of physicists secretly conducted the Chicago Pile 1 experiment on a squash court under the stands of a football stadium on Dec. 2, 1942. The anniversary of this unprecedented achievement comes as tensions escalate between the U.S. and North Korea, which launched a new ballistic missile on Tuesday.

The Irish border has emerged as perhaps the most intractable stumbling block in the United Kingdom's plan to leave the European Union as Prime Minister Theresa May faces a deadline to devise a solution ahead of a Brexit summit next month.

Azzedine Alaia, the French-Tunisian designer known for his figure-sculpting fashions, has died at 77, the French Federation of Haute Couture and Fashion confirmed on Saturday.

In his more than four decades in the fashion industry, Alaia gained a reputation for going rogue; he refused to follow the calendar of international fashion weeks and released his collections only when he was ready. He rose to fame for his body-hugging designs that celebrated the female form.

The Palestinians threatened on Saturday to cease communication with the United States if the White House closes its diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C., lodging a potential thorn in President Trump's plans for Mideast peace.

The State Department says the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization must close under a little-known provision in U.S. law that forbids it from requesting Israelis be prosecuted for crimes against Palestinians. Trump may reverse the closure within 90 days if the Palestinians prove they are engaging in peace negotiations with the Israelis.

Tens of thousands of euphoric Zimbabweans marched through the country's capital on Saturday to celebrate what may be the near end of President Robert Mugabe's reign.

Mugabe, one of Africa's last living independence leaders, had been in power for nearly four decades, until this week when the military ousted him in what it is describing as a "bloodless correction."

A Saudi-led blockade of Yemen continues to exacerbate a humanitarian crisis that aid groups are calling the most severe in decades.

Updated at 6:15 p.m. ET

"Free Speech Week," a four-day, right-wing rally at the University of California, Berkeley, has been called off, student organizers of the event tell member station KQED.

Here's what we've been told about passwords:

• Make them complicated.
• Use numbers, question marks and hash marks.
• Change them regularly.
• Use different passwords for each app and website.

These guidelines often leave users frustrated and struggling to remember them all.