The complex field of health-care information may soon be a little more streamlined. On Tuesday, Chicago-based electronic medical records provider Allscripts announced it has agreed to merge with British rival Misys PLC in a cash-and-stocks deal worth more than $1 billion. The new firm, which will operate under the name Allscripts, will become one of the largest players in the U.S.'s $20 billion electronic health-record industry. In its present form, Allscripts manages data for more than 40,000 ...

YouTube has been the birthplace of many Internet stars, but few of them have had the business savvy to turn video views into paychecks. Take Sam Tsui, the site's latest crowd pleaser. A fresh-faced a cappella singer at Yale, Tsui has an impressive voice, but the real draw is the electronic wizardry that allows him to harmonize onstage with five digital versions of himself. Glee, meet Attack of the Clones. Since July, Tsui's medley of Michael Jackson hits has been ...

George Bush knows how to talk about children. With a sure sense of childhood's mythology, of skinned knees and candy apples and first bicycles, he campaigned for office in a swarm of jolly grandchildren and promised justice for all. In this year's State of the Union address, he mentioned families and "kids" more than 30 times -- the electronic equivalent of kissing babies on the village green. "To the children out there tonight," he declared as he built to his ...

John Brennan works underground. His basement office in the White House has low ceilings and no windows. It is an extra-secure enclave within one of the world's most secure buildings, with a keypad lock on its outer door, a gleaming steel safe in its anteroom and a prohibition on electronic devices, such as BlackBerrys and cameras, which could scoop up some of America's most sensitive secrets. The location makes sense. President Obama's top adviser on homeland security ...

Oil prices climbed back to near $113 a barrel Friday as a weaker dollar made crude more attractive to investors with other currencies and the conflicts in Libya and Syria raised risk premiums. By early afternoon in Europe, benchmark crude for June delivery was up 40 cents at $113.26 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract added 10 cents to settle at $112.86 on Thursday and reached $113.97 during in ...

The nervous system is somehow involved in so many diseases and disorders, from fleeting, no-account headaches to crippling paralyses, that doctors are often at a loss to know what part of the patient to treat first. Some forms of liver disease, for example, cause emotional disturbances that can be mistaken for mental illness or signs of brain damage. Merely to diagnose many cases in which the nervous system is involved takes an almost infinite variety of sensitive electronic devices. Treatment ...

Two senior U.S. senators are expected to introduce Tuesday legislation to establish an Internet consumer bill of rights, moving the needle in the burgeoning debate over how to protect individuals without impeding one of the country's few growth sectors. The bill, by Sen. John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Sen. John McCain, Republican of Arizona, would create the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights, and if passed it would force companies to give consumers more control over how their ...

Darting around a windowless command center in southwestern Germany, Maggie Woodward flashed orders to pilots and skippers from the Great Plains to the Dolomites. She scrambled U.S. warplanes from Italy's Aviano air base and ordered them to attack targets deep inside Libya. She dispatched secret orders to Marine amphibious ships in the Mediterranean, instructing their chopper crews when and where to stage for pilot search and rescue. She ordered electronic-countermeasures aircraft to broadcast radio messages encouraging Muammar Gaddafi's troops to ...

With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman's villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It was the headquarters from which Gaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: "Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good." ...

A wiry, slightly hunched man presses in a few numbers, the electronic lock gives way with a beep and the group presses into the crowded laboratory, plastered with ominous warnings about toxins and biohazards. Guiding the visitors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is Mark Roth, a 50-year-old biologist with a tall forehead, thinning red hair and a perpetual wry smile. He asks his assistant, Jennifer Blackwood, if the rat is ready. It is. She turns a dial, ...