Ticker: Smart-city spinoff back under Google; US jobless claims at 206,000

Google parent company Alphabet is folding one of its subsidiaries back into Google as the startup's founder steps down to confront a neurological disease. Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff said Thursday he's leaving the company focused on environmentally sustainable urban planning technology because he "very likely" has ALS, also known as Lou Gehring's disease. Sidewalk Labs was one of a hodgepodge of projects to spin off from Google when the tech giant put itself under a new holding company, Alphabet, in 2015. The idea was to separate Google's riskier explorations of futuristic technology from its highly profitable, advertising-fueled core business. Doctoroff said in a Medium post about his departure Thursday that four products developed by Sidewalk Labs now fit squarely into Google's commitments to be more environmentally sustainable and go carbon-free by 2030.