In Brazil's cracolandias , roving hordes of lost souls

SAO PAULO, Brazil — Between the high-rises in the dark center of this megacity, a swarm of people covers an entire block. They...

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Maker Mom Builds Cookie-Cutter Empire With 3-D Printers

Athey Moravetz is doing some tasty work with her 3-D printers. The video game designer has worked on PlayStation games like Resistance Retribution and Uncharted Golden Abyss. She's also a self-described "jack-of-all-trades," skilled with 3-D modeling tools like Maya, and knows how to design compelling characters with them. After having two children she decided to work from home, and in addition...

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Americans answer D.C.’s siren song of employment, strong economy

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Thirteen years ago the band The Magnetic Fields crooned that the U.S. capital city is “the greatest place to be,” in the indie love song “Washington, D.C.”Recently, a growing number of Americans are singing along as they move to the District in search of jobs, economic opportunity and cultural attractions.In a study on migration provided exclusively to Reuters that is set to...

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York TimesDr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct. For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs...

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Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy steps down

LONDON — Prime Minister Mario Monti, the technocrat who guided Italy through economic turbulence for 13 months after scandal-plagued...

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NimbleTV Promises Cable TV From Anywhere on All Your Devices

Cutting the cord may save you money, but the reality is that cable and satellite TV are incredibly convenient. Yet that convenience stops when you try to watch some of those channels on anything other than the cable-box-connected TV. One startup thinks it has a work around. NimbleTV started accepting beta applications on Friday for its rather intriguing service. To...

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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.The actor’s divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.Kutcher’s filing does not indicate that the couple...

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The New Old Age Blog: The Ex-Wives Club

Weather permitting, Kappy Lundy and Barbara Thompson are heading out to Vancouver, Wash., on Saturday night to have a holiday dinner with the parents of their daughter’s husband.Yes, these women both mothered the same children — now grown and with children of their own. Ms. Lundy is their biological parent; Ms. Thompson is the stepmother who married their father after he and Ms. Lundy divorced.But...

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Boehner rejects Democrats' push for immediate vote on gun bill

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker John A. Boehner rejected calls from Democrats to schedule a vote on new gun restrictions before...

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Net Neutrality, Data-Cap Legislation Lands in Senate

A proposal forbidding internet service providers from turning the data-cap meter off to grant a so-called internet fast lane to preferential online services was introduced Thursday in the Senate.The bill by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) comes a week after a report found that the institutionalization of data caps by ISPs is geared toward profiteering rather than the stated goal of managing traffic...

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World Music Awards postponed due to visa issues, Newtown tragedy

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The World Music Awards was postponed on Thursday due to “logistical and multiple visa issue,” organizers said, two days before the event was scheduled to be held in Miami.Event producers John Martinotti and Marcol International said in a statement that the December 22 awards ceremony also was being delayed in the wake of the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut,...

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German Health Care Attracts Foreign Patients

BERLIN — When Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, needed advanced medical care for a stroke suffered this week, he flew not to the United States or Britain but to Germany, for treatment here in the capital. For many Americans, Germany is known as a way station where soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan received immediate medical care on United States military bases. But it is also...

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Russia bill to ban U.S. adoptions of Russian children advances

MOSCOW — Russia's parliament took a first step Wednesday toward banning the adoption of Russian children by American parents,...

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Cosmo Strikes Again, Taking Over Another Westboro Twitter Account

It feels a little bit like hacker Groundhog Day. After hijacking a Westboro Baptist Church leader’s Twitter account on Monday, Wired has confirmed that the 15-year-old hacker known as Cosmo the God took over another account belonging to one of the of the same church members on Wednesday, using much the same method.A source with direct knowledge of the attack who spoke...

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Music, roses at singer Jenni Rivera’s memorial

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. (AP) — Jenni Rivera‘s “celestial graduation” was marked by festive music, heartfelt speeches in Spanish and English and passionate chants of “Jen-ni! Jen-ni!”Rivera’s children and famed singers Olga Tanon and Joan Sebastian performed during the nearly 2 ½-hour memorial service Wednesday at the Gibson Amphitheatre, where thousands of fans gathered to salute the “Diva de la Banda”...

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F.D.A. and States Meet About Regulation of Drug Compounders

Mary Calvert/ReutersMargaret Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, testified on the meningitis outbreak before Congress in November. She addressed the need for greater federal oversight of large compounding pharmacies, which mix batches of drugs on their own, often for much lower prices than major manufacturers charge. SILVER SPRING, Md. – The Food and Drug Administration conferred with public health...

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State of the Art: Android Cameras From Nikon and Samsung Go Beyond Cellphones - Review

60 Seconds with Pogue: Android Cameras: David Pogue reviews the Nikon Coolpix S800C and the Samsung Galaxy Camera.“Android camera.” Wow, that has a weird ring, doesn’t it? You just don’t think of a camera as having an operating system. It’s like saying “Windows toaster” or “Unix jump rope.” But yes, that’s what it has come to. Ever since cellphone cameras got good enough for everyday...

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Two more funerals in Newtown; NRA responds to school massacre

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Two more of the children killed by a gunman who invaded a Connecticut elementary school were buried on Tuesday...

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Instagram Puts a Sunny Filter on Its Terms of Service

Instagram won’t be selling your food photos to Denny’s after all.The popular photo-sharing site made an abrupt about-face on Tuesday and said it will remove a portion of its updated terms of service that would have allowed Instagram to use your photographs, likeness, photo metadata (location information) and screen name to generate revenue from third-party businesses and “other entities” without...

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Naomi Watts pulls off “The Impossible” to critical acclaim

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Days after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, actress Naomi Watts took part in a fundraising telethon spearheaded by George Clooney to help the region’s hundreds of thousands of people in 14 nations whose lives were shattered.Little did Watts know that eight years later she would be starring in “The Impossible,” out in the U.S. movie theaters on Friday, about a real...

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DealBook: Private Equity Giant to Sell Gunmaker; Cites Massacre

12:12 p.m. | Updated The investment firm Cerberus Capital Management announced Tuesday that it would sell its stake in the country’s largest gun maker after one of the company’s guns was used in the Connecticut school shootings.Cerberus said that it was putting the company, Freedom Group, up for sale just hours after one of its largest investors, the California teachers’ pension fund, said it was...

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Hawaii's nine-term senator, Daniel Inouye, dies at 88

WASHINGTON – Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the second-longest-serving senator in U.S. history and winner of the Medal of Honor...

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