Wall Street ends sour week with 5th straight decline

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell for a fifth straight day on Friday, dropping 1 percent and marking the S&P 500's longest losing streak in three months as the federal government edged closer to the "fiscal cliff" with no solution in sight. President Barack Obama and top congressional leaders met at the White House to work on a solution for the draconian debt-reduction measures set...

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Victim of Gang Rape in India Dies at Hospital in Singapore

NEW DELHI — A young woman who had been in critical condition since she was raped two weeks ago by several men who lured her onto a bus here died early Saturday, an official at the hospital in Singapore that is caring for her said. The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student whose rape on Dec. 16 had served as a reminder of the dangerous conditions women face in India, “died peacefully”...

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NORAD Santa trackers draw record number of phone calls, social media followers

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. – NORAD says it drew a record number of phone calls and social media followers during its NORAD Tracks Santa operation on Christmas Eve.The North American Aerospace Defence Command said Friday volunteers answered more than 114,000 calls, up 12,000 from 2011.NORAD’s Santa Facebook page had more than 1.2 million followers, up from about 1 million last year. More than 129,000...

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Sofia Vergara Sizzles in Cut-Out Bathing Suit

12/28/2012 at 05:00 PM EST After posting this WhoSay photo, Sofia Vergara will have men dreaming of a black and white Christmas."Holyday!" wrote the Modern Family star, 40, showing off her famous curves in a peek-a-boo cut-out bathing suit while basking in the Miami sun over the holidays. Spending time with...

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated...

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Wall Street rebounds on House session, but off for 4th day

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell for a fourth day on Thursday, but recovered most of their losses after the House of Representatives, in the barest sign of progress, said it would come back to work on avoiding the "fiscal cliff" this weekend. It was a jittery session for stocks, with shares falling more than 1 percent after Senate Majority Harry Reid warned a deal was unlikely before...

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U.N. Envoy Calls for Transitional Syria Government

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lakhdar Brahimi, the international envoy on a mission to Damascus seeking an end to the escalating civil conflict in Syria, said Thursday that a transitional government with full executive authority should be established, perhaps within months, and should rule the country until elections could be held. Mr. Brahimi did not say who would serve in such a government, and he...

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iOS apps see Christmas sales spike shrink in 2012

Distimo just released its statistics on Christmas Day app downloads and revenue growth… and the download spike is far smaller than it was last year. Back in 2011, Christmas Day iOS app download volume spiked 230% above the December average. This year, the increase was just 87% — far below industry expectations. The revenue spike came in at 70%.[More from BGR: Google names 12 best Android apps...

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Ashton Kutcher & Mila Kunis Share 'Flirtatious' Lunch in Chicago

Caught in the Act 12/27/2012 at 05:10 PM EST Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis FameFlynet After spending some quality time in Iowa over the holidays, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis visited Chicago on Thursday.Around noon, the couple stopped into eco-friendly restaurant...

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Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

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Wall Street drops in thin session, led by retailers

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell for a third straight day on Wednesday, dragged lower by retail stocks after a report showed consumers spent less in the holiday shopping season than last year. Trading was light, with volume at a mere 4.01 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, well below the daily average so far this year of about 6.48 billion...

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Shinzo Abe Selected as Japan’s Prime Minister

TOKYO — Parliament formally elected Shinzo Abe as prime minister on Wednesday, ending a three-year break from decades of near-constant rule by his conservative Liberal Democratic Party. The victory puts Mr. Abe, 58, a former prime minister and an outspoken nationalist, at Japan’s helm as it faces the growing burden of its aging population, years of industrial decline and the challenge of...

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Samsung expects to ship more than half a billion phones in 2013

Title Post: Samsung expects to ship more than half a billion phones in 2013Rating: 100%based on 99998 ratings.5 user reviews.Author: Fluser SeoLinkThanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comm...

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Mariah Carey, Nick Cannon Share Their Family Holiday Photo

Mom & Babies Celebrity Baby Blog 12/26/2012 at 05:00 PM ET Happy holidays from Mariah Carey, Nick Cannon and Dem Babies!Posing in front of the perfect seasonal backdrop — their fully lit fir surrounded by a pile of presents — the American Idol judge and her husband cuddle up with their twins Monroe...

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Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

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Yen on defensive on U.S. fiscal worry, helps Nikkei

TOKYO (Reuters) - Uncertainty over whether U.S. lawmakers will strike a deal by an end-of-year deadline to avert a severe fiscal retrenchment undermined the yen and bolstered Japanese shares on Tuesday in low volume, with many participants away on Christmas holiday. The dollar rose to a 20-month high of 84.965 yen early on Tuesday in Asia, as Japanese markets caught up with global investors...

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Iran Says Hackers Targeted Power Plant and Culture Ministry

Iran reported a spree of new cyberattacks on Tuesday, saying foreign enemy hackers tried in recent months to disrupt computer systems at a power plant and other industries in a strategically important southern coastal province as well as a Culture Ministry information center. Accounts of the attacks in the official press did not specify who was responsible, when they were carried out or how...

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Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.’s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies...

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Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

Read More..

Start of "Santa Claus rally" dampened by "cliff' worries

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks edged lower on Monday as caution over the potential for volatility driven by worries about the U.S. "fiscal cliff" dampened enthusiasm at the start of a seasonally strong period for equities. Investors are betting Congress will reach a deal to avert most of the austerity measures due to come into force at the start of next year. That has led to the best...

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U.S. Civilian Is Killed at Police Headquarters in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan — A female police sergeant shot and killed an American civilian adviser at police headquarters in Kabul on Monday, Afghan police officials said, breaking a relative lull in the so-called insider killings that have strained the relationship between Americans and Afghans here. The American victim was identified as Joseph Griffin, 49, of Mansfield, Ga., who had worked for...

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Sprint salesman refuses to sell iPhone to customer, says his ‘fingers are too fat’ to use it

We’ve known for a while now that some mobile carriers have been instructing their sales staff to start pushing their customers away from Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and toward Android or Windows Phone devices. The reason is simple: carriers pay a lot more to subsidize Apple’s popular smartphone than they do with other devices and they’d prefer to have higher gross margins at the end of each quarter....

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Queen Elizabeth Goes 3D for Her Holiday Message

By Simon Perry 12/24/2012 at 03:05 PM EST Queen Elizabeth, in her 3D glasses John Stillwell/AFP/Getty Check out the new Queen of Cool – rockin' her shades.As if her Diamond Jubilee, her Summer Olympics' James Bond stunt and the anticipation of her great-grandchild from William and Kate weren't...

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Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

Read More..