Dec
28

Suspect in homeless woman's burning is mentally ill, police say

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Bluetooth Tracking Can Predict the Length of Your Commute Hell

Bluetooth is good for more than silly headsets and wireless speakers. The city of Calgary, Alberta, is using the technology to give drivers real-time information about travel time during their commute.The Travel Time Information System along Calgary’s Deerfoot Trail anonymously collects Bluetooth signals from mobile phones, headsets and other devices to estimate travel...
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Singer Travis pleads not guilty to assault

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) – Country singer Randy Travis pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault in a municipal courtroom in the Dallas suburb of Plano on Friday, his lawyer said.Lawyer Peter A. Schulte told Reuters his client is “absolutely not guilty of this crime.”Police say Travis assaulted a man in a church parking lot in Plano in August while attempting to intervene in a disagreement between a...
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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients. While the medical center had been treating...
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Dec
27

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to step down

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'Softwalks' Spruces Up New York City's Construction Zones

New York City is constantly under construction, meaning the skyline and sidewalk vistas always include cranes and scaffolding. Now, two designers aim to improve the view by making construction a little nicer for pedestrians. Their sidewalk-improving initiative is called Softwalks. The endeavor comes from Bland Hoke and Howard Chambers, who began...
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Christmas box-office haul paces Hollywood for record year

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A strong Christmas-day box office performance by musical “Les Miserables” and western “Django Unchained” put Hollywood on pace to set an all-time box office record with $ 10.8 billion in annual revenue, box-office tracker Hollywood.com said on Wednesday.Universal Pictures‘ star-studded “Les Miserables” took in a weekday Christmas record of $ 18.2 million in the United States...
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New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York TimesDr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum hospitals, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel...
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Dec
26

Obama, Democrats, winning over public on 'fiscal cliff'

WASHINGTON -- Americans are increasingly doubtful that Congress and the White House will reach a budget deal as the deadline to the "fiscal cliff" approaches, according...
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Pentagon Preps Stealth Strike Force to Counter China

The U.S. military has begun a staged, five-year process that will see each of its three main stealth warplane types deployed to bases near China. When the deployments are complete in 2017, Air Force F-22s and B-2s and Marine Corps F-35s could all be within striking range of America’s biggest economic rival at the same time. With Beijing now testing its own radar-evading jet fighters — two...
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Britain’s royal family attends Christmas services

LONDON (AP) — Britain‘s royal family is attending Christmas Day church services — with a few notable absences.Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, Queen Elizabeth II arrived at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk. She was accompanied in a Bentley by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie.Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other...
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Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?

Claudia Steinman saw her husband’s BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody’s mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — “Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear...
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Dec
25

U.S. drone strategy in Yemen is fraught with peril

AL SARRAIN, Yemen — The U.S. drone flew over a cluster of mud houses on a ridge and, according to Yemeni officials, locked onto...
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A Look Inside Tarantino's <em>Django Unchained</em> Comic Book

Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to...
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Character actor, World War Two hero Charles Durning dies at 89

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Charles Durning, a World War Two hero who became one of Hollywood’s top character actors in films like “The Sting,” “Tootsie” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” has died, a New York City funeral home said on Tuesday. He was 89.Durning, who was nominated for nine Emmys for his television work as well as two Academy Awards, died of natural causes at his New York City home...
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Dec
24

Four firefighters shot, two fatally, in western New York

WEBSTER, N.Y. -- A western New York police chief says a gunman who entrapped and shot four volunteer firefighters outside a...
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Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process...
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Quentin Tarantino unchains America’s tormented past in “Django”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Twenty years after Quentin Tarantino unveiled his first film “Reservoir Dogs,” the director has turned his eye to America’s slavery history, spinning a blood-filled retribution tale in his trademark style for “Django Unchained.”Tarantino, 49, has become synonymous with violence and dark humor, taking on the Nazis in “Inglourious Basterds” and mobsters in “Pulp Fiction.”In “Django...
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Risks: Pedestrian Accidents More Deadly in Men

More than twice as many men as women die in pedestrian-vehicle accidents. Now researchers have partly determined why.Writing online last month in the journal Injury Prevention, investigators considered the contribution of three factors: distance walked, number of accidents and fatalities per collision.Researchers using data from a variety of sources found that men and women walk similar distances...
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E-Book Price War Has Yet to Arrive

Thor Swift for The New York TimesA Google e-reader is displayed at a bookstore. Sales of e-books for the devices have slowed this year. Right about now, just as millions of e-readers and tablets are being slipped under Christmas trees, there was supposed to be a ferocious price war over e-books. Last spring, the Justice Department sued five major publishers and Apple on e-book price-fixing...
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Dec
23

Raging fire guts Kabul market

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Firefighters battled through the night to contain a raging fire that swept through a market in the Afghan...
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