Mass. Republican Senator is sworn in, Democrats regroup
<i>WASHINGTON </i>— President Barack Obama and congressional Democratic leaders sought to reset their agenda as they lost their 60th vote in the Senate on Thursday, trying to push ahead with measures to spur job creation even as they grasped for ideas to keep alive their health care legislation.
Talks reported as trial nears for 9/11 lawsuits
<i>NEW YORK</i> — With a firm trial date looming for thousands of lawsuits brought by workers at ground zero against the city, lawyers for both sides are engaged in intensive talks aimed at settling some or all the cases.
Amazon pulls Macmillan books over pricing dispute, fight ongoing
Last Friday, Amazon.com pulled all books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on Amazon’s website.
Weather
Some schools and businesses have already closed in the Mid-Atlantic states of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia ahead of a powerful snowstorm that is forecast to strike that region starting this afternoon.
Google asks spy agency to look into cyberattacks
<i>SAN FRANCISCO </i>— Google has turned to the National Security Agency for technical assistance to learn more about the computer network attackers who breached the company’s cybersecurity defenses last year, a person with direct knowledge of the agreement said Thursday.
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<i>WASHINGTON</i> — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday that he was replacing the general in charge of the Pentagon’s largest weapons program — the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — and withholding $614 million in award fees from the contractor, Lockheed Martin.
Protecting Haiti while protecting its ‘orphans’
<i>P</i><i>ORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI</i> — “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that,” Laura Silsby, one of 10 Americans accused of trafficking Haitian children, said Monday through the bars of a jail cell here. “Our hearts were in the right place.”
Obama submits a budget of ‘hard choices’
<i>WASHINGTON </i>— President Barack Obama declared in presenting his new 10-year budget proposal on Monday that “our fiscal situation remains unacceptable,” but he insisted that the country pursue his ambitious domestic agenda despite facing swollen budget deficits for the foreseeable future.
Obama budget privatizes NASA space exploration
The ambitious space initiative that President Barack Obama unveiled for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Monday calls for sweeping changes in mission and priorities for the 52-year-old agency, yet omits two major details: where the agency will send its astronauts and a timetable for getting them there.
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<i>DETROIT — </i>Toyota, struggling to eliminate questions surrounding millions of its vehicles, announced a repair on Monday to stop gas pedals from possibly sticking and causing cars to speed up unexpectedly.
Once Pay is Divvied Up, Little is Left for Banks’ Shareholders
Finding the winners on Wall Street is usually as simple as looking at pay. Rarely are bankers who lose money paid as well as those who make it.
Rising Criticism for Both Deficit and Solutions
Advocates of more aggressive steps to address the national debt failed on Tuesday in their effort to create a bipartisan commission to press for tax increases and spending cuts, but President Barack Obama now plans to establish a similar panel by executive order in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
Haiti’s Quake Set Children Adrift In a World of Chaos
Not long after 14-year-old Daphne Joseph escaped her collapsed house on the day of the earthquake, she boarded a crowded jitney with her uncle and crawled in traffic toward the capital, where her single mother sold beauty products in the Tete Boeuf marketplace. “Mama,” she said she repeated to herself. “Mama, I’m coming.”
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The tiny village of Kivalina, Alaska, does not have a hotel, a restaurant or a movie theater. But it has a very big lawsuit that might affect the way the nation deals with climate change.
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James Cameron’s science-fiction epic “Avatar” has passed his “Titanic” to become history’s highest-grossing film, with a sizable boost from higher-priced tickets for 3-D and Imax showings.
Democrats Put Lower Priority On Health Bill
With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them.
Return of the Freeze
The small warm-up that has occurred in the Boston area at the beginning of this week has had many people thinking that the worst part of the winter is over, and that spring is just around the corner. With temperatures in the 50s°F (above 10°C) for most of the day on Monday, several parts of the Charles River have even begun to unfreeze.
Managing Disasters With Small Steps
A week ago, Elizabeth Sheehan, the founder of Containers to Clinics, a nonprofit organization in Dover, Mass., was preparing to deploy the group’s first medical clinic overseas. Made from two shipping containers, it was to be sent to the Dominican Republic, where it would begin to fulfill the group’s long-term goal of building health care infrastructure in developing countries through networks of small container clinics in rural areas. Then, last Tuesday, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck the Dominican Republic’s neighbor, Haiti. Hospitals in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were destroyed or damaged, and basic medical care was practically nonexistent. Sheehan said her donors immediately started calling her. “They all said, ‘Why don’t you send it there?”’ she said.
Siddiqui, Alleged Pakistani Militant, Stands Trial in NYC
In the summer of 2008, a shopkeeper in the Afghan city of Ghazni noticed a strange sight: a woman in burqa drawing a map. In a region where nearly all females are illiterate, he found it suspicious and called the police, according to an Afghan intelligence official.
Children Awake? Then They’re Probably Online
The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.