A normally stoic president sheds tears over mass shooting of ‘our children’

President Obama, so often cool and unemotional, struggled to maintain his composure Friday as he addressed a nation reeling from a mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. “The majority of those who died today were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” Obama said partway into a four-minute stateme...

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Philippine police shoot dead Malaysian carrying bomb

MANILA: A man with alleged ties to Islamic militants was shot dead in the Philippines after he threatened to set off a backpack bomb in a stand-off with local police, an official said Saturday.A suspect identified by police as Mohammad Noor Fikrie of Malaysia was killed in the southern city of Davao after he threatened to blow up an explosive device in a rucksack, city police chief Ronald...

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Kashmir valley remains cut-off from country for second day

SRINAGAR: The Kashmir valley remained cut-off from rest of the country for the second consecutive day today, but improvement in weather has raised hopes of early restoration of traffic on the Srinagar-Jammu national highway. "The National Highway is still closed but work is going on to clear the road of the snow at the earliest," Aamir Ali, coordinator of Natural Disaster Management Cell, told...

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National GeographicThe aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles...

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Conn. Shooter Adam Lanza: 'Obviously Not Well'

Adam Lanza of Newtown, Connecticut was a child of the suburbs and a child of divorce who at age 20 still lived with his mother.This morning he appears to have started his day by shooting his mother Nancy in the face, and then drove her car to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School, armed with two handguns and a semi-automatic rifle.There, before turning his gun on himself, he shot...

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Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s 2012 Christmas card: Fiscal cliff, Gretzky in heaven

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen — your Rep. Loretta Sanchez Christmas card for 2012! (Courtesy of the Office of Rep. Loretta Sanchez) Over the past decade, the California Democrat’s wacky holiday greetings have drawn a cult following. “I’ve seen them being sold on eBay,” the congresswoman told us. (Courtesy of the Office of Rep. Loretta Sanchez) Nice topical theme this...

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Retail sales dip 1% on-year in Oct

SINGAPORE: Retail sales in Singapore dipped one per cent on-year in October as a result of lower sales of motor vehicles, according to the Department of Statistics (DOS).Excluding motor vehicles, DOS said retail sales rose 1.3 per cent on-year.Compared to the previous year, retail sales of motor vehicles decreased 8.5 per cent in October 2012. Sales of optical goods and books, watches...

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Royal hoax call: Australian radio presenters get death threats

SYDNEY: Death threats have been made against the Australian radio hosts involved in the royal prank call tragedy, police said on Friday, with station management reportedly moving some staff to safehouses.The revelations came as a London inquest showed the nurse who fielded the hoax call, Jacintha Saldanha, 46, hanged herself.The mother-of-two was found dead last Friday, three days after transferring...

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Global Checkup: Most People Living Longer, But Sicker

If the world's entire population went in for a collective checkup, would the doctor's prognosis be good or bad? Both, according to new studies published in The Lancet medical journal.The vast collaborative effort, called the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010, includes papers by nearly 500 authors in 50 countries. Spanning four decades of data, it represents...

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Health-Exchange Deadline Looms

All of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," doesn't go into effect until 2014, but states are required to set up their own health care exchanges or leave it to the federal government to step in by next year. The deadline for the governors' decisions is Friday.The health insurance exchanges are one of the key stipulations of the new health care law. They will offer...

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