Wall Street rises after Alcoa reports earnings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Wednesday, rebounding from two days of losses, as investors turned their focus to the first prominent results of the earnings season. Stocks had retreated at the start of the week from the S&P 500's highest point in five years, hit last Friday, on worries about possible earnings weakness. Shares of Alcoa Inc were down 0.5 percent to...

Read More..

Q. and A. With Gen. Stanley McChrystal

Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesRetired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal in his office on Saturday. WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration weighs how many troops to keep in Afghanistan after 2014, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal cautioned that the United States still needs to keep forces there to help stabilize the country and urged a continued effort to advise the Afghan military that appears...

Read More..

Samsung’s big push for 2013: content, corporates

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics, the global leader in consumer smartphones, is planning two major thrusts in 2013: bulking up mobile content and moving faster into the corporate market dominated by Research in Motion.The South Korean electronics company is investing in devices that enterprise users like corporations will endorse, with a higher level of security and reliability than general...

Read More..

Kangaroo Gets Loose at Melbourne Airport

People Pets 01/08/2013 at 08:00 PM EST Travelers passing through Australia's Melbourne Airport on Monday may have been greeted by an unexpected baggage handler.At around 7 a.m., a 3-year-old eastern gray kangaroo was spotted in the airport's parking garage, where it hopped around for almost two hours, giving...

Read More..

Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer."There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer...

Read More..

Shares buoyed by Alcoa earnings, dollar gains on yen

LONDON (Reuters) - European shares rose slightly on Wednesday, ending two days of losses after aluminum giant Alcoa opened the U.S. earnings season with an optimistic outlook for world demand. But with a light data day in prospect for Europe, featuring mainly German and Greek industrial output figures, and with European and UK central banks due to meet on Thursday, market movements were...

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Jan. 8

NEWS A battle over media censorship in China intensified Monday with an outpouring of support for journalists at a Guangzhou newspaper who are protesting what they called overbearing censorship by provincial officials. Edward Wong reports from Beijing. Also Monday, state media said China would start reforming its draconian system of re-education through labor, as Andrew Jacobs reports from Beijing.The...

Read More..

181,354 People on Twitter Think They’re Experts at Twitter

Do you tweet a lot? Do you post everything on Facebook? Do you #hashtag #complete #sentences #like #this? Do you describe yourself, variously, as a social media “maven”, “master”, “guru”, “freak”, “warrior”, “evangelist” or “veteran”? (Yes, a social media veteran. As if Tumblr were a deadly war you narrowly survived.) Well: you’ve got company! There are more than 181,000 such individuals...

Read More..

Justin Bartha Is Dating Trainer Lia Smith

01/07/2013 at 07:00 PM EST Lia and Justin in Hawaii New Years Day Pacific Coast News Justin Bartha's "mystery woman" is in fact his girlfriend, trainer Lia Smith, a source reveals to PEOPLE. The pair recently enjoyed a cozy trip to Smith's native Hawaii and...

Read More..

Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer."There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer...

Read More..