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 falls for fourth day over "fiscal" fears

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell for a fourth day in a row on Thursday and a measure of investor anxiety hit its highest in five months after the top Senate Democrat warned a deal to avoid fiscal austerity measures may not be reached by the December 31 deadline. The comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just days before the hefty tax hikes and spending cuts go into effect pushed...

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IHT Rendezvous: Monitoring Mandela, and With Him the Soul of a Nation

PLETTENBERG BAY, South Africa – After almost three weeks of treatment for a recurrent lung infection, Nelson Mandela, the 94-year-old icon of South Africa’s triumph over apartheid, was discharged from hospital late Wednesday. But a terse statement from his physicians saying he would not return immediately to his remote, rural home at Qunu in the Eastern Cape region raised fresh questions that his...

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Apple CEO’s pay takes big hit vs. record 2011 package

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook’s 2012 compensation package of just over $ 4 million is a huge cut on paper for the top executive of the most valuable U.S. corporation, after a 2011 package fattened by more than $ 376 million in long-term stock awards.Cook received the largest single pay package awarded to a company CEO in about a decade when he replaced Apple‘s legendary co-founder, Steve...

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What Did Neve Campbell Name Her Son?

Mom & Babies Celebrity Baby Blog 12/27/2012 at 02:00 PM ET Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagicNeve Campbell is no stranger in the sea of unusual names.So when it came to her now 5-month-old son, the actress, wanting him to follow in her footsteps, skipped the mundane monikers.“We looked through a lot of books...

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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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Retailers lead Wall Street lower, "cliff" still a concern

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Wednesday, dragged lower by retail stocks after a report showed consumers were less enthusiastic about the holiday shopping season than last year. Many investors said concerns about the "fiscal cliff" kept shoppers away from stores, suggesting markets may struggle to make any ground until next year. Holiday-related sales rose 0.7 percent...

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Israel to Review Curbs on Women’s Prayer at Western Wall

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York TimesMembers of a group called Women of the Wall read from the Torah near the Western Wall in Jerusalem in December. JERUSALEM — Amid outrage across the Jewish diaspora over a flurry of recent arrests of women seeking to pray at the Western Wall with ritual garments in defiance of Israeli law, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman...

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Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

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 and...

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Jessica Simpson Stopping Weight Watchers Diet While Pregnant

By Maggie Coughlan 12/26/2012 at 02:30 PM EST Following Jessica Simpson's Christmas day confirmation of her pregnancy, Weight Watchers has extended their congratulations to the spokeswoman."What an amazing year you've had!" the organization Tweeted following the Fashion Star judge's announcement on Tuesday. Simpson...

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