Parties' role reversal complicates spending debates

WASHINGTON — Congress has become the butt of late-night comedians for waiting until the last minute to do any work, yet its...

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Judge Says No One Is Confusing Apple's App Store and Amazon's Appstore

Apple suffered a major setback Wednesday in its fight with Amazon over the use of the term “app store” when a federal judge in Oakland rejected Apple’s claim that the Amazon Appstore for Android was committing false advertising.U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton noted that although Apple’s digital storefront for apps is called the App Store and Amazon’s is called...

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U.S. pop singer Patti Page dies at age 85

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – American pop singer Patti Page, whose 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz” topped the charts for months, has died in Southern California, her manager said on Wednesday. She was 85.Nicknamed “The Singing’ Rage,” Page sold more than 100 million albums in her 67-year career, which included 1950s chart toppers “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window,” “I Went to Your Wedding” and “All My...

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5-Hour Energy’s ‘No Crash Later’ Claim Is Disputed

The distributor of the top-selling energy “shot,” 5-Hour Energy, has long claimed on product labels, in promotions and in television advertisements that the concentrated caffeine drink produced “no crash later” — the type of letdown that consumers of energy drinks often feel when the beverages’ effects wear off. But an advertising watchdog group said on Wednesday that it had told the company...

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Debt Ceiling Clash Nears for Lawmakers

WASHINGTON — With the resolution of the year-end fiscal crisis just hours old, the next political confrontation is already taking shape as this city braces for a fight in February over raising the nation’s borrowing limit. But it is a debate President Obama says he will have nothing more to do with. Even as Republicans vow to leverage a needed increase in the federal debt limit to make headway...

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Hong Kong real estate investors pursue parking spaces

HONG KONG — The hottest properties in this frenetic city have no walls, windows or even front doors. Forget condos, apartments...

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The Future Is Now: What We Imagined for 2013 — 10 Years Ago

Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. We’re Wired, after all. Ten years ago, we boldly declared that we’d be living with phones on our wrists, data-driven goggles on our eyes and gadgets that would safety-test our food for us. Turns out, a lot of the things Sonia Zjawinski conceptualized in our “Living in 2013” feature way back in 2003...

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.Playboy said on Tuesday...

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Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out. He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing...

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Laos May Bear Cost of Planned Chinese Railroad

OUDOM XAI, Laos — Wang Quan, the new Chinese owner of a hotel in this farm town tucked into the tropical mountains of northern Laos, is hoping that the first of 20,000 Chinese workers will arrive here soon to start construction on a new railroad. The Chinese-financed railway is to snake its way through dozens of tunnels and bridges, eventually linking southern China to Bangkok, the capital...

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