White House eases path to residency for some illegal immigrants

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration eased the way Wednesday for illegal immigrants who are immediate relatives of American...

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6 States Bar Employers From Demanding Facebook Passwords

California and Illinois on Tuesday joined four others in becoming the union’s only states barring employers from demanding that employees fork over their social-media passwords.Congress unsurprisingly couldn’t muster the wherewithal to approve the Password Protection Act of 2012, so a handful of states have taken it upon themselves.The new laws come amid reports nationwide...

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A Minute With: Singer Trey Songz on new movie “Texas Chainsaw 3D”

LOS ANGELES, January2 (Reuters) – R&B and hip-hop artists have appeared in horror films before, but 28-year old singer Trey Songz tackles a brand new incarnation of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise with “Texas Chainsaw 3D.”The film, which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, follows a young woman who inherits a lavish, isolated mansion. When she visits it for the first time with her three...

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Safed Journal: New Insights on Marijuana in Israel, Where It’s Illegal

Baz Ratner/ReutersTikkun Olam, a medical marijuana farm in Israel, blends the high-tech and the spiritual. SAFED, Israel — Among the rows of plants growing at a government-approved medical marijuana farm in the Galilee hills in northern Israel, one strain is said to have the strongest psychoactive effect of any cannabis in the world. Another, rich in anti-inflammatory properties, will not get you...

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It's the Economy: What Will the Economy’s New ‘Normal’ Look Like in 2013?

Illustration by Jasper RietmanBack in the mid-2000s, the U.S. consumer economy was undergoing a serious change. After decades of favoring low prices (even when they promised low quality), consumers began paying more for all sorts of premium features like single-serve packaging and pretty much anything “green” or “organic.” Then came the financial crisis and the drop in consumer demand. ...

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Ruling over bumper-car injury supports amusement park

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court, protecting providers of risky recreational activities from lawsuits, decided Monday...

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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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Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic...

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House Takes On Fiscal Cliff

Molly Riley/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRepresentative Eric Cantor arrived at the Capitol on Tuesday. WASHINGTON — House Republicans reacted with anger Tuesday afternoon to a Senate-passed plan to head off automatic tax increases and spending cuts, putting the fate of the legislation in doubt just hours after it appeared Congress was nearing a resolution of the fiscal crisis. Lawmakers...

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