Jul
17
2013
NEW YORK — Bank of America says its second-quarter profits soared, helped by higher earnings from investment banking and cost-cutting.
The results beat analysts’ expectations. The bank earned $3.6 billion in the quarter after payments to preferred shareholders. That was up 70 percent from $2.1 billion a year ago.
Per share, that worked out to 32 cents. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected 25 cents per share. The bank’s stock rose 1 percent in pre-market trading.
Bank of …
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Jul
17
2013
PATNA, India (AP) — At least 22 children died and more than two dozen others were sick after eating a free school lunch that was tainted with insecticide, Indian officials said Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear how chemicals ended up in the food in a school in the eastern state of Bihar. One official said the food may not have been properly washed before it was cooked.
The children, between the ages of 5 and 12, …
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Jul
16
2013
WASHINGTON — To its defenders, Intellectual Ventures is a revolutionary company unfairly viewed, in the words of its co-founder Peter N. Detkin, “as the poster child of everything that is wrong with the patent system.” To its critics, it is a protection racket otherwise known as a patent troll.
Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, has urged a crackdown on the misuse of patents.
Ms. Ramirez has not named names, but to many …
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Jul
16
2013
(Nairobi) – Cameroonian authorities should immediately conduct an effective and thorough investigation into the torture and killing of Eric Ohena Lembembe, an activist and journalist who was found dead at his home in Yaoundé on the evening of July 15. Lembembe, executive director of the Cameroonian Foundation for AIDS (CAMFAIDS), was an outspoken activist who defended the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people.
Lembembe’s friends discovered his body on Monday evening after …
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Jul
16
2013
Medical cannabis advocacy group Americans for Safe Access (ASA) will ask the US Supreme Court to review the United States’ classification of marijuana as more dangerous than cocaine, meth, or Oxycodone. Oakland-based ASA said Monday that they had filed a petition with the US Supreme Court to appeal a January Circuit Court decision which maintains cannabis’ prohibition as one of the world’s most dangerous drugs.
The Drug Enforcement Administration classifies pot as a “schedule 1” narcotic …
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Jul
16
2013
(Reuters) – Black preachers said on Tuesday they were planning peaceful protests in 100 cities across the United States this weekend to press for federal charges in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Standing outside the U.S. Justice Department building in Washington, the preachers pledged to hold the protests near federal buildings and said action was justified because of what they see as the civil rights questions surrounding the death.
A Florida jury on Saturday found …
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Jul
16
2013
CAIRO — Egyptian officials announced a new government on Tuesday that excluded members of the country’s influential Islamist parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and appeared to give an expanded role to the country’s powerful military chief.
The new cabinet, led by one of Egypt’s most prominent economists, replaces the government of President Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed by the military nearly two weeks ago after mass protests against his rule. The formation of the government …
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Jul
16
2013
The World Bank board of directors could today endorse a sweeping new energy policy that for the first time restricts financing for new coal plants in poor countries, bank officials confirmed.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Export-Import Bank will decide later this week whether to move forward with the proposed financing of a new coal plant in Vietnam, making it the first test of President Obama’s vow to end American support for coal projects overseas.
Together, the moves …
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Jul
16
2013
Debate over a proposed open-pit iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin went from heated to outright bizarre last week when masked guards brandishing assault rifles showed up at the site in the remote and scenic wilderness of Penokee Hills.
Local activist Rob Ganson, 56, first came upon three heavily-armed guards while leading a small group on a hike to view the mining site. (The drilling site is on private land, but the owner has been given …
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Jul
16
2013
BEIJING — As compensation for an official act of injustice, the $429 a Chinese court awarded the mother of a rape victim on Monday was relatively paltry. Symbolically, the money carried a wallop.
That is because the award, issued by a high court in Hunan Province in southern China, was an explicit acknowledgment that the mother, Tang Hui, had been wrongly sentenced to a labor camp last year after she publicly demanded that some of …
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