Mutual Funds Found Big 2012 Gains, Despite Political Worry

ECONOMIC growth remained sluggish and politics often intruded on the markets, yet stocks achieved solid returns last year all the same. It wasn’t the first time that investors scaled a wall of worry, but it might be the only instance when the main source of concern, at least in the fourth quarter, was thought to be a cliff. Tim Kelly/ReutersA computer factory in Kobe, Japan. A resurgence...

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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure. The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s. “My work?” Ms. Mitchell said....

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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure. The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s. “My work?” Ms. Mitchell said....

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Gadgetwise Blog: Why Pixel Counts Don't Count in Cameras

With the coming of the Consumer Electronics Show, camera manufacturers will be trotting out scads of new products, but many are unfortunately falling back on an old marketing strategy.I have been seeing manufacturers offer ever larger pixel counts for their newer models. For instance Nikon’s D5100 is still in the lineup alongside the newer and less expensive D3200. The D5100 has 16.2 megapixel sensor,...

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Venezuela Governors Warned Not to Question Government’s Legitimacy

CARACAS, Venezuela — Top government officials are threatening to take action against opposition governors and issuing dark warnings about conspiracies against the government of President Hugo Chávez, who is ailing and remains incommunicado in Cuba. At a large rally for the cancer-stricken Mr. Chávez on Thursday, the day designated for his inauguration, Vice President Nicolás Maduro sent a...

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Your Money: She’ll Tell You, It’s Time to Think Ahead

Stuart Isett for The New York TimesOnce Chanel Reynolds had enough emotional distance from her husband's death, she built the site that attempts to convince others to take a couple of hours now to spare themselves countless hours of hardship later. In the days after Chanel Reynolds’s husband was hit while riding his bicycle near Lake Washington here and the best cases just kept getting worse, she...

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Well: Calling All Cauliflower

At my house we eat cauliflower like popcorn. Using a simple recipe from Alice Waters, we slice it thin, toss in olive oil and salt, and roast. One head of cauliflower is never enough.This week in Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman takes us on a trip to Sicily, where cauliflower is a favorite food. She writes:Every once in a while I revisit the cuisine of a particular part of the world (usually...

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Well: Calling All Cauliflower

At my house we eat cauliflower like popcorn. Using a simple recipe from Alice Waters, we slice it thin, toss in olive oil and salt, and roast. One head of cauliflower is never enough.This week in Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman takes us on a trip to Sicily, where cauliflower is a favorite food. She writes:Every once in a while I revisit the cuisine of a particular part of the world (usually...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Dealing With Duplicate Work on Dropbox

What happens if two people work on the same file at the same time in a shared Dropbox folder? Does one copy of the file overwrite the other?If two people are editing the same file at the same time, Dropbox saves both versions of the file in the shared folder. The service does not merge the two different files, but adds the words “conflicted copy” to the file name of the second version so it is obvious...

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A Trail of Bullet Casings Leads From Africa’s Wars to Iran

The first clues appeared in Kenya, Uganda and what is now South Sudan. A British arms researcher surveying ammunition used by government forces and civilian militias in 2006 found Kalashnikov rifle cartridges he had not seen before. The ammunition bore no factory code, suggesting that its manufacturer hoped to avoid detection. Within two years other researchers were finding identical cartridges...

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Lew to Complete Change of Obama’s Economic Team

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced his choice of Jacob J. Lew to be the secretary of the Treasury on Thursday, saying that he has “worked and succeeded in some of the toughest jobs in Washington.” The selection of Mr. Lew, the White House chief of staff and a former budget director, is a change that would complete the transformation of Mr. Obama’s economic team from the big-name economists and...

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F.D.A. Requires Cuts to Dosages of Ambien and Other Sleep Drugs

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Thursday that it was requiring manufacturers of popular sleeping pills like Ambien and Zolpimist to cut their recommended dosage in half for women, after laboratory studies showed that they can leave people still sleepy in the morning and at risk for accidents. The agency issued the requirement for drugs containing the active ingredient zolpidem,...

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F.D.A. Requires Cuts to Dosages of Ambien and Other Sleep Drugs

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Thursday that it was requiring manufacturers of popular sleeping pills like Ambien and Zolpimist to cut their recommended dosage in half for women, after laboratory studies showed that they can leave people still sleepy in the morning and at risk for accidents. The agency issued the requirement for drugs containing the active ingredient zolpidem,...

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City Room: Free Outdoor Wi-Fi Comes to West Chelsea

Residents of West Chelsea inManhattan who were wondering what Google had done for them lately now have their answer: free Wi-Fi service for the whole neighborhood.Google, which houses most of its 3,000 New York employees in a massive building on lower Eighth Avenue, has invested about $75,000 to install the broadest wireless network that is open to the public in any neighborhood in the city, elected...

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Three Kurdish Activists Killed in Central Paris

Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMembers of the Kurdish community watched as the body of one of the three Kurdish women shot dead at the Kurdish Institute was carried away on Thursday in Paris. T PARIS — Three Kurdish women, including a founding member of a leading militant group fighting for autonomy in Turkey, were shot to death at a Kurdish institute in central Paris, police officials...

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DealBook: S.E.C. Enforcement Chief, Robert Khuzami, Steps Down

Robert Khuzami, a former terrorism prosecutor who revamped the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement unit, is stepping down from the agency after an aggressive four-tenure.His departure signals the end of an important chapter in the history of the agency, which has been praised for taking significant actions against some of Wall Street’s largest banks after the financial crisis but also...

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Economic Scene: Health Care and Pursuit of Profit Make a Poor Mix

Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state. Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering profit-making “proprietary” institutions. But patients in proprietary...

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Economic Scene: Health Care and Pursuit of Profit Make a Poor Mix

Thirty years ago, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered an interesting pattern in the use of sedatives at nursing homes in the south of the state. Patients entering church-affiliated nonprofit homes were prescribed drugs roughly as often as those entering profit-making “proprietary” institutions. But patients in proprietary...

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American Delegation Arrives in North Korea on Controversial Private Trip

David Guttenfelder/Associated PressEric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, arrived in Pyongyang on Monday. SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, led a private delegation including Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, to North Korea on Monday, a controversial trip to a country that is among the most hostile to the Internet. Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated...

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