Oscars expand social media outreach for 85th show

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is encouraging celebrities to tweet during the Oscars.The film organization has expanded its digital outreach for the 85th Academy Awards with a new feature that lets stars to snap photos of themselves backstage during Sunday’s ceremony and instantly post them online.What Twitter calls a “Magic Mirror” will take photo-booth-style pictures...

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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve HortonCapt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq. The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones. “Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors...

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BP and Gulf Coast States Jockey Over Settlement on Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

John Moore/Getty ImagesA BP cleanup crew removing oil from a beach in May 2010 in Port Fourchon, La., after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. With a major civil trial scheduled to start Monday in New Orleans against BP over damages related to the explosion of an offshore drilling rig in 2010, federal officials and those from the five affected Gulf Coast states are trying to pull together to strike an...

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Gunfire and deadly crash rattle the Las Vegas Strip

LAS VEGAS — A spectacular predawn crash on the Strip — triggered when bullets fired from a black Range Rover peppered a Maserati...

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PayPal's New U.K. Card Reader Exposes Inferior U.S. Tech

PayPal has released a new mobile card reader in the U.K., which wouldn’t seem like big news — we already have a bunch of those here in the U.S., including PayPal’s. But there’s a difference: the overseas version crushes anything available stateside.This superiority isn’t because PayPal has come up with some big breakthrough. It’s because the underlying payment technology on which its based,...

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Question Mark: Acne Common in Baby Boomers Too

Pimples are no surprise on babies and teenagers, but boomers? You no longer have to gaze over a school lunchroom, hoping to find a seat at a socially acceptable table. You don’t rush to get home at night before your junior license driving restrictions kick in. And you men no longer have to worry that your voice will skip an octave without warning. But if adolescence is over, what is that...

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Euro Watch: European Commission Offers Grim Forecast for Economy

BRUSSELS — A top E.U. official warned Friday that the economy of the euro area would shrink for the second year in a row and that countries like France and Spain would miss fiscal targets meant to ensure the stability of the common currency. Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, forecast growth across the 27-nation European Union of just 0.1 percent this...

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Bulgari shows off Liz Taylor's gems

It isn't easy sometimes to be an ordinary person in Los Angeles, so near to and yet so far from the city's glamorous events.You...

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RIAA Says Google's Anti-Piracy Search Algorithm Is Bogus

The Recording Industry Association of American said Thursday that Google’s algorithm change to lower rankings of sites with “high numbers” of copyright-infringing removal notices has had no “demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy.”“The sites we analyzed, all of which were serial infringers per Google’s Copyright Transparency Report, were not demoted in any significant...

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Living With Cancer: Arrivals and Departures

After being nursed and handed over, the baby’s wails rise to a tremolo, but I am determined to give my exhausted daughter and son-in-law a respite on this wintry evening. Commiserating with the little guy’s discomfort — gas, indigestion, colic, ontological insecurity — I swaddle, burp, bink, then cradle him in my arms. I begin walking around the house, swinging and swaying while cooing in soothing...

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