Wall Street Week Ahead: Attention turns to financial earnings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - After over a month of watching Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue, Wall Street can get back to what it knows best: Wall Street. The first full week of earnings season is dominated by the financial sector - big investment banks and commercial banks - just as retail investors, free from the "fiscal cliff" worries, have started to get back into the markets. ...

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Armstrong will answer 'honestly' during Oprah talk

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Lance Armstrong said he will answer questions "directly, honestly and candidly" during an interview with Oprah Winfrey next week. He will also apologize and make a limited confession to using performance-enhancing drugs, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.Armstrong has spent more than a decade denying that he doped to win the Tour de France seven times. Without...

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Amateur Astronomers Discover 42 Alien Planets

A team of amateurs has discovered evidence for 42 alien planets, including a Jupiter-size world that could potentially be habitable, by sifting through data from a NASA spacecraft.Forty volunteers with the crowd-sourcing Planet Hunters project discovered the new planet candidates, which include 15 potentially habitable worlds and PH2 b, a Jupiter-size planet that the team confirmed to be in the habitable...

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Abandoning Afghanistan a bad idea

U.S. Marines from the 3rd Battalion 8th Marines Regiment start their patrol in Helmand Province on June 27. STORY HIGHLIGHTSWhite House aide suggested all U.S. troops could be withdrawn from AfghanistanPeter Bergen said the idea would be dangerous and send the wrong messageHe says U.S. has abandoned Afghanistan before and saw the rise of the TalibanBergen: U.S. is seeking agreement that military will...

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Kelly to stay at Notre Dame

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Brian Kelly will remain Notre Dame's football coach, the school announced Saturday."This week, I had an...

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Russia rejects Assad exit as precondition for Syria deal

MOSCOW/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Russia voiced support on Saturday for international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi but insisted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's exit cannot be a precondition for a deal to end the country's conflict. Some 60,000 Syrians have been killed during the 21-month-old revolt and world powers are divided over how to stop the escalating bloodshed. Government aircraft bombed...

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Wall Street ends flat as rally slows, earnings eyed

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks ended little changed on Friday as investors took a step back from buying ahead of next week's busy corporate earnings calendar. Overall earnings are expected to grow by just 1.9 percent in this season, according to Thomson Reuters data. Analysts say that, with the bar low, there's room for companies to beat expectations, and that may have contributed to the...

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Alabama's Lacy, Milliner, Fluker enter NFL draft

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Alabama tailback Eddie Lacy, cornerback Dee Milliner and right tackle D.J. Fluker are entering the NFL draft after helping lead the Crimson Tide to a second straight national title.Lacy and Milliner announced their plans to skip their senior seasons Friday at a news conference. Fluker couldn't be there for the announcement because he was traveling.It's another exodus of talented...

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Man mauled by Bronx Zoo tiger pleads not guilty to trespassing

(Reuters) – A man who was mauled after leaping into a Siberian tiger’s den at the Bronx Zoo in September pleaded not guilty to criminal trespassing charges on Friday.David Villalobos, 25, jumped off of the zoo’s elevated monorail and into the tiger enclosure on the afternoon of September 21, according to the criminal complaint against him. He was released until his next court appearance on March 12,...

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Saudi execution: Brutal and illegal?

STORY HIGHLIGHTSSaudi authorities beheaded Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan womanShe was convicted of killing a baby of the family employing her as a housemaidThis was despite Nafeek's claims that the baby died in a choking accidentBecker says her fate "should spotlight the precarious existence of domestic workers"Jo Becker is the Children's Rights Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch and author of...

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Ald. Sandi Jackson resigns from Chicago City Council

Chicago Tribune political editor Eric Krol phones in to discuss the resignation of Alderman Sandi Jackson and the future of the Chicago City Council. (Posted: January 11, 2013). ...

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Obama, Karzai agree to speed up Afghan military transition

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed on Friday to speed up the handover of combat operations in Afghanistan to Afghan forces this year, underscoring Obama's determination to move decisively to wind down the long, unpopular war. Signaling a narrowing of differences, Karzai appeared to give ground in White House talks on U.S. demands for...

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Wall Street climbs as China data puts S&P back at five-year high

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Thursday and the S&P 500 ended at a fresh five-year high as stronger-than-expected exports from China spurred optimism about global growth prospects. Buying accelerated late in the day after the S&P 500 broke through technical resistance at 1,466.47, which was the market's closing level last Friday and the highest level since December 2007....

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Researchers: NFL's Seau had from brain disease

When he ended his life last year by shooting himself in the chest, Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease often linked with repeated blows to the head.Researchers from the National Institutes of Health said Thursday the former NFL star's abnormalities are consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.The hard-hitting linebacker played for 20 NFL seasons with San Diego, Miami and New...

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NASA Announces Launch of New Earth-Observing Satellite

NASA announced today (Jan. 10) the upcoming launch of a new satellite, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), to monitor Earth’s landscape and the changes to it.The new satellite, scheduled to launch Feb. 11, will take the place of the Landsat 5 satellite, which is to be decommissioned in the coming months, the U.S. Geological Survey reported in December.LDCM carries two new instruments, the...

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Panel recommends against closing any Chicago public high schools

  (Tribune illustration / April 9, 2012) ...

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String of bombings kill 101, injure 200 in Pakistan

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - At least 101 people were killed in bombings in two Pakistani cities on Thursday in one of the country's bloodiest days in recent years, officials said, with most casualties caused by sectarian attacks in Quetta. The bombings underscored the myriad threats Pakistani security forces face from homegrown Sunni extremist groups, the Taliban insurgency in the northwest...

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Wall Street rises after Alcoa reports earnings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Wednesday, rebounding from two days of losses, as investors turned their focus to the first prominent results of the earnings season. Stocks had retreated at the start of the week from the S&P 500's highest point in five years, hit last Friday, on worries about possible earnings weakness. Shares of Alcoa Inc were down 0.5 percent to...

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Bonds, Clemens rejected; no one elected to BB Hall

NEW YORK (AP) — Steroid-tainted stars Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa were denied entry to baseball's Hall of Fame, with voters failing to elect any candidates for only the second time in four decades.In a vote that keeps the game's career home run leader and one of its greatest pitchers out of Cooperstown — at least for now — Bonds received just 36.2 percent of the vote and Clemens 37.6...

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Underwater Robots Hear 9 Endangered Whales

Two underwater robots outfitted with equipment to detect whale song heard the calls of nine critically endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of Maine last month, just east of New England.The whales are thought to use the area to mate between November and January, according to a release from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, whose researchers led the project.The...

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