BANGKOK (AP) — Global stock markets were volatile Thursday, with the Japanese benchmark dropping sharply while those in Europe edged higher, as investors muddled through conflicting signals about the state of the global economy.
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LIMA, Peru (AP) — Teenagers throughout Latin America have long looked north for pop music inspiration. Now the East is rising, with a large and enthusiastic cult of fans in some countries following the K-pop music from Korea.
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RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (AP) — When President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (shee jihn-peeng) sat down for dinner, they feasted on several dishes prepared by one of America's top chefs....
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Gardez, AFGHANISTAN (Reuters) - A suicide bomber detonated a motorbike packed with explosives outside a boys' high school in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, killing about 10 students, at least one U.S. soldier, and wounding a further 20 students, officials said. The blast at about noon in Paktia province had targeted a convoy of U.S. soldiers and Afghan police officers, local officials said. (Reporting By Samiullah Paiwand; Editing by Ron Popeski)...
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By Erika Solomon BEIRUT (Reuters) - Heavy fighting raged around the strategic Syrian border town of Qusair and the capital Damascus on Monday and further reports surfaced of chemical weapons attacks by President Bashar al-Assad's forces on rebel areas. The Syrian military pounded eastern suburbs of Damascus with air strikes and artillery and...
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BIG SUR, Calif. (AP) — Napster co-founder and early Facebook adviser Sean Parker is set to get married in California's Big Sur region....
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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The Foschini Group, South Africa's No.3 listed clothing retailer, missed estimates with an 11 percent rise in full-year profit as debt-laden consumers cut back on spending. Foschini, which also sells jewellery and furniture, said diluted headline earnings per share totalled 851.3 cents in the year to end-March compared with 766.1 cents a year earlier. The result fell short of the 859 cents estimatd by Thomson Reuters...
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By Steve Gutterman MOSCOW (Reuters) - A man was murdered in Russia because he was gay, investigators said on Monday, the second such killing in less than a month, and activists fear homophobic violence is being fuelled by President Vladimir Putin's conservative agenda. Three men in a village on the Kamchatka peninsula on Russia's eastern coast stabbed and trampled the victim to death last week, the country's Investigative Committee said. The...
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation's top intelligence official is stressing that a previously undisclosed program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen.
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By Randall Palmer OTTAWA (Reuters) - Rising exports helped rouse the Canadian economy from a sluggish second half of 2012 to grow at an annualized rate of 2.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, the fastest pace in six quarters, Statistics Canada reported on Friday. The real growth rate was well above the Bank of Canada's forecast in
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A prosecutor faces numerous obstacles as he weighs whether to bring death penalty charges against a man accused of kidnapping three women and forcing one of them into miscarriages through starvation and beatings, capital punishment experts say....
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The craft of making Oriental and Persian rugs is only part of a world-wide industry featuring beautiful design, detailed workmanship and a rich, vibrant history. 
