India Ink: Selling ‘Midnight’s Children’ in India

“Am I allowed to mention the Rushdie word?” quipped the historian and author Tom Holland at the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival. Mr. Holland was speaking of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel, “Midnight’s Children,” a book he called a contemporary classic.His comment alluded to the political baggage attached to Mr. Rushdie in India, the country of his birth, because of his novel “The Satanic...

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Nintendo says it won’t cut Wii U price despite slumping sales

Nintendo (NTDOY) has a lot riding on its latest video game console, but sales have been slow thus far. Gamers have not responded to the bulky new GamePad controller, which could be considered the biggest point of differentiation on the Wii U. As a result, Nintendo recently slashed its sales outlook on Wii U consoles for the March quarter. Following some speculation that Nintendo might cut the price...

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Jenna Miscavige Hill Pens Revealing Scientology Book

02/01/2013 at 08:00 PM EST Jenna Miscavige and her uncle David inset Michael Murphree; Inset: Polaris What was it like to grow up inside Sea Org, the Church of Scientology's most elite body? In her memoir Beyond Belief, excerpted exclusively below, Jenna Miscavige...

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"Great Rotation"- A Wall Street fairy tale?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street's current jubilant narrative is that a rush into stocks by small investors has sparked a "great rotation" out of bonds and into equities that will power the bull market to new heights. That sounds good, but there's a snag: The evidence for this is a few weeks of bullish fund flows that are hardly unusual for January. Late-stage bull markets...

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Feb. 1

NEWS After nearly 10 months of occupation by Islamists fighters, many of them linked with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the people of Timbuktu, Mali, recounted how they survived the upending of their tranquil lives. Lydia Polgreen reports from Timbuktu, Mali.Israel has pursued a creeping annexation of the Palestinian territories through the creation of Jewish settlements and committed multiple...

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BlackBerry World is off to a decent start, but it’s missing some big-name apps

When BlackBerry (RIMM) announced that more than 70,000 BlackBerry 10 applications would be available when its new platform launched, users were ecstatic. That big number was too good to be true, unfortunately, as we and many others noticed in our time spent with the BlackBerry Z10. While the app store includes some big names such as Rovio’s Angry Birds and various titles from Electronic Arts...

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Steven Tyler Auditions in Drag for American Idol

TV Watch American Idol By Steve Helling 01/31/2013 at 10:35 PM EST Steven Tyler sings before the AFC Championship NFL football game, Jan, 22, 2012 Elise Amendola/AP Former judge Steven Tyler made a surprise cameo on American Idol Thursday night – dressed as a woman....

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Asian shares steady; regional PMI data dampens mood

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares were on the defensive on Friday after a series of surveys on factory output signaled a tough outlook for the region's manufacturers, though Japanese equities were a notable exception, logging their longest winning run in 54 years on a weaker yen. European markets are likely to inch higher, with financial spreadbetters predicting London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>,...

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India Ink: Gandhi's Relationship With Kallenbach Focus of New Exhibition in Delhi

“My Dear Lower House,” begins one letter, from Hermann Kallenbach, to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, dated Aug. 20, 1912.“We are to blame for all the misery in the world and therefore all the imperfections of our surroundings. They will be perfect when we are.”In the letter, Mr. Kallenbach requests that Gandhi meet him to discuss “Tolstoy Farm,” a project that Mr. Kallenbach, an architect by profession,...

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Facebook’s mobile ad revenue doubles in fourth quarter

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc doubled its mobile advertising revenue in the fourth quarter, a sign that the No.1 social network is seeing early success in expanding onto handheld devices as more of its users migrate to smartphones and tablets.Investors want to see evidence that CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s 8-year-old company is delivering on promises to develop a full-fledged mobile advertising...

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Asian shares off highs, Fed's stance weighs on dollar

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares fell slightly on Thursday after rallies to multi-month highs, and longer for some Southeast Asian markets, while the U.S. Federal Reserve's pledge to retain its stimulus policy undermined the dollar. Sentiment in Asian markets remained underpinned, however, by positive factory output data in Japan, and strong gross domestic product reports from Taiwan and...

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Israel to Transfer Tax Funds to Palestinians

JERUSALEM — Israel has decided to transfer tax and customs revenues collected last month on behalf of the Palestinian Authority to help ease the economic crisis there, a senior Israeli government official said on Wednesday. This reverses an earlier decision to use the revenues to offset at least part of the Palestinian debts to Israeli utility companies as a punitive measure following the...

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Critical, long-overdue BlackBerry makeover arrives

TORONTO (AP) — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. will kick off a critical, long-overdue makeover when chief executive Thorsten Heins shows off the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York on Wednesday.Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple’s trend-setting iPhone and Google’s Android-driven devices. There has even been...

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Ashley Judd Splits from Husband Dario Franchitti

01/29/2013 at 08:05 PM EST Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti Robin Marchant/Wireimage Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti are splitting after more than a decade of marriage."We have mutually decided to end our marriage. We'll always be family and continue to cherish...

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Asian shares gain on global recovery outlook

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares advanced on Wednesday as investor confidence in the global economic outlook strengthened on solid U.S. data, giving comfort to investors ahead of the U.S. Federal Reserve's monetary policy decision due later in the session. Optimism over economic recovery from strong U.S. housing data and China's promising economic growth forecast for 2013 raised expectations...

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IHT Rendezvous: Regulating the British Press

LONDON — News doesn’t just travel fast here. It happens fast, too. And once it has happened, new news overtakes the old: the dogs bark, as the old Middle Eastern adage has it, but the caravan moves on.So it has seemed in the almost two months since the publication of the bulky Leveson Report into the culture and behavior of the British press. The land has been swamped by a procession of other front-page...

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Cómo se desarrolló el Linux de las netbooks educativas

La elección de un sistema operativo para una computadora es una situación que, en situaciones cotidianas al ingresar a una tienda de venta de artículos electrónicos, está marcada por la presencia de la plataforma Windows de Microsoft. Nada de esto impide que los usuarios puedan optar por software libre, sin costo alguno al momento de realizar la descarga e instalación, con propuestas como Ubuntu,...

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Stanley Karnow, Historian and Journalist, Is Dead at 87

Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who produced acclaimed books and television documentaries about Vietnam and the Philippines in the throes of war and upheaval, died on Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mr. Karnow’s son, Michael. For more than three decades Mr. Karnow was a correspondent in Southeast...

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Providence theater experiments with ‘tweet seats’

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Sarah Bertness slipped into her seat at a recent staging of the musical “Million Dollar Quartet” and, when the lights dimmed, started doing something that’s long been taboo inside theaters: typing away at her iPhone.The 26-year-old freelance writer from Providence wasn’t being rude. She had a spot in the “tweet seat” section at the Providence Performing Arts Center.The downtown...

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