General news

• 97 factions sign onto Syria truce

  26-02-2016 23:58 via rss.cnn.com
  
  As the clock races toward the deadline for Syria's warring parties to declare them in or out of a proposed "cessation of hostilities," the stakes could hardly be higher -- for those groups vying for power, for the Syrian people, for the Middle East, for Europe -- and for the world as a whole.
  
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• The Latest: Slain Kansas man was 'Mr. Fix It,' devoted dad

  26-02-2016 23:57 via news.yahoo.com
  
  HESSTON, Kan. (AP) — The Latest on the attack at a central Kansas factory (all times local):
  
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• Snyder lawyer called Flint water 'scary' before lead crisis

  26-02-2016 23:51 via news.yahoo.com
  
  LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Gov. Rick Snyder's newest release of state emails and documents related to Flint's water disaster appears to indicate that his aides' reluctance to brief him, his own mismanagement — or both — led to delays in addressing the public health threat.
  
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• France's best foreign film prize awarded to Inarritu's 'Birdman'

  26-02-2016 23:47 via news.yahoo.com
  
  Paris (AFP) - The Oscar-winning "Birdman" by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was awarded a Cesar -- the top film prize in France -- for best foreign film on Friday.
  
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• 5 dead, including gunman, after standoff in Washington state

  26-02-2016 23:41 via news.yahoo.com
  
  BELFAIR, Wash. (AP) — A gunman killed four people in a home in rural Washington state before fatally shooting himself after an hourslong standoff, authorities said Friday.
  
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• Emporio Armani, Versace, Diesel headline Milan fashion Day 3

  26-02-2016 23:40 via news.yahoo.com
  
  The Italian fashion industry is deeply tied to its manufacturing base, with the textile mills that populate northern Italy key to helping designers realize their particular visions. This could explain ...
  
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• UN: Syria talks to resume March 7 if truce 'largely holds'

  26-02-2016 23:36 via news.yahoo.com
  
  UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations special envoy for Syria said Friday he plans to resume peace talks on March 7 if a cessation of hostilities negotiated by the United States and Russia that began at midnight local time "largely holds."
  
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• Biggar steers Wales past France in Six Nations

  26-02-2016 23:29 via news.yahoo.com
  
  Dan Biggar booted 14 points to help steer Wales to a 19-10 victory over France in a Six Nations international on Friday and keep their championship title hopes alive. Warren Gatland's Wales team were held to a 16-all draw by the Irish before seeing off Scotland 27-23 in their opening two matches, but dominated a France side also coming into the Cardiff game undefeated after wins over Italy (23-21) and Ireland (10-9). The win was Wales' fifth in succession over France, for whom defeat was a fifth
  
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• Trump wins Christie's support in race laced with insults

  26-02-2016 23:26 via news.yahoo.com
  
  FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Donald Trump scored a powerhouse endorsement Friday as he sought to regain headway in a Republican presidential race that devolved into a series of fierce insults and schoolyard taunts heading into the weekend before Super Tuesday contests.
  
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• U.N. demands Syria parties halt fighting, peace talks set for March 7

  26-02-2016 23:25 via news.yahoo.com
  
  By Louis Charbonneau and Michelle Nichols UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council on Friday unanimously demanded that all parties to the civil war in Syria comply with the terms of a U.S.-Russian deal on a "cessation of hostilities" due to take effect at midnight local time (5.00 p.m. ET). The demand was included in a resolution drafted jointly by Russia and the United States that also urged the government and opposition to resume U.N.-brokered peace talks. Before the 15-n
  
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• Soccer's world body elects Gianni Infantino as president

  26-02-2016 23:23 via news.yahoo.com
  
  ZURICH (AP) — Gianni Infantino is the new president of soccer's corruption-scarred world governing body, winning election after promising national leaders of the sport that he would share the wealth from FIFA's $5 billion World Cup revenues.
  
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• Syria ceasefire takes effect under US-Russia deal

  26-02-2016 23:18 via news.yahoo.com
  
  A UN-backed ceasefire entered into effect at midnight in Syria (2200 GMT Friday) between the regime and rebels, under an agreement reached Monday between Russia and the United States. It was the first major ceasefire in the civil war that has lasted almost five years and claimed more than 270,000 lives. Less than an hour before it was due to begin, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution supporting the ceasefire and UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura called new peace talks for March 7 if it
  
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• Big endorsement bolsters Trump against Republican rivals

  26-02-2016 23:12 via news.yahoo.com
  
  The Republican party's last-gasp bid to deny Donald Trump the presidential nomination suffered a momentous setback Friday, when the billionaire won the shock endorsement of charismatic conservative grandee Chris Christie. "The single most important thing for the party is to nominate the person to give us the best chance to beat Hillary Clinton," said Christie, who joined Trump on the campaign trail in Florida to pledge his support, two weeks after dropping out of the race himself. The meticulous
  
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• Iran starts election count to set post-sanctions power balance

  26-02-2016 23:08 via news.yahoo.com
  
  By Samia Nakhoul TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran started counting tens of millions of votes on Saturday after hotly contested elections that could see reformists speed up Tehran's opening to the world or long-dominant hardliners reassert the Islamic Republic's traditional anti-Westernism. The twinned elections for parliament and a leadership body called the Assembly of Experts are seen by some analysts as a potential turning point that could shape the future for the next generation, in a country where n
  
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• Governor: Police chief chased, shot gunman at Kansas factory

  26-02-2016 23:07 via news.yahoo.com
  
  HESSTON, Kan. (AP) — The police chief in Hesston, Kansas, is being credited with chasing and fatally shooting a man suspected of killing three people and wounding 14 others during a shooting rampage that ended at a local factory.
  
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• Ex-Michigan lawmakers face felony charges over affair

  26-02-2016 23:06 via news.yahoo.com
  
  LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Two former Michigan lawmakers were charged Friday with felony misconduct in office, the state attorney general announced, after their extramarital affair snowballed into a political scandal when one of them concocted a bizarre cover story about being caught with a male prostitute.
  
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• Gunman who attacked factory had criminal record in 2 states

  26-02-2016 23:05 via news.yahoo.com
  
  KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The man suspected of killing three people at the Kansas factory where he worked had a criminal record in at least two states and had recently been served with an order to stay away from a woman.
  
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• Mexico documents big rebound in monarch butterflies

  26-02-2016 23:01 via news.yahoo.com
  
  MEXICO CITY (AP) — Monarch butterflies have made a big comeback in their wintering grounds in Mexico, after suffering serious declines, experts said Friday.
  
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• New York museum settles admissions lawsuit

  26-02-2016 22:59 via news.yahoo.com
  
  New York's famed Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the biggest museums in the world, announced Friday it had settled a long-running lawsuit challenging its admissions policy of charging up to $25. The agreement, which needs to be approved in court, brings to an end a three-year lawsuit that first disputed the museum's right to charge visitors and then quibbled its semantics. The changes are being made to coincide with the March 18 opening of The Met Breuer, the museum's third location on Madiso
  
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• The Latest: Mom of teen who killed teacher cries at sentence

  26-02-2016 22:48 via news.yahoo.com
  
  SALEM, Mass. (AP) — The Latest on the sentencing of a Massachusetts teenager convicted of raping and killing his high school math teacher (all times local):
  
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• Cleveland outfielder Almonte hit with 80-game MLB ban

  26-02-2016 22:45 via news.yahoo.com
  
  Cleveland Indians outfielder Abraham Almonte was suspended Friday by Major League Baseball for 80 games after testing positive for the banned performance-enhancing substance Boldenone. The 26-year-old Dominican, batting .244 with 10 home runs and 48 runs batted in over three major league seasons, will miss one game less than half the season and be out of the Indians' lineup until July. Almonte batted .250 with five homers over 82 games last season for the Indians and San Diego Padres last season
  
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• NASA to simulate growing potatoes on Mars in Peru

  26-02-2016 22:43 via news.yahoo.com
  
  Do Peru's potatoes have the right stuff? NASA, the US space agency, is conducting the pioneering experiment together with Lima's International Potato Center (CIP). The selection was made from a total of 4,500 varieties registered at CIP, a nonprofit research facility that aims to reduce poverty and achieve food security.
  
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• Honeywell offer for United Tech worth more than $90 billion

  26-02-2016 22:40 via news.yahoo.com
  
  NEW YORK (AP) — Honeywell offered more than $90 billion to acquire United Technologies, revealing for the first time to company shareholders the details of a proposed deal to combine the industrial conglomerates.
  
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• Dollar, yields rise, backed by U.S. data; stocks, oil fade

  26-02-2016 22:40 via news.yahoo.com
  
  By Lewis Krauskopf NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar jumped on Friday and Wall Street's stock rally faded as fresh economic data kept alive Federal Reserve rate increases, while oil prices turned negative late in the session. The S&P 500 ended slightly lower but finished the week up 1.6 percent. Treasury yields also rose after data showed U.S. consumer spending rose solidly in January and underlying inflation picked up by the most in four years.
  
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• Academy Awards stage will be dressed up in golden 1970s glam

  26-02-2016 22:34 via news.yahoo.com
  
  LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Oscars are going disco — or at least embracing the gilded glamor of the 1970s.
  
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• Mexicans back ex-President Fox in vulgar spat with Trump

  26-02-2016 22:33 via news.yahoo.com
  
  MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexicans backed former President Vicente Fox in his verbal spat with Donald Trump on Friday, after Fox called the Republican front-runner "crazy" and a "false prophet" and Trump replied that he ought to be "ashamed of himself" for using a profanity.
  
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• China's $300m 'happiness plan'

  26-02-2016 22:28 via rss.cnn.com
  
  With the world's football authorities occupied with electing the next FIFA president, China's billionaire club owners have been busy putting the European soccer establishment on notice with over $300 million spent on foreign players.
  
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• Lennie Baker, voice of Sha Na Na's 'Blue Moon,' dies at 69

  26-02-2016 22:24 via news.yahoo.com
  
  BOSTON (AP) — Longtime Sha Na Na member Lennie Baker, who sang lead on the doo-wop favorite "Blue Moon" and appeared in the 1978 hit movie "Grease," has died at age 69.
  
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• EU Med countries oppose unilateral actions on refugee crisis

  26-02-2016 22:23 via news.yahoo.com
  
  LIMASSOL, Cyprus (AP) — The rift over how to handle Europe's immigration crisis ripped wide open Friday. As nations along the Balkans migrant route took more unilateral actions to shut down their borders, diplomats from EU nations bordering the Mediterranean rallied around Greece, the epicenter of the crisis.
  
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• Kansas killer served with abuse order

  26-02-2016 22:18 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Cedric Ford "never came off as a bad guy," according to a co-worker. But his run-ins with the law dated back more than a decade.
  
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• Hundreds of dead sea lions wash ashore

  26-02-2016 22:16 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Marine researchers have found more than 100 dead sea lions -- most of them newborns -- washed ashore along a relatively small peninsula in northern Chile over the past three months, part a more widespread die-off being observed elsewhere on South America's Pacific coast.
  
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• US details cases of nine pregnant women with Zika virus

  26-02-2016 22:07 via news.yahoo.com
  
  US health authorities Friday described the cases of nine pregnant women who contracted the Zika virus while traveling, two of whom chose abortion and one who gave birth to a baby with microcephaly. The women's identities were not released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which described them in a report covering the time period of August 2015 to February 2016. Zika, a mainly mosquito-borne virus, has been linked to a spike in birth defects in Brazil, where thousands of babie
  
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• Voting goes into extra time in Iran elections

  26-02-2016 22:02 via news.yahoo.com
  
  Voting in Iran's elections required extra time Friday to allow millions of latecomers to cast ballots in what is a crucial test for moderate President Hassan Rouhani's administration. As well as picking 290 members of parliament, voters were also selecting the Assembly of Experts, a powerful committee of 88 clerics that monitors the work of the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and may choose his successor. Polls closed at 10pm except in Tehran after repeated extensions had been an
  
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• U.S. options for Syria; Barely Plan B

  26-02-2016 21:54 via rss.cnn.com
  
  The Obama administration is holding internal discussions on military options if the ceasefire in Syria fails, including the possibility of increasing the number of Special Forces on the ground in Syria, though no decision has been made, a senior U.S. official told CNN.
  
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• Tony Burton, cornerman-trainer in 6 'Rocky' films, has died

  26-02-2016 21:46 via news.yahoo.com
  
  LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tony Burton, a veteran character actor best known for brief but memorable turns as a tough, no-nonsense trainer and cornerman in Sylvester Stallone's first six "Rocky" films, has died at age 78.
  
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• House backs bill to boost hunting, fishing on public lands

  26-02-2016 21:46 via news.yahoo.com
  
  WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Friday approved a bill to expand access to hunting and fishing areas on public lands, extend protections for the use of lead bullets in hunting and strip wolves of federal protections in four states.
  
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• Report: Rail hazmat safety violations should be prosecuted

  26-02-2016 21:44 via news.yahoo.com
  
  WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators are failing to refer serious safety violations involving freight rail shipments of crude oil and other hazardous cargo for criminal prosecution, and are going lightly on civil fines, according to a report released Friday by a government watchdog.
  
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• Kansas gunman had just been served restraining order

  26-02-2016 21:43 via news.yahoo.com
  
  A factory worker who killed three people and wounded 17 in a shooting spree in Kansas had just been served with a restraining order, authorities said Friday, in a possible trigger for the deadly rampage. The latest mass shooting to rock the United States unfolded Thursday at a lawn mower plant in a town north of Wichita, and ended when police shot dead the gunman identified as Cedric Larry Keith Ford, 38. President Barack Obama telephoned the mayor of Hesston, David Kauffman, to offer condolence
  
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• Canada's Kaillie Humphries wins women's bobsled World Cup

  26-02-2016 21:42 via news.yahoo.com
  
  KOENIGSSEE, Germany (AP) — Olympic champion Kaillie Humphries clinched the women's bobsled World Cup title after coming second to Elana Meyers Taylor of the United States in the final race of the season on Friday.
  
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• Grand Canyon weighs killing, capturing bison to cut numbers

  26-02-2016 21:41 via news.yahoo.com
  
  FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The National Park Service is looking at using sharpshooters, capture and other methods to reduce the number of bison that are roaming the far northern reaches of the Grand Canyon and damaging resources, officials said.
  
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• Monarch butterfly population surges in Mexico

  26-02-2016 21:33 via news.yahoo.com
  
  The monarch butterfly population has soared in its Mexican winter sanctuary this season, marking a recovery for the threatened species that migrates across North America, officials said Friday. The orange and black butterfly covered 4.01 hectares (9.9 acres) of forest in the 2015-2016 season, more than tripling last year's figure of 1.13 hectares (2.8 acres), according to the Mexican government and the World Wildlife Fund. While researchers measure the population by the area it covers, it estima
  
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• Photos: Inside the Life and Career of Oscars Host Chris Rock

  26-02-2016 20:55
  
  Go inside the life of the actor and comedian.
  
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• The crystal Bible to last a billion years

  26-02-2016 20:10 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Researchers in the U.K. have developed digital data discs that can survive possibly longer than the human race.
  
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• Trainer in 'Rocky' films dies

  26-02-2016 20:03 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Tony Burton, the actor who played trainer Tony "Duke" Evers in the "Rocky" films, died Thursday, his sister Loretta Kelley said. He was 78.
  
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• California pony in unicorn getup captured after 3-hour hunt

  26-02-2016 19:54 via news.yahoo.com
  
  MADERA, Calif. (AP) — The calls coming into a California Highway Patrol office were alarming: A tiny unicorn was running down a road.
  
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• Iran's elections: Why you should care

  26-02-2016 19:49 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Iran has been in the news a lot lately. The nuclear agreement has been implemented, prisoners have been freed, sanctions lifted. All is right with the world, and Iran is on track to becoming a friend of the West, right?
  
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• Iran elections: What the voters think

  26-02-2016 19:48 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Iranians vote in crucial elections that could decide who gets to pick the country's next Supreme Leader. Here's what they're saying to CNN.
  
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• Court frees reporters held on spy charges

  26-02-2016 19:21 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Two Turkish journalists have been released after waiting 92 days in jail to be tried on charges of espionage, attempting to topple the government and aiding a terrorist network.
  
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• Trump gets first big endorsement

  26-02-2016 19:20 via rss.cnn.com
  
  New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered a surprise endorsement to Donald Trump, saying there is no one better prepared to lead the country in the Republican 2016 race.
  
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• FIFA election: And the winner is...

  26-02-2016 19:02 via rss.cnn.com
  
  Scandal-hit FIFA has a new president -- and his name is Gianni Infantino.
  
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