Strong quake strikes Myanmar; at least 6 killed

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — A strong earthquake struck northern Myanmar on Sunday, collapsing a bridge, damaging several old Buddhist pagodas and leaving at least six people dead, according to local media reports.No casualties or major damage was reported in the nearest major population center, Myanmar's second-biggest city of Mandalay, about 117 kilometers (72 miles) south of the quake's epicenter near...

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Are Twitter’s Sports Trolls Out of Control?

The Los Angeles Lakers — a star-stacked superteam with four potential Hall of Famers — have struggled out of the gate this NBA season, and many have placed the blame squarely on new head coach Mike Brown, who was fired on Friday after just five games. Fan frustration, however, reached an ugly crescendo earlier this week, with sports trolls using Twitter...

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War photography exhibit debuts in Houston museum

HOUSTON (AP) — It was a moment Nina Berman did not expect to capture when she entered an Illinois wedding studio in 2006. She knew Tyler Ziegel had been horribly injured, his face mutilated beyond recognition by a suicide bombing in the Iraq War. She knew he was marrying his pretty high school sweetheart, perfect in a white, voluminous dress.It was their expressions that were surprising."People don't...

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Malaria vaccine a letdown for infants

LONDON (AP) — An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the...

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FBI probe of Petraeus began with 'suspicious emails'

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI investigation that led to the discovery of CIA Director David Petraeus' affair with author Paula Broadwell was sparked by "suspicious emails" that initially did not contain any connection to Petraeus, U.S. law enforcement and security officials told Reuters on Saturday. But the CIA director's name unexpectedly turned up in the course of the investigation,...

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China congress highlights contrast with Taiwan

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — While ties between China and Taiwan may be closer than at any time since they split in a civil war, the staid, formal Communist Party congress being held in Beijing highlights how far apart the two sides are politically."Taiwan's democracy has learned from the United States," said Wang Yingying, who moved from eastern China to Taiwan in 2005 with her Taiwanese spouse. "We in...

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Can a Fit Video Game Avatar Make You Healthier?

Time to reconsider the stereotype of doughy, fast food-guzzling online role players in dark basements. Strongly identifying with your avatar in virtual video game worlds like “Second Life” could actually help make you healthier in the real world, research from the University of Missouri shows.Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz surveyed 249 “Second Life” users to...

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Madonna fan guilty in NYC resisting arrest trial

NEW YORK (AP) — A former firefighter with a crush on Madonna has been convicted of resisting arrest outside her former New York City apartment building as he spray-painted poster boards with love notes.A jury delivered its verdict Friday in Robert Linhart's trial. He could face up to a year in jail.Defense lawyer Lawrence LaBrew tells the New York Post (http://bit.ly/ZgI4jl) that Linhart will appeal.Linhart...

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Malaria vaccine a letdown for infants

LONDON (AP) — An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the...

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How 'poor judgment' felled military star Petraeus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Petraeus was a star on the battlefield, commanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but was undone by "poor judgment" in engaging in an extramarital affair that led to his downfall as CIA director. Just two days after his 60th birthday, Petraeus stepped down from the spy agency where he had held the top office since September 6, 2011. "After being married for over...

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Contrasting politics of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan

China, Hong Kong and Taiwan — all societies rooted in Chinese culture — have developed very different ways of selecting their leaders and taking part in public affairs. The distinctions are highlighted as China undergoes its once-a-decade transition to a new slate of Communist Party leaders in Beijing this month. Despite China's dramatic transformation into an economic superpower, the authoritarian...

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Dancing With The Stars Family Rallies On Twitter In Support Of Brooke Burke-Charvet Following Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis

Members of the “Dancing with the Stars” family Tweeted their well-wishes for the show’s co-host, Brooke Burke-Charvet, who revealed on Thursday she has thyroid cancer.Helio Castroneves, who was recently eliminated from the “All-Stars” season, said he is confident she will overcome the disease. PLAY IT NOW: Brooke Burke-Charvet’s...

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Mark Wahlberg to star in next 'Transformers' movie

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mark Wahlberg, roll out."Transformers" director Michael Bay says the 41-year-old actor will star in the franchise's fourth film.Bay called Wahlberg the "perfect guy to re-invigorate the franchise and carry on the Transformers' legacy" in a post on his blog Thursday. He previously squashed rumors that Wahlberg was joining the film franchise about warring robots.Bay worked with Wahlberg...

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Calif. city plans to provide transgender surgeries

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.The city's Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco...

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Obama breaks down while speaking to staff, volunteers

The morning after he won re-election, an emotional President Barack Obama credited his youthful staff of several hundred with running a campaign that will "go on in the annals of history.""What you guys have accomplished will go on in the annals of history and they will read about it and they'll marvel about it," said Obama told his team Wednesday morning inside the Chicago campaign headquarters,...

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Truck bomb rocks Pakistan's largest city, kills 1

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — A suicide bomber smashed a truck packed with explosives into housing for a paramilitary force protecting Pakistan's largest city, killing at least one person in the explosion Thursday morning that sent a large plume of smoke into the sky, officials said.The blast underlined deteriorating security in Karachi, the sprawling port city of 18 million people that is considered the...

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RIM's BlackBerry 10 platform wins coveted U.S. security clearance

TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd said on Thursday it has won a much-coveted U.S. government security clearance for its yet-to-be launched platform for BlackBerry 10 devices that are expected to hit store shelves in the first quarter of 2013. The company said its BlackBerry 10 platform has received the FIPS 140-2 certification, which would allow government agencies to deploy...

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Rihanna a rock star on Victoria's Secret catwalk

NEW YORK (AP) — Rihanna rocked the lingerie look at Wednesday night's Victoria's Secret fashion show in New York, providing the highlight of the live-music soundtrack and holding her own on the catwalk with some of the world's top models.And those models even had props, including Adriana Lima's ringmaster wand, Doutzen Kroes' body cage and several pairs of the oversized wings that the retailer has...

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Experts raise concerns over superhuman workplace

LONDON (AP) — Performance-boosting drugs, powered prostheses and wearable computers are coming to an office near you — but experts warned in a new report Wednesday that too little thought has been given to the implications of a superhuman workplace.Academics from Britain's leading institutions say attention needs to be focused on the consequences of technology which may one day allow — or compel —...

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How did America become so polarized?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The election laid bare a dual — and dueling — nation, politically speaking, jaggedly split down the middle on the presidency and torn over much else. It seems you can please only half of the people nearly all of the time.Americans retained the fractious balance of power in re-electing President Barack Obama, a Republican House and a Democratic Senate, altogether serving as guarantors...

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Hu Jintao's legacy: A strong but strained China

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Exclusive - Amazon to win EU e-book pricing tussle with Apple

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Quiet media night explodes suddenly, Rove protests

NEW YORK (AP) — Careful media coverage of a close presidential election Tuesday exploded so suddenly Tuesday that it left the bizarre spectacle of Fox News Channel analyst Karl Rove, a major fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, publicly questioning his network's declaration that President Barack Obama had been re-elected.

ABC News was also frantically trying to repair a power outage that left much of its set inoperable precisely at the time the election was being decided.

For several hours, election coverage resembled the run-up to a Super Bowl, with plenty of talk signifying little. Then NBC News, at 11:12 p.m. ET, was the first to declare Obama had won by virtue of winning the battleground state of Ohio. "He remains president of the United States for a second term," said anchor Brian Williams.

Other networks followed suit, including Fox five minutes later. But Rove, the former top political aide to President George W. Bush whose on-air presence on Fox this campaign raised some eyebrows because of his prominent role supporting Romney, suggested the call was premature.

"We've got to be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the candidates and a quarter of the vote left to count ... I'd be very cautious about intruding in this process," said Rove, a behind-the-scenes player in the wild 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore that took weeks to decide. (Gore was on TV Tuesday, too, as anchor of Current TV's election coverage).

It left Rove's colleagues struggling for words.

"That's awkward," said co-anchor Megyn Kelly. She then went backstage to interview on camera two men who were part of Fox's team in charge of making election calls. They had concluded that based on the precincts where votes were left to be counted, Romney couldn't beat Obama.

Later, Rove tried to make light of the encounter. "This is not a cage match," he said. "This is a light intellectual discussion."

As the evening had progressed for Fox and it became clear that Romney, the clear favorite of most of its audience, would find it hard to win, commentators like Sarah Palin and Peggy Noonan looked stricken.

"This was the referendum that Mitt Romney wanted on Barack Obama," said Huffington Post's Howard Fineman on MSNBC. "And guess what? Barack Obama won the referendum. And that's pretty darned emphatic."

Much of ABC's New York election studio was left powerless for about 20 minutes at the height of Tuesday's coverage. The network didn't inform viewers, and tried to compensate by taking anchors Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos away from their desks, and cutting away to crowd shots at Times Square.

Sawyer's relaxed, folksy delivery in her first presidential election night as anchor drew considerable social media attention. The rock group They Might Be Giants tweeted: "and Diane Sawyer declares tonight's winner is ... chardonnay!"

Sawyer and Stephanopoulos were a new election anchor team for ABC, and Scott Pelley led the CBS coverage. Of the three anchors for the biggest broadcast networks, only NBC's Williams was a returnee from 2008.

But it was a far different media world anyway. 2012 was notable for the vast array of outlets that an interested consumer could command to create their own media experience on multiple screens. Web sites offered deep drill-downs in data and social media hosted raucous conversations.

"If you started a drinking game with the words 'exit poll' in it, please stop now. You will die!" tweeted TV critic Tim Goodman.

Obama's Twitter account tweeted a picture of the president hugging First Lady Michelle Obama, and within 45 minutes it was retweeted more than 300,000 times.

Earlier in the evening, journalists took special care not to rely too heavily on exit polls. Perhaps they remembered how misleading exit polls in 2004 led TV networks astray then or perhaps, in CBS' Bob Schieffer's words, its results this year were too contradictory.

News outlets carefully parsed information and sometimes used the same facts for contradictory conclusions.

Fox News analyst Brit Hume noted an exit poll finding that 42 percent of voters said Superstorm Sandy was an important factor in their vote, suggesting that was a positive for Obama since he was widely considered to have been effective in his response. With the same information, the web site Politico headlined: "Exit Survey: Sandy Not a Factor."

There was a certain amount of vamping time, too. Glenn Beck's online network, The Blaze, had a blackboard straight out of the 1960s as a tote board. Beck killed time on the air by asking for cookie dough ice cream from the on-set food bar.

"Waffle cone, please," Beck said.

When Sawyer asked David Muir for the latest news from the Romney campaign, he reported the family had pasta for dinner and the candidate indulged in his favorite peanut butter and honey sandwich.

The media personality with perhaps the most on the line was Nate Silver of The New York Times, whose FiveThirtyEight blog was sought out by 20 percent of the people who visited the newspaper's website on Monday. He has used statistical data throughout the campaign to predict an Obama victory and by Tuesday, had forecast a 90.9 percent chance that Obama would win.

After Obama's victory became clear, Gavin Purcell, producer of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," tweeted that "Nate Silver is the only white male winning tonight." CNN's Piers Morgan tweeted Silver an invitation to appear on his show Wednesday.

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Television Writers Frazier Moore in New York and Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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