BEIJING | Wed Nov 28, 2012 6:11am EST BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Wednesday that people should not read too much into the placement of a new map in its passports that depicts claims to disputed territory, after the United States said it would raise concerns with Beijing over the issue. The Philippines and Vietnam have condemned the new microchip-eq...

By Joachim Dagenborg OSLO | Wed Nov 28, 2012 5:18am EST OSLO (Reuters) - The startup behind the algebra app that overtook Angry Birds as No. 1 in the Norwegian app store earlier this year aims to replicate that success globally next year with four more mathematics games. The goal of WeWantToKnow AS - to teach 12 years of math curriculum in some 3...

NEW YORK | Wed Nov 28, 2012 3:56am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Melissa Rycroft was crowned champion of the celebrity television competition "Dancing With the Stars" on Tuesday, propelled by perfect scores from the judges and fan votes which spelled victory for the television host. Rycroft, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who was also a contestant on the...

By Ben Everill LOS ANGELES | Wed Nov 28, 2012 3:19am EST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - - Indiana guard George Hill delivered the kind of last-gasp, game-winning basket Kobe Bryant is famous for to give the Pacers a scrappy 79-77 win over the Lakers in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Bryant shrugged off "flu-like symptoms" to score 40 of the Lakers' points, tho...

NEW YORK | Wed Nov 28, 2012 12:41am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - An American author sued the prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry in a federal court on Tuesday, accusing him of lifting the plot of his 2012 movie, "Good Deeds," from her book. Terri Donald, who also writes under the pseudonym TLO Red'ness, says Perry based the film on her 2007 book, "Bad Apples Can ...

SYDNEY | Wed Nov 28, 2012 12:40am EST SYDNEY (Reuters) - Former Australia international David Campese has been pilloried by current and former Wallabies for suggesting a woman should not report on rugby for one of Australia's biggest newspapers. Campese, 50, won 101 caps for his country as a fullback and winger in one of the sport's most glittering caree...

LOS ANGELES | Tue Nov 27, 2012 8:41pm EST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - R&B singer Rihanna shot straight to the top of the Billboard 200 album chart on Tuesday with her seventh record "Unapologetic," scoring her first No. 1 album despite mixed reviews. "Unapologetic," which topped iTunes charts in 43 countries just hours after its release on November19, so...

By Mark Lamport-Stokes THOUSAND OAKS, California | Tue Nov 27, 2012 8:12pm EST THOUSAND OAKS, California (Reuters) - With a widely expected ban on anchoring long putters likely to be announced by the game's ruling bodies on Wednesday, players have expressed sharply contrasting views ahead of this week's World Challenge. While 14-times major winne...

Tue Nov 27, 2012 7:41pm EST (Reuters) - The New York Giants bolstered their depleted running back position by signing Ryan Torain and Kregg Lumpkin on Tuesday after Andre Brown broke his leg in Sunday's win over Green Bay. Brown fractured the fibula in his left leg during a 38-10 thrashing of the Packers, leaving Ahmad Bradshaw and rookie David Wilson as New York...

By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 7:33pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal regulators investigating Google for a range of accusations of antitrust violations took a stand this week on how to handle a type of patent similar to ones in the Google case, but also exposed a rift between reg...

By Gyles Beckford WELLINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 7:23pm EST WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand's capital city was taken over by pointy-eared, costumed Hobbit fans on Wednesday, many of whom camped overnight to grab the best spots for the red carpet world premiere of the film later in the day. Welli...

FRANKFURT | Tue Nov 27, 2012 7:02pm EST FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank's (DBKGn.DE) compliance chief Stephan Leithner and former board member Hugo Baenziger face skeptical German lawmakers on Wednesday as parliamentarians seek answers about how banks manipulated global benchmark interest rates. Birgit Reinemund, a lawmaker with the Free Democrats (F...

By Noel Randewich SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:57pm EST SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc plans to sell and lease back its campus in Austin, Texas, to raise cash and fund its chipmaking business as it diversifies beyond the struggling PC industry into new markets. AMD expects to sell the 58-acre site for between $150 mill...

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:56pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama signed a bill on Tuesday shielding U.S. airlines from paying for each ton of carbon their planes emit flying into and out of Europe, despite a recent move by Europe to suspend its proposed measure for one year. The carbon fee bill was the f...

By Rodrigo Campos NEW YORK | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:55pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks slid on Tuesday in a choppy session, losing ground in the last hour before the close after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid expressed disappointment that there has been "little progress" in dealing with the "fiscal cliff." The market was flat for most of the ses...

By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:54pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New research suggests it may be possible to forecast flu outbreaks in much the same way meteorologists predict weather, a potential boon for public health officials and consumers, one of the study's authors said on Tuesday. Using real-time U.S. data gathered by G...

LOS ANGELES | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:48pm EST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Quirky comedies "Silver Linings Playbook" and "Moonrise Kingdom" led nominations on Tuesday for the 2013 Spirit Awards, one of the largest celebrations of independent films. The two movies notched up five nominations apiece, including best feature film and director, just ahead of the mysti...

By Mark Lamport-Stokes THOUSAND OAKS, California | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:48pm EST THOUSAND OAKS, California (Reuters) - Twelve months after ending a two-year victory drought at the tournament he hosts, Tiger Woods is excited about his prospects for 2013 as he prepares to defend his World Challenge title this week. His one-shot triumph over fellow Am...

By David Ingram WASHINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:34pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Major tobacco companies that spent decades denying they lied to the U.S. public about the dangers of cigarettes must spend their own money on a public advertising campaign saying they did lie, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The ruling sets out what might be the har...

By Richard Cowan and Jeff Mason WASHINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:31pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday launched a public relations push for his bid to raise taxes on wealthy Americans, but U.S. lawmakers remained deadlocked over dramatic, year-end tax increases and spending cuts known as the "fiscal cliff." At the White...

Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:31pm EST (Reuters) - Super Bowl contenders have started to emerge from the pack with a handful of teams poised to clinch playoff spots this weekend as the National Football League's (NFL) regular season enters the home stretch. Heading into final month of the schedule, 26 of the league's 32 teams are within two games of a playoff spot with only...

By Bill Rigby SEATTLE | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:27pm EST SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the month since the launch, according to one of the new co-heads of the Windows unit, setting a faster pace than Windows 7 three years ago. The sales number represents a solid but unspectacular start for the touch-frien...

By Alistair Barr Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:24pm EST (Reuters) - Internet sales jumped more than 30 percent on Cyber Monday, making it the biggest online shopping day ever, according to data released on Tuesday. Walmart.com, the online division of Walmart U.S., had its best sales day in history, a spokeswoman said.Cyber Monday also was a record day for sales of A...

By Tamim Elyan CAIRO | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:09pm EST CAIRO (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Egyptians rallied on Tuesday against President Mohamed Mursi in one of the biggest outpourings of protest since Hosni Mubarak's overthrow, accusing the Islamist leader of seeking to impose a new era of autocracy. Police fired tear gas at stone-throwing youth...

By Ben Hirschler LONDON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:02pm EST LONDON (Reuters) - Drugmakers - led by GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson - are stepping up efforts to ensure their medicines are available and affordable in poor countries, after being attacked in the past for not doing enough. The Access to Medicines Index, which tracks the actions of...

Tue Nov 27, 2012 5:33pm EST (Reuters) - Philadelphia Phillies All-Star catcher Carlos Ruiz was suspended 25 games after testing positive for an amphetamine, Major League Baseball (MLB) said on Tuesday. The suspension of Ruiz, who set career-highs in batting average (.325), runs batted in (68) and home runs (16) last season, is effective at the start of the 2013 r...

By Ivan Oransky NEW YORK | Tue Nov 27, 2012 5:15pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - When it comes to describing medical findings, researchers may need to tone it down a bit, according to a group of heart journal editors. "It's a plea to not get ahead of the evidence," said Dr. Christopher Cannon, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School i...

By Ethan Bilby BRUSSELS | Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:53pm EST BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The physicists who theorized the existence of a basic subatomic particle half a century ago are confident recent data is proving they were right all along. Peter Higgs, whose eponymous "Higgs boson" is the long-sought target of the $10 billion Large Hadron collider in Swit...

By Larry Fine NEW YORK | Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:30pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - The ageing New York Yankees, struggling to inject youth into their roster, appear poised to sign two of their evergreen core members for one more go-round in a drive for a sixth World Series ring since 1996. Left-handed starting pitcher Andy Pettitte, 40, and all-time Major...

By Kim Dixon and Thomas Ferraro and David Morgan WASHINGTON | Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:29pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dick Durbin, a senior Senate Democrat and close ally of President Barack Obama, urged fellow liberals on Tuesday to consider reforming Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. healthcare programs they have long fought to shield from spending cu...

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK | Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:13pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - During a recent whooping cough outbreak in California, kids who hadn't been vaccinated against the disease were nine times more likely to get it than those who had received the entire five-shot series, researchers found. But even among children who were fully va...

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK | Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:12pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Despite rising spending on health care in the United States, primary care doctors don't seem to be reaping the rewards on their paychecks, a new study suggests. The findings could have implications for what some predictions say will be a primary care shortage in...

By Emi Emoto and Tim Kelly TOKYO | Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:08pm EST TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp has been approached by at least three investment banks offering to sell its battery business as the struggling Japanese group looks to offload non-core assets and focus on reviving its consumer electronics business, banking sources said. Selling the unit, w...

LOS ANGELES | Tue Nov 27, 2012 3:18pm EST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The six-year-old daughter of dead Playboy model and reality television star Anna Nicole Smith has stepped in front of the camera like her mother to model for U.S. clothing brand Guess, the company said on Monday. Photos of Dannielynn Birkhead, who was five-months-old when her mother died i...

HELSINKI | Tue Nov 27, 2012 3:13pm EST HELSINKI (Reuters) - Early success for the iPhone 5 smartphone has helped Apple to overtake Google's Android software in the United States, research firm Kantar WorldPanel said on Tuesday. Apple's U.S. share of smartphone sales in the 12 weeks to October 31 more than doubled from a year ago to 48.1 percent, putting ...

NEW YORK | Tue Nov 27, 2012 3:10pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - The piano from the Oscar-winning film "Casablanca" could fetch more than $1 million when it is sold at auction in New York next month on the 70th anniversary of the premiere of the classic movie, Sotheby's said on Tuesday. The 58-key piano, on which actor and singer Dooley Wilson performed "As T...

By Ece Toksabay ISTANBUL | Tue Nov 27, 2012 3:04pm EST ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A hit TV show about the Ottoman Empire's longest-reigning Sultan has raised a political storm in Turkey, with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan urging legal action over historical inaccuracies and the opposition accusing him of artistic tyranny. Erdogan tore into the weekly s...

SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Nov 27, 2012 2:50pm EST SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Hewlett Packard Co rebuffed a request by former Autonomy Chief Executive Mike Lynch to detail accusations of accounting fraud leveled against the British software company and its former executives, and challenged Lynch to submit to questions under penalty of perjury. HP was responding ...

SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Nov 27, 2012 2:47pm EST SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Former Autonomy Chief Executive Mike Lynch asked Hewlett-Packard Co's board of directors for specific details about the accounting allegations which led the company to take an $8.8 billion write-down last week. In an open letter to HP's board on Tuesday, Lynch also asked for the interi...

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO | Tue Nov 27, 2012 2:44pm EST CHICAGO (Reuters) - More than half of young people in the United States who are infected with HIV are not aware of it, according to a new report by government health officials that zeroes in on one of the remaining hot spots of HIV infection in America. Young people ages 13 to 24 account ...