China Toughens Restrictions on Internet Use

How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto AgencyNew measures by the Chinese government could chill some of the vibrant discourse on Twitter-like microblogs. HONG KONG — The Chinese government issued new rules on Friday requiring Internet users to provide their real names to service providers, while assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting forbidden postings and reporting them to the...

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India Ink: Rape in the World's Largest Democracy

The brutal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi this month has cast a cold light on how badly India treats its women. On Dec. 16, the 23-year-old physiotherapy student was viciously assaulted by a group of men while she was riding a bus with a male companion. The two had just seen a movie. Both she and the man were beaten with an iron rod and eventually stripped, robbed and dumped on the...

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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients. While the medical center had been treating...

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Surgery Returns to NYU Langone Medical Center

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesSenator Charles E. Schumer spoke at a news conference Thursday about the reopening of NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU Langone Medical Center opened its doors to surgical patients on Thursday, almost two months after Hurricane Sandy overflowed the banks of the East River and forced the evacuation of hundreds of patients. While the medical center had been treating...

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Latest Netflix Disruption Highlights Challenges of Cloud Computing

For some on Christmas Eve, “White Christmas” was a blackout on Netflix. That’s because problems with Amazon’s cloud computing service, which provides storage and computing power for all kinds of Web sites and services, caused Netflix to go down for much of the day. In updates on a Web site that reports on the status of its online services, Amazon traced the trouble to Elastic Load...

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Guangzhou Journal | Changing of the Guard: With Focus on Unity, China Looks to Nationalist Past

Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesTourists at the Whampoa Military Academy, on Changzhou Island in Guangzhou. GUANGZHOU, China — It was 1926, not long after the fall of the Qing dynasty, and much of China had been divided among warlords. In the south, leaders of the young Kuomintang mustered an army. At its head rode Chiang Kai-shek, who called to his side officers he had helped train, and together...

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The iEconomy: Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China

The iEconomy: Factory Upgrade: Change comes to factories in China.CHENGDU, China — One day last summer, Pu Xiaolan was halfway through a shift inspecting iPad cases when she received a beige wooden chair with white stripes and a high, sturdy back. At first, Ms. Pu wondered if someone had made a mistake. But when her bosses walked by, they just nodded curtly. So Ms. Pu gently sat down and...

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Creating the Ultimate Housework Workout

Robert Wright for The New York TimesChris Ely, an English butler, and Carol Johnson, a fitness instructor at Crunch NYC, perfecting a houseworkout. CAN housework help you live longer? A New York Times blog post by Gretchen Reynolds last month cited research linking vigorous activity, including housework, and longevity. The study, which tracked the death rates of British civil servants, was the latest...

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Creating the Ultimate Housework Workout

Robert Wright for The New York TimesChris Ely, an English butler, and Carol Johnson, a fitness instructor at Crunch NYC, perfecting a houseworkout. CAN housework help you live longer? A New York Times blog post by Gretchen Reynolds last month cited research linking vigorous activity, including housework, and longevity. The study, which tracked the death rates of British civil servants, was the latest...

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Dec. 27

NEWS China began service Wednesday morning on the world’s longest high-speed rail line, from Beijing to Guangzhou — covering a distance in eight hours that is about equal to that from New York to Key West, Florida, or from London across Europe to Belgrade, Serbia. Keith Bradsher reports from Hong Kong.Syria’s embattled leadership suffered a new setback Wednesday with the defection of its military...

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Fiscal Cutoff Gradually Morphs Into a Horizon

Quick action by President Obama and Congress could still help the economy escape the full impact of hundreds of billions in tax increases and automatic spending cuts set to take effect shortly after the last minutes of 2012 tick away next week. But if the deadlock in Washington persists much longer than a few weeks, the consequences will quickly mount, economists warn. Until late last week,...

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Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York TimesPenne with mushroom ragout and spinach. ​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.   1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive...

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Recipes for Health: Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach

Andrew Scrivani for The New York TimesPenne with mushroom ragout and spinach. ​​Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.   1/2 ounce (about 1/2 cup) dried porcini mushrooms 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive...

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The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito

Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties. Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial...

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Israel to Review Curbs on Women’s Prayer at Western Wall

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York TimesMembers of a group called Women of the Wall read from the Torah near the Western Wall in Jerusalem in December. JERUSALEM — Amid outrage across the Jewish diaspora over a flurry of recent arrests of women seeking to pray at the Western Wall with ritual garments in defiance of Israeli law, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Natan Sharansky, the chairman...

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets? Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought...

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