Psychiatric Hospitals Alter Rules on Patient Smoking

MANDEVILLE, La. — Annelle S., 64, who has paranoid schizophrenia, took an urgent drag on a cigarette at a supervised outdoor smoke break at Southeast Louisiana Hospital. “It’s mandatory to smoke,” she explained. “It’s a mental institution, and we have to smoke by law.” That was 18 months ago, and Annelle’s confusion was understandable. Until recently, Louisiana law required psychiatric...

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DealBook: R.B.S. to Pay $612 Million Over Rate Rigging

A campaign to root out financial fraud secured a victory on Wednesday, as authorities took aim at the Royal Bank of Scotland for its role in an interest rate manipulation scheme that has emboldened prosecutors and consumed the banking industry.American and British authorities struck a combined $612 million settlement with the bank, the latest case to emerge from the global investigation into rate-rigging....

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Child porn suspect indicted by federal grand jury

A North Hills woman whom authorities allege plied a young girl with crack cocaine and photographed her having sex with an older...

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Meryl Streep, Jean Dujardin returning to the Oscars

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep will likely get to induct Daniel Day-Lewis into that triple-Oscar club on February 24 at the Dolby Theatre, while “The Sound of Music” star Christopher Plummer will probably hand the Best Supporting Actress award to a new screen-musical star, Anne Hathaway.Those are two conclusions to be drawn from the Academy’s Tuesday announcement...

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Question Mark: Women’s Eggs Diminish With Age

Baby girls enter the world with enough of them to populate perhaps 40 small cities. A dozen or so years later, the first will make a debut of its own. And in the months and years to come, others will appear regularly, sometimes greeted with relief, other times with disappointment, perhaps most often with a touch of annoyance. Abdullah Pope/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNot women's...

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DealBook: E-Mails Show Alarm at S.&P. as Mortgage Crisis Exploded

10:17 p.m. | Updated The executive at Standard & Poor’s was clear: “This market is a wildly spinning top which is going to end badly.”That sober assessment of certain mortgage-related investments, delivered to colleagues in a confidential memo in December 2006, is now part of a trove of internal e-mails and documents that have come to light in a federal suit against S.& P., the nation’s largest...

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Scientists identify remains as those of King Richard III

LONDON -- More than 500 years after his death in battle, scientists announced Monday that they had definitively identified a...

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Robert De Niro cements place in Hollywood movies

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Double Oscar winner Robert De Niro cemented his place in acting history on Monday by placing his hands and feet in concrete in front of Hollywood‘s historic Chinese Theatre.De Niro, 69, gave a short thank you speech with a few punchlines of his own.“(Actor) Joe Pesci always said I’d end up with my feet in cement. I don’t think this is what he had in mind,” said De Niro, referring...

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.How I feared chemo, afraidIt would change me.It did.Something dissolved inside me.Tears began a slow drip;I cried at the news storyOf a lost boy found in the...

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Frequent Flier: An Unhappy Meal and an Aborted Business Trip - Frequent Flier

I WAS going to go into academics, but then decided to serve the marketing machine by going into public relations. A lot of my travel involves conferences, speaking engagements and, of course, pitching new business and meeting with existing clients. Jason Schlossberg, a partner in the public relations agency Kwittken & Company, in Kyoto, Japan, last year. He still looks forward to...

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