Charities Press Congress to Save Tax Deductions

WASHINGTON — Proposals to cap or otherwise limit deductions in order to raise tax revenue from the wealthy are gaining bipartisan support in Washington — and making charities and nonprofits very worried. Concerned that special tax benefits to encourage Americans to give to charity might be significantly curtailed in the negotiations between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner,...

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Debut of repainted sign is Hollywood event

If there's anything Tinseltown excels at, it's turning a ho-hum event into a made-for-TV spectacle. Witness the fanfare that...

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The Coolest Vertigo Comics, From <em>Sandman</em> to <em>Swamp Thing</em>

DC Comics has lost one of its most influential tastemakers with the news that executive editor Karen Berger will be stepping down from Vertigo Comics, the DC Comics imprint she founded and ran since its inception in 1993. In her nearly 20 years running Vertigo, Berger helped birth numerous legendary comics, like Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, which often reached beyond the...

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Huston’s “Infrared” wins Bad Sex fiction prize

LONDON (AP) — It’s the prize no author wants to win.Award-winning novelist Nancy Huston won Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction award Tuesday for her novel “Infrared,” whose tale of a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex proved too revealing for the judges.The choice was announced by “Downton Abbey” actress Samantha Bond during a ceremony at the Naval & Military Club in London.Judges...

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Generic Drug Makers Facing Squeeze on Revenue

They call it the patent cliff. Brand-name drug makers have feared it for years. And now the makers of generic drugs fear it, too. This year, more than 40 brand-name drugs — valued at $35 billion in annual sales — lost their patent protection, meaning that generic companies were permitted to make their own lower-priced versions of well-known drugs like Plavix, Lexapro and Seroquel...

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To Fight Climate Change, College Students Take Aim at the Endowment Portfolio

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no. As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard...

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Two Mexican nationals charged in killing of U.S. Coast Guardsman

Federal prosecutors charged two Mexican nationals in connection with killing U.S. Coast Guardsmen Terrell Horne III after they...

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Microsoft's Motorola Patent Violation Won't Stop Xbox Sales

A federal judge in Seattle has told Motorola Mobility that he will not grant its request to ban the sale of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the two need to stop bickering and broker a licensing deal to end their patent suit.The ruling by Judge James Robart follows a finding by an International Trade Commission administrative law judge that the Xbox has violated four Motorola...

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Additional copies of ‘Lincoln’ headed to theaters

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Lincoln” is marching to more movie theaters.Disney, which distributed the DreamWorks film, is making additional prints of director Steven Spielberg‘s historical saga starring Daniel Day-Lewis to meet an unexpected demand that has left some moviegoers in Alaska out in the cold.“To say that we’re encouraged by the results to date or that they’ve exceeded our expectations is an understatement,”...

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Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated PressGlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in. Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically...

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