Grammy audience down, still 2nd highest since 1993

NEW YORK (AP) — While the Grammy Awards couldn't come close to the freakishly high ratings generated in 2012 because of Whitney Houston's death and Adele's smashing success, this year's show had the second-largest audience for the program since 1993.The Nielsen company said Monday that music's annual awards show was seen by 28.4 million people Sunday night on CBS.The Grammys this year were packed...

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Personal Health: Getting the Right Addiction Treatment

“Treatment is not a prerequisite to surviving addiction.” This bold statement opens the treatment chapter in a helpful new book, “Now What? An Insider’s Guide to Addiction and Recovery,” by William Cope Moyers, a man who nonetheless needed “four intense treatment experiences over five years” before he broke free of alcohol and drugs.As the son of Judith and Bill Moyers, successful parents who watched...

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Bits Blog: Reporter's Notebook: Snapchat's Path From Stanford to the Beach

Over the weekend, I reported about the recent successes of an up-and-coming start-up, Snapchat, that lets people send messages that disappear after they are viewed. I spent two days with the founders of the company, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, in Los Angeles, interviewing them and learning about their business.Snapchat’s headquarters are on the sunny stretch of the Venice Beach boardwalk, steps...

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Paterno Family Challenges Accusation of Cover-Up

The 238-page report, which was compiled by a team led by Richard Thornburgh, a former United States attorney general, and released Sunday, said an even larger investigation into the scandal by Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, was “factually wrong, speculative and fundamentally flawed.” According to the Thornburgh report, the Freeh inquiry, which was ordered by the Penn State board...

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All eyes on Frank Ocean as Grammy Awards approach

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Everybody's thinkin' about Frank Ocean.Ocean is a cause celebre and the man with the momentum as Sunday's Grammy Awards approach. One of six top nominees with six nominations apiece, the 25-year-old R&B singer turned cultural talking point will have the music world's attention.It remains to be seen if it will be the "Thinkin Bout You" singer's night, but there's no question...

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help? Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. In her 20s, after a more...

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Boeing 787 Completes Test Flight

A Boeing 787 test plane flew for more than two hours on Saturday to gather information about the problems with the batteries that led to a worldwide grounding of the new jets more than three weeks ago. The flight was the first since the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing permission on Thursday to conduct in-flight tests. Federal investigators and the company are trying to determine...

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German Education Chief Quits in Scandal Reflecting Fascination With Titles

Tobias Schwarz/ReutersEducation Minister Annette Schavan, left, with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday. BERLIN — For 32 years, the German education minister’s 351-page dissertation sat on a shelf at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf gathering dust while its author pursued a successful political career that carried her to the highest circles of German government. The academic work...

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Stars salute MusiCares honoree Bruce Springsteen

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Be it concert or charity auction, Bruce Springsteen can bring any event to a crescendo.Springsteen briefly took over auctioneering duties before being honored as MusiCares person of the year Friday night, exhorting the crowd to bid on a signed Fender electric guitar by amping up the deal. The 63-year-old rock 'n' roll star moved the bid north from $60,000 by offering a series of...

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said. The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio. Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of...

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