Month: February 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) — Big retail stores, hotels, restaurants and other companies with lots of low-wage and part-time workers are among the main beneficiaries of the Obama administration's latest tweak to health care rules.

You can trick yourself and harness the power of the placebo effect all on your own        

A composer known as the "Beethoven of Japan" said on Wednesday he had regained some of his hearing ability, a week after setting off a furor by admitting he had used a ghost writer for his popular symphonies and other music. Mamoru Samuragochi, a classical musician, became known as an inspirational genius for composing despite losing his hearing. Samuragochi said on Wednesday that he had suffered hearing loss and was not able to hear when he began paying a part-time university professor to write music under his name, a collaboration that went on for 18 years. Samuragochi, 50, apologized to fans last week for paying Takashi Niigaki to write compositions under his name.

By Nelson Renteria and Carlos Carrillo SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – A fisherman from El Salvador who says he spent more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean arrived home Tuesday night and was barely able to speak, sobbing as dozens of curiosity-seekers craned for a glimpse of the famous castaway. Jorge Salvador Alvarenga, 36, told officials he washed ashore in the Marshall Islands at the end of January and said he survived the ordeal by drinking turtle blood and catching fish and birds with his bare hands. "I can't find any words to say," an emotional Alvarenga said on landing at the airport in the capital, San Salvador, where he was reunited with family before being taken to a local hospital in a wheelchair for further tests. While the exact dates remain unclear, Alvarenga is believed to have set sail on a shark fishing trip from southern Mexico in late December 2012, before being blown out to sea, drifting for months and washing up some 10,000 km (6,200 miles) away in the Marshall Islands.