Year: 2014

By Mari Saito TAMURA, Japan (Reuters) – People in Japan on Tuesday began their first homecomings in three years to a small area evacuated after the Fukushima disaster, but families are divided as worries about radiation and poor job prospects have kept many away. The reopening of the Miyakoji area of Tamura, a city 220 km (140 miles) northeast of Tokyo and inland from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear station, marks a tiny step for Japan as it attempts to recover from the 2011 disasters. "Many of our friends and neighbors won't come back," said Kimiko Koyama, 69, speaking on her return to the large farmhouse she had occupied for 50 years, while her husband Toshio, 72, tried to fix a television antenna on the roof. "My daughter won't bring our grandsons here because of the radiation." Miyakoji, set amid rolling hills and rice paddies, has been off-limits to most residents since March 2011, when the government ordered evacuations after a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a triple meltdown at the power plant on the Pacific coast about 20 km (12 miles) away.

Q&A: Preventative health expert talks diets … Prevention Research Center and a leading voice in the health and weight loss field. … with Katz about how the media portrays food and the ways the public understands dietary health.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress once again has given doctors temporary relief from a flawed Medicare payment formula that threatened them with a 24 percent cut in their fees.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Like so much about the government's health care overhaul, Monday's deadline to sign up for coverage in 2014 didn't turn out quite as planned: Many people still are eligible for extensions that will let them enroll.

An explosion in an area of Kenya's capital Nairobi that is popular with Somalis killed six people and wounded several others on Monday, the National Disaster Operations Centre said. In the past, such attacks in the Eastleigh area of Nairobi have been blamed on Somalia's al Shabaab Islamist group, which attacked a Nairobi shopping mall in September and killed at least 67 people. "Police are securing the area for emergency response services," the disaster organisation said on its official Twitter site. Nairobi's police commander Benson Kibui told Reuters the incident might have involved twin blasts.

The attack happened on Monday in an apartment in the town of League City, about 25 miles southeast of Houston. Officers shot the dog, and the child was flown to a nearby hospital, the League City Police Department said in a statement.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A blizzard, jammed phone lines and unreliable websites failed to stop throngs of procrastinating Americans from trying to sign up for health coverage by the midnight Monday deadline for President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy initiative.

Before you go on Facebook to check out your friends’ status updates, beware of what might happen. According to new research, there’s a high probability that you’ll catch the prevailing mood online—whether it’s positive or negative. That’s right, Facebook feelings are contagious.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Beating expectations, President Barack Obama's health care overhaul was on track to sign up more than 7 million Americans for health insurance on deadline day Monday, government officials told The Associated Press.