Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An outage at one of Amazon‘s web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.’s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies...

Read More..

Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

Read More..

Egypt constitution passes with 63.8 percent

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's disputed Islamist-backed constitution passed with a 63.8 percent "yes" in a referendum, the election commission announced Tuesday, rejecting opposition allegations of significant vote fraud.Turnout of 32.9 percent of Egypt's nearly 52 million registered voters was quite a bit lower than most other elections since the uprising nearly two years ago that ousted authoritarian leader...

Read More..

Afghan policewoman kills US adviser in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan policewoman walked into a high-security compound in Kabul Monday and killed an American contractor with a single bullet to the chest, the first such shooting by a woman in a spate of insider attacks by Afghans against their foreign allies.Afghan officials who provided details identified the attacker as police Sgt. Nargas, a mother of four with a clean record. The...

Read More..

Sprint salesman refuses to sell iPhone to customer, says his ‘fingers are too fat’ to use it

We’ve known for a while now that some mobile carriers have been instructing their sales staff to start pushing their customers away from Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and toward Android or Windows Phone devices. The reason is simple: carriers pay a lot more to subsidize Apple’s popular smartphone than they do with other devices and they’d prefer to have higher gross margins at the end of each quarter....

Read More..

Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

Read More..

Firefighters ambushed by gunman while responding to house fire

A man with a criminal history shot and killed two West Webster, N.Y. firefighters and seriously injured two others as they responded to a fire at his home, police say.William H. Spengler, Jr., 62, apparently started a 5:35 a.m. fire at his home on Lake Road  and then waited with an armament of weapons for first responders to arrive, Webster N.Y. Police Chief Gerald Pickering said at an afternoon...

Read More..

Taliban not demanding Afghan power monopoly

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban representatives at a conference did not insist on total power in Afghanistan and pledged to grant rights to women that the militant Islamist group itself brutally suppressed in the past, according to a Taliban statement received Sunday.The pledges emerged from a rare meeting last week involving Taliban and Kabul government representatives.The less strident substance...

Read More..

Sri Lanka arrests 100 Chinese for cyber fraud, police say

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka on Saturday arrested at least 100 Chinese nationals accused of an internet fraud scheme targeting people in their home country, a police spokesman said.The accused, all in Sri Lanka on tourist visas, are suspected of hacking into computers in China and then demanding their owners transfer them money, police spokesman Prishantha Jayakodi told Reuters.Chinese police requested...

Read More..

Predicting who's at risk for violence isn't easy

CHICAGO (AP) — It happened after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., and now Sandy Hook: People figure there surely were signs of impending violence. But experts say predicting who will be the next mass shooter is virtually impossible — partly because as commonplace as these calamities seem, they are relatively rare crimes.Still, a combination of risk factors in troubled kids or adults including...

Read More..