DealBook: Despite Improving Profits, Morgan Stanley's Path Is Uncertain

8:40 p.m. | Updated Morgan Stanley has taken aggressive action to bolster profit. Over the last year, the Wall Street bank has cut thousands of employees, sold costly assets and retooled major businesses.Those efforts worked. In the fourth quarter, Morgan Stanley reported earnings of $481 million, in contrast to a loss of $275 million in 2011. Profit was equally strong for the year.But the path to...

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Facebook Wants New Breed of Flash Memory for Storing Old Pics

With each passing day, more than 350 million digital photos find their way onto Facebook, joining the more than 240 billion that are already there. Jay Parikh is the man who makes sure all those photos can remain online from now until the end of time, and that’s going pretty well. But he wants a little help. He wants the world to build him a new kind of flash memory ideally suited to storing...

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Eclectic opening for Sundance with films about Mideast, Chile, U.S. Southwest

PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) – The Sundance Film Festival opens Thursday with movies and documentaries from around the world, including a feature that examines the cultural divide between the Middle East and the United States.The 10-day Sundance Film Festival, founded by actor-director Robert Redford and now in its 35th year, will showcase 119 films from 32 countries.“May in the Summer,” the U.S. dramatic...

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Personal Health: That Loving Feeling Takes a Lot of Work

When people fall in love and decide to marry, the expectation is nearly always that love and marriage and the happiness they bring will last; as the vows say, till death do us part. Only the most cynical among us would think, walking down the aisle, that if things don’t work out, “We can always split.”But the divorce rate in the United States is half the marriage rate, and that does not bode well...

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Chinese Economy Picks Up Steam in Last Quarter

HONG KONG — The giant Chinese economy picked up some steam during the last few months of 2012, closely watched data from Beijing on Friday confirmed. But at the same time the figures underlined the view that the pace of future growth is likely to remain well below that seen in recent years. China’s gross domestic product expanded 7.9 percent during the final quarter of last year, compared...

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State agency says U.S. removed wildlife habitat without permit

A state regulatory agency Wednesday said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to obtain a required permit before it removed...

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Judge Tells Apple, Amazon to Try to Settle Their 'Appstore' Beef

The judge presiding over the Apple and Amazon lawsuit over rights to the “appstore” name has told the two companies to sit down and at least try to settle their dispute before trial.San Francisco U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte issued an order Tuesday telling the two sides to talk it out. This doesn’t mean they’ll come to terms before the August 19 trial, but...

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Pregnant Kim Kardashian wants to be more private

NEW YORK (AP) — As the tabloids speculated about whether Jessica Simpson is expecting again (she is) and the media zeroed in on Kate Middleton‘s acute morning sickness, Kim Kardashian says it was nice to be out of the media spotlight during the early stages of her pregnancy.“I’m obviously so happy for them, but if anything I loved the privacy,” the 32-year-old reality TV star said in an interview...

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Some With Autism Diagnosis Can Recover, Study Finds

Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely. The study, posted online on Wednesday by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, is the largest to date of such extraordinary cases and is likely to alter the way that scientists and parents...

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DealBook: H.P. Said to Have Suitors for Two Units

Hewlett-Packard has received a number of inquiries from would-be buyers for its Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems units in recent weeks, though the technology company isn’t interested in selling at the moment, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.The volume of calls from potential suitors and bankers picked up after H.P. filed its annual report with regulators on Dec. 28, this person...

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