Tiananmen protester still defiant

If 63-year-old Chinese scholar Zhou Dou had his way, he would be on hunger strike on June 4, sitting quietly through the day at Purple Bamboo Park, 20 minutes’ taxi ride from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. His aim: to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown and to dramatize his defiant call for answers from Chinese authorities. “What is the truth” he pressed rhetorically, as he discussed his plans with CNN a week earlier.

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American couple on Flight 447 loved life, relatives say

Anne and Michael Harris were an "extraordinary" couple with a zest for life, their niece said. “We truly hope that they are remembered for the way they lived their lives and not this tragic end,” Charlstie Laytin said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “We’re all just devastated and going to miss them both so much.” The Harrises were two of three Americans on board Air France Flight 447 when it crashed Monday

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Rare disease patients priced out of drugs market

The 1992 Hollywood movie "Lorenzo’s Oil," depicts the true story of Lorenzo, a five-year-old boy who suffered from adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a rare and incurable disease that slowly destroys the entire nervous system. The movie showed how Lorenzo’s grave physical and mental decline was finally stopped when his tireless parents found a treatment based on a mixture of oils, despite skepticism from doctors. The film illustrated perfectly the struggle faced by patients suffering from any of 6,000 known rare conditions worldwide, generally known as orphan diseases

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Life for pregnant Briton in Laos trial

A pregnant British woman accused of smuggling heroin into Laos was sentenced to life in prison, the British Foreign Office said Wednesday. Samantha Orobator, 20, was jailed last August at the airport in the Lao capital, Vientiane, and charged with carrying about half a kilogram of heroin. She is more than five months pregnant, and enters her third trimester on Saturday

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Brazilian judge suspends order to reunite American boy and father

A Brazilian supreme court judge on Tuesday suspended a lower court’s order that would have given custody of a 9-year-old boy to the U.S. consulate in Rio de Janeiro, where he was to be reunited with his American father. Judge Marco Aurelio argued against taking Sean Richard Goldman from what has been his home for almost five years to the United States “in an abrupt manner.” Doing so, he wrote in his order published on the supreme court’s Web site, could subject the boy to psychological harm.

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Music a ‘mega-vitamin’ for the brain

When Nina Temple was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2000, then aged 44, she quickly became depressed, barely venturing out of her house as she struggled to come to terms with living with the chronic condition. “I was thinking of all the things which I wished I’d done with my life and I wouldn’t be able to do. And then I started thinking about all the things that I still actually could do and singing was one of those,” Temple told CNN.

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Poll: Few Americans have good view of Muslim world

Shortly before President Obama departs for a trip to the Middle East, a new national poll suggests that one in five Americans has a favorable view of Muslim countries. That view compares with 46 percent of the people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey who say they have an unfavorable opinion of Muslim countries

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