Steroids fallout: No BB Hall for Bonds, Clemens

NEW YORK (AP) — No one was elected to the Hall of Fame this year. When voters closed the doors to Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa, they also shut out everybody else.For only the second time in four decades, baseball writers failed to give any player the 75 percent required for induction to Cooperstown, sending a powerful signal that stars of the Steroids Era will be held to a different...

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Hall of Famers happy to see Bonds, Clemens denied

NEW YORK (AP) — Nobody was happier about the Hall of Fame shutout than the Hall of Famers themselves.Goose Gossage, Al Kaline, Dennis Eckersley and others are in no rush to open the door to Cooperstown for anyone linked to steroids.Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa: Keep 'em all out of our club."If they let these guys in ever — at any point — it's a big black eye for the Hall and for baseball,"...

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Baseball-MLB, players agree to expand drug testing

Jan 10 (Reuters) - Major League Baseball and the players' union have agreed to expand their drug program to include random in-season blood testing for human growth hormone and a new test for testosterone, they said on Thursday.The testing will start this season.MLB has been conducting random blood testing for the detection of HGH among minor league players since July 2010.Starting this season, the...

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British retailers start online sales early

REUTERS/Paul HackettLONDON (Reuters) - British retailers have brought forward their Christmas clearance sales online in the hope that shoppers will log on to buy bargains and offset lackluster spending in stores.Marks & Spencer launched its sale online at midday on Monday, it said on its website, while department store John Lewis said it would cut online prices when its stores close at 1700 GMT....

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China may require real name registration for internet access

BEIJING (Reuters) - China may require internet users to register with their real names when signing up to network providers, state media said on Tuesday, extending a policy already in force with microblogs in a bid to curb what officials call rumors and vulgarity.A law being discussed this week would mean people would have to present their government-issued identity cards when signing contracts for...

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Tajikistan blocks scores of websites as election looms

DUSHANBE (Reuters) - Tajikistan blocked access to more than 100 websites on Tuesday, in what a government source said was a dress rehearsal for a crackdown on online dissent before next year's election when President Imomali Rakhmon will again run for office.Rakhmon, a 60-year-old former head of a Soviet cotton farm, has ruled the impoverished Central Asian nation of 7.5 million for 20 years. He...

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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...

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