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Spending a night between destinations in a stopover city and need a place to stay? Online boutique hotel experts Mr & Mrs Smith (www.mrandmrssmith.com) have come up with 10 class="mandelbrot_refrag"> hotels for a memorable stopover. Reuters has not endorsed this list. _0"> 1. Best for resort relaxation: Capella Singapore, Singapore Languishing on Sentosa Island, just a 15-minute taxi hop south of the city centre, Capella Singapore hotel in Singapore feels a relaxing world away. A tranquil resort, the 112-room heritage-modern hybrid has a graceful colonial building, art works dotted around the manicured grounds and a triple-tier pool with South class="mandelbrot_refrag"> China Sea views. 2. Best for gourmet dining: The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong, class="mandelbrot_refrag"> China   true       A day-spa with 113 contemporary guest rooms, The Landmark Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong gives good stopover. This styli

For British student Carly Connor a trip to London for a city break would be impossible if she had to pay for a hotel so instead she rents a room in a Londoner's home. Connor, 26, is among a growing number of people taking advantage of a surge in the number of homeowners offering to rent out a room for a night or longer, with the cash a welcome addition to recession-squeezed budgets. This new wave of hospitality sweeping the travel industry was sparked by the success of "couch surfing", where people could go online to book a free bed in a home, and is being led by a blitz of new websites that let tourists bypass resorts and class="mandelbrot_refrag"> hotels .   true       "A lot of the time you find yourself with a host who is more than happy to point you in the direction of a few local hot spots that you otherwise would have missed entirely," Connor told Reuters. But the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer rentals has lawmakers on the alert

The law firms Squire Sanders and Patton Boggs said on Friday they had agreed to combine, striking a deal that is expected to save Patton Boggs from growing financial strain. In a news release, the two firms said they would begin operating under the name Squire Patton Boggs effective June 1. Partners at 1,300-lawyer Squire Sanders voted on Friday, after 300-lawyer Patton Boggs, known for its lobbying presence in Washington, D.C., had earlier approved the combination.   true       The combination was held up on Thursday because of concerns within Squire Sanders over the role Patton Boggs played in a legal battle between class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Chevron Corp ( id="symbol_CVX.N_0"> CVX.N ) and a group of Ecuadorean villagers, Patton Boggs managing partner Edward Newberry said. Starting in 2010, Patton Boggs had advised the villagers on a plan to enforce an $18 billion pollution judgment against Chevron that the oil giant said was obtained through fraud.

U.S. safety regulators said on Friday that it is likely that more than 13 people died in General Motors cars recalled earlier this year for defective ignition switches. The automaker told Reuters it had raised the number of crashes associated with faulty ignition switches but stood by its count for the number of fatalities. GM recalled 2.6 million older models, including Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion, to replace defective switches that can cause engines to shut off while driving, leading to a sudden loss of power steering, power brakes and the failure of air bags to deploy in a crash.   true       GM has linked the switch to 13 deaths in cars built and sold between model years 2003-2010. It has never fully explained how it arrived at the figure. Spokesman Jim Cain on Friday said that GM recently informed regulators that it had identified about a dozen more crashes connected with the ignition switch in addition to the previous 35 in had counted. In response to a query from Reut

class="mandelbrot_refrag"> EBay Inc initially believed that its customers' data was safe as forensic investigators reviewed a network security breach discovered in early May and made public this week, a senior executive told Reuters on Friday. class="mandelbrot_refrag"> EBay has come under fire over its handling of the cyberattack, in which hackers accessed personal data of all 145 million users, ranking it among the biggest such attacks launched on a corporation to date. "For a very long period of time we did not believe that there was any eBay customer data compromised," global marketplaces chief Devin Wenig said, in the first comments by a top eBay executive since the e-commerce company disclosed the breach on Wednesday.   true       EBay moved "swiftly to disclose" the breach after it realized customer data was involved, he said. Wenig would not say when the company first realized that the cyberattackers accessed customer

Sales of new U.S. single-family homes rose in April and the stock of houses on the market hit a 3-1/2 year high, but economists said the market was still not clearly gaining steam. Sales increased 6.4 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 433,000 units, the Commerce Department said on Friday. The rise ended two straight months of declines and beat Wall Street expectations, but sales remained in line with their sluggish first-quarter average.   true       "The data have yet to show a meaningful pickup in activity early on in the spring following the unusually harsh winter," said Daniel Silver, an economist at JPMorgan in New York. But investors welcomed the report and snapped up homebuilder shares, such as class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Lennar Corp ( id="symbol_LEN.N_0"> LEN.N ) and D.R. Horton Inc ( id="symbol_DHI.N_1"> DHI.N ). A run-up in mortgage rates and home prices over the last year has weighed on the market. Sales