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giver.
• As demand for senior services provided by nurses' aides, home health aides and other such workers grows with the aging of baby boomers, so are those professions' employment of other seniors. The new face of America's network of caregivers is increasingly wrinkled.
• Among the overall population of direct-care workers, 29 percent are projected to be 55 or older by 2018, up from 22 percent a decade earlier, according to an analysis by the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, or PHI, a New York-based nonprofit advocating for workers caring for the country's elderly and disabled. In some segments of the workforce, including personal and home care aides, those 55 and older are the largest single age demographic.
• "I think people are surprised that this workforce is as old as it is," said Abby Marquand, a researcher at PHI. "There's often people who have chronic disease themselves who have to muster up the energy to perform these really physically taxing caregiving needs."
• ___

• SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) -- Thousands of young men are plunging into icy rivers and lakes across Bulgaria to retrieve crucifixes cast by priests in an old ritual marking the feast of Epiphany.
• By tradition, a crucifix is cast into the waters of a lake or river, and it is believed that the person who retrieves it will be freed from evil spirits and will be healthy through the year.
• The celebration of Epiphany, or the Apparition of Christ, as Bulgarians call it, began on Monday in Sofia with a water blessing ceremony.
• The head of Bulgaria's Orthodox Church, Patriarch Neofit, said a prayer for the prosperity of the people and blessed the colors of representative army units -- a tradition abandoned in 1946 and re-established in 1992.
• ___

• OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Acting with a court order, the family of a 13-year-old California girl declared brain dead after a tonsillectomy has had her taken from a

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