Month: March 2013

By David Ingram WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The government has dropped its push for cigarette labels to carry images of diseased lungs and other graphic health warnings, and will craft new anti-smoking ads that do not run afoul of free speech rights. In a letter to Republican House Speaker John Boehner last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Food and Drug Administration would go back to the drawing board to develop the ads, as required by legislation passed by Congress in 2009. …

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday that it would send medical supplies to the Syrian city of Aleppo on Wednesday, but could not verify if chemical weapons or some other toxin had been used there. “At this stage we cannot confirm the use of chemical weapons, nor what agent, if any, was used,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told Reuters in Geneva. Syria’s government and rebels accused each other of launching a deadly chemical attack near the northern city of Aleppo on Tuesday in what would, if confirmed, be the first use of such weapons in the two-year …

NEW YORK (AP) — Walk into any convenience store or gas station in the country, and chances are the cigarettes will be in roughly the same spot: at eye level, right behind the cash register.

(Reuters) – A patient at a Pennsylvania hospice was shot and killed on Tuesday by her elderly husband, who then killed himself in an apparent murder-suicide, the hospital said. The shooting took place at the hospice inpatient unit at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, in eastern Pennsylvania, at about 1 p.m., according to a statement from hospital spokesman Chuck Lewis. No other patients or staff were injured. “A hospice patient was shot and killed by her elderly husband,” it said, without disclosing their identities or the state of the wife’s health before she was killed. …

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The U.S. government is abandoning a legal battle to require that cigarette packs carry a set of large and often macabre warning labels depicting the dangers of smoking and encouraging smokers to quit.