Month: May 2013

By Keith Coffman DENVER (Reuters) – Public defenders representing James Holmes, accused of killing 12 moviegoers in Colorado last summer, will return to court on Thursday to challenge the state's insanity defense law in a bid to try to avoid the death penalty for their client. Lawyers representing Holmes, 25, are challenging Colorado's capital punishment statute on several fronts, and on Thursday are arguing that it unconstitutionally bars him from calling his own mental health experts at sentencing if he refuses to cooperate with court-appointed psychiatrists. …

I always thought that of yoga as something only done by young, lithe ballet enthusiasts. It was definitely not something practiced by uncoordinated, middle-aged guys who can’t touch their toes. Put me in the latter category and add to that that I’m nearly six-and-a-half feet tall and have had two back…        

DENVER (AP) — In the most prominent challenge of its kind, Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. is asking a federal appeals court Thursday for an exemption from part of the federal health care law that requires it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s BTG said it would make two acquisitions, one extending its expertise in liver cancer and the other a treatment for severe blood clots, to create an interventional medicine business with potential sales of $1 billion. The company said on Thursday it had agreed to buy the targeted therapies division of Nordion Inc, for about $200 million in a deal that adds Therasphere radioactive glass beads treatment for liver cancer to its chemotherapy beads unit. …

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) – Kathrin Jansen is a microbiologist with at least two breakthrough vaccines to her name: she brought the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil to market for Merck and helped develop the $4 billion a year pneumonia and meningitis vaccine Prevnar 13 for Pfizer. Jansen's next vaccine success could come by taming the superbug MRSA, a drug-resistant bacterium that she has seen ravage a healthy man up close and personally. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infects an estimated 53 million people globally and costs more than $20 billion a year to treat. …

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation's record-low teen birth rate stems from robust declines in nearly every state, but most dramatically in several Mountain States and among Hispanics, according to a new government report.

The U.S. teen birth rate fell 25 percent over five years to a record low of 31 births per 1,000 teens ages 15 to 19, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By Katie Schubert OMAHA, Nebraska (Reuters) – Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning on Wednesday filed a petition to revoke the license of the only nurse at a controversial abortion clinic in the state for allegedly providing substandard care and improperly administering drugs. …