Year: 2013

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will propose a ban on Styrofoam, the substance commonly used for take-out food containers that is almost impossible to recycle. The mayor who has already targeted fat, sugar and salt in the city will turn to extruded polystyrene foam, saying it clogs up landfills, does not biodegrade and might harm human health. Bloomberg will raise the proposal in his final State of the City speech on Thursday. The city provided reporters an advance text of the speech on Wednesday. …

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A lawyer for Barry Bonds told an appellate court on Wednesday that it should strike down the home run king’s felony obstruction of justice conviction tied to a probe of steroids in sports. “There’s not a shred of evidence that Mr. Bonds was ever given anything to inject himself with or that he ever injected anything,” the player’s attorney, appellate specialist Dennis Riordan, told the court. At least one of three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel appeared skeptical Bonds committed a crime. …

LONDON (Reuters) – Discoveries so far of horsemeat in products sold as beef are likely to be the “tip of the iceberg”, a British parliamentary report into the scandal said on Thursday. “The scale of contamination emerging in the meat supply chain is breathtaking,” said Anne McIntosh, a legislator who chairs the cross-party Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which published the report. “More revelations will doubtless come to light in the UK and across the European Union. …

(Reuters) – Weight Watchers International Inc forecast full-year earnings below Wall Street expectations as attendance at its diet meetings remained low so far this year, sending its shares down more than 15 percent after the bell. The weight management company expects mid- to high-teen declines in attendance in the first quarter. The company said its marketing strategy has not been effective in an increasingly competitive environment with its diet meetings business losing steam in North America and the United Kingdom. “Consumers saw their paychecks shrinking by mid-January. …

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is undergoing "complex" alternative treatments more than two months after having cancer surgery in Cuba, his vice president said on Wednesday. The 58-year-old socialist leader has not been seen in public since he went to Havana for the operation on December 11, his fourth surgery for cancer in 18 months. Vice President Nicolas Maduro did not give details of the alternative treatments the president was receiving. …

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama's decision to spotlight drug rebates as a way to save money on Medicare is likely to be opposed by the pharmaceutical industry, which could potentially lose billions of dollars in profits. In his annual State of the Union speech on Tuesday, Obama said he would "reduce taxpayer subsidies to prescription drug companies" to rein in the rising cost of Medicare, the $600 billion healthcare program for the elderly and disabled. …