Month: March 2014

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin, the lead singer of alt-rock band Coldplay, said on Tuesday they are separating after 10 years of marriage. "It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate," the couple said on Paltrow's lifestyle website, Goop.com, in a post entitled "Conscious Uncoupling." "We have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate. Paltrow, 41, who won a Best Actress Academy Award for "Shakespeare in Love," and British singer Martin, 37, were married in December 2003, and have two children, Apple and Moses.

By Laila Kearney SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The U.S. Navy plans to test hundreds of homes for radiation in a remote San Francisco neighborhood after an object containing radium was found beneath an unoccupied residence in the area last fall, city officials said on Tuesday. In the coming weeks Navy officials will begin surveying about 600 homes on Treasure Island, a manmade land mass in the San Francisco Bay that once served as a naval base, said Bob Beck, a director with the city’s Treasure Island Development Authority. The Navy and the agencies with which it is working on the cleanup, including the California Department of Public Health and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, were not immediately available for further comment. The Navy began cleaning up Treasure Island shortly after the base was closed in 1997.

A spate of regulatory warnings for India's generic drug manufacturers will add a new emphasis on the quality of such medicines in an industry long dominated by the ability to deliver treatments as cheaply as possible, analysts say. In the short term, that is expected to benefit larger global competitors, such as Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, Actavis Plc and Mylan Inc, which will be called upon to supply drugs no longer available from some of their rivals in India, they said. Now the ability to supply the market and have a reliable supply, to be in good favor with the FDA, that's starting to mean something to customers," said Gabelli & Co analyst Kevin Kendra. The biggest setback for India's $14 billion a year generic drug industry came in January, when the FDA banned imports from all the Indian plants of Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, India's No. 1 drugmaker by sales, over repeated production quality lapses.

By Joan Biskupic WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Supreme Court arguments over federal healthcare policy were nearly finished on Tuesday when Justice Anthony Kennedy challenged Obama administration lawyer Donald Verrilli on abortion rights. While defending the part of the 2010 healthcare law known as Obamacare that requires companies to cover birth control as part of employee health insurance, Verrilli said it was unlikely the government would demand corporations pay for abortions.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew's treatment for a benign enlarged prostate on Tuesday "went well and as planned," a Treasury spokesperson said. "The secretary is now resting comfortably and continues to expect to resume his normal schedule in Washington next week," U.S. Treasury spokesperson Natalie Wyeth Earnest said. Lew, 58, was sworn in as Treasury secretary in February 2013 after serving as President Barack Obama's chief of staff. (Corrects typo in second paragraph.) (Reporting by Timothy Ahmann; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)