Month: March 2014

LONDON (Reuters) – French biotech company AB Science has lost an appeal to get the London-based European Medicines Agency to reconsider its rejection of the company’s cancer drug Masican, originally handed down in November. AB Science had been seeking conditional authorization of the drug, also known as masitinib mesylate, for the second-line treatment of malignant gastrointestinal stromal tumor. The company said it now intended to file for full approval with data from an ongoing confirmatory Phase III study. (Reporting by Ben Hirschler)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The new health care law helps some people, hurts others and confuses almost everyone. Hoping to simplify things a bit, The Associated Press asked its Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus followers for their real-life questions about the program and the problems they're running into as the March 31 deadline approaches to sign up for coverage in new insurance markets.

China has launched a nationwide inspection of schools amid rising public anger at revelations that many educational institutions secretly gave children medicine to ward off illnesses and boost attendance, state media said on Friday. No deaths have been reported, but food and drug safety for toddlers is a highly sensitive issue in China after at least six children died and thousands were sickened in 2008 from drinking milk contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical. Local governments have been ordered to inspect schools and particularly kindergartens, to check if they were illegally administering any medicine, the official China Daily said, citing a health ministry notice. A string of reports since last week has revealed that at least six kindergartens in three provinces gave toddlers a cheap antiviral drug without informing their parents.

By Tom Ramstack WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A judge acquitted a former Naval Academy football player on Thursday of sexually assaulting a drunken female midshipman, one of a number of sexual misconduct cases roiling the U.S. military. Midshipman Joshua Tate, a senior from Nashville, Tennessee, had been accused of assaulting the 22-year-old woman at an alcohol-fueled off-campus party in April 2012. Marine Colonel Daniel Daugherty found Tate, who resigned from the academy on Thursday, not guilty of aggravated sexual assault after two days of testimony by more than a dozen witnesses at Washington's Navy Yard. Asked by reporters how much of the trial had been motivated by the military wanting to show it was tough on sexual misconduct, Tate's attorney Jason Ehrenberg said: "All of it." "That's the system we have.