Month: July 2014

BALTIMORE (AP) — For Myra James, the process of going to the gynecologist is now too much to bear.

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) – Palestinian civilians in densely-populated Gaza have no place to hide from Israel’s military offensive and children are paying the heaviest price, the United Nations said on Tuesday. “There is literally no safe place for civilians,” Jens Laerke, spokesman of the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), told a news briefing in Geneva. Nearly 500 homes have been destroyed by Israeli air strikes and 100,000 people have sought shelter in schools of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), where they need food, water and mattresses, he said. Israel began air strikes on the coastal strip on July 8, saying it wanted to halt missile fire out of Gaza by Hamas militants, and launched a ground offensive last Thursday.

By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The dwindling numbers of Indian girls, caused by the illegal abortion of millions of babies, has reached "emergency proportions", fuelling an increase in crimes such as kidnapping and trafficking, the United Nations warned on Tuesday. Despite laws that ban expectant parents from running tests to determine the gender of unborn children, female foeticide remains a common practice in parts of India, where a preference for sons runs deep. "It is tragically ironic that the one who creates life is herself denied the right to be born," said Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of U.N. Women, at the launch of a new study on sex ratios and gender-biased sex selection. India's traditionally male-dominated culture views sons as assets — breadwinners who will provide for the family, carry on the family name, and perform the last rites for their parents, an important ritual in many faiths.

By Adam Jourdan SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The latest food scandal in China is spreading fast, dragging in U.S. coffee chain Starbucks, Burger King Worldwide Inc and others, as well as McDonald’s products as far away as Japan. McDonald’s Corp and KFC’s parent Yum Brands Inc apologized to Chinese customers on Monday after it emerged that Shanghai Husi Food Co Ltd, a unit of U.S.-based OSI Group LLC, had supplied expired meat to the two chains. On Tuesday, Starbucks said some of its cafes previously sold products containing chicken originally sourced from Shanghai Husi, a firm that was shut down on Sunday by local regulators after a TV report showed staff using expired meat and picking up meat from the floor to add to the mix.

Conventional patches provide a steady supply of nicotine, but the electronic SmartStop proactively addresses situations when quitters most want to smoke, pumping doses before cravings even have a chance. Developed by Chrono Therapeutics, the product interfaces with smartphones and tablets via Bluetooth and customizes dosage according to the user's profile and initial input.

The mayor of Moscow has dismissed the head of the Russian capital's metro network following an accident that killed at least 22 people, the mayor's office said on Tuesday. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin replaced Ivan Besedin, who had run the metro since February 2011, with Dmitry Pegov, a former official at a subsidiary of state-controlled Russian Railways. Russian state investigators have detained four Moscow metro workers suspected of safety breaches but Besedin was not among them. The accident is the worst in years on Moscow's metro, one of the world's busiest subway networks, and highlights concerns about Russia's patchy transport safety record.