Year: 2014

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Friday he would sign a controversial anti-gay bill into law, warning that those who promoted homosexuality would be dealt with harshly. Museveni last month indicated he was planning to shelve the bill, which has attracted fierce criticism from Western donors and human rights groups since its inception in 2009. Homosexuality is taboo in African countries and illegal in 37. During a conference held by Uganda's ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, a group of scientists presented their findings on homosexuality to Museveni.

By Shereen Jegtvig NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Young men know even less about emergency contraception than young women do, which may be limiting access to an effective means of preventing unwanted pregnancies, researchers say. “The big finding in our study is that young men had a lot less knowledge about emergency contraception than the young women that we surveyed, and even among the young women, knowledge wasn’t great,” Sheree Schrager, a member of the study team, told Reuters Health. “About half of the women understood basic facts about emergency contraception, how you get it, how you use it, and the fact that male partners were also able to buy it over-the-counter for their female partners,” added Schrager, a researcher at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, California. “But young men had significantly lower knowledge then the young women did, and this is an opportunity for providers to reach out to young men in the hopes of reaching more young women to use emergency contraception,” she said.

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss (Reuters) – Top U.S. hedge fund managers in the fourth quarter focused on the consumer sector, with investment plays ranging from high-end auction house Sotheby's to eBay Inc, the multinational Internet consumer-to-consumer corporation. General Motors also became the flavor of the quarter with many hedge funds as the U.S. government exited its position. The quarterly disclosures of manager stock holdings, in so-called 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, are always intriguing for investors trying to divine a pattern in what savvy traders are selling and buying. As a result, the public filings don't always present a complete picture of a manager's stock holdings.

When I talk about meditation, I get lots of skeptical looks and hear loads of ridiculous reasons for why people aren’t doing it. Here are my top three.        

(Reuters) – Aveo Oncology and Astellas Pharma Inc said they would end an agreement to develop Aveo's lead experimental drug that has seen a string of failures in multiple cancer indications. Aveo, which cut 62 percent of its workforce last year to focus on developing the drug, tivozanib, as a treatment for breast and colon cancers, said in December that the drug was not likely to succeed in a mid-stage trial testing its use in colon cancer. A mid-stage trial testing tivozanib as a treatment for breast cancer was stopped last month due to insufficient enrolments. Tivozanib was rejected by U.S. health regulators in June for use in kidney cancer, citing inconsistent study results.

By Martinne Geller LONDON (Reuters) – As a slowdown in emerging markets takes the shine off shares in consumer goods makers like Nestle , Unilever , Danone and Procter & Gamble , hungry investors have been sampling more of the companies that supply them. Scent and flavor makers such as Symrise , Givaudan and International Flavors & Fragrances , and food ingredient names like Glanbia and Kerry Group are attractive, analysts say, because they're more resistant to weak consumer spending and benefit from health and wellness trends forcing so many brands to modify their products. They upgraded Germany's Symrise to "buy" and Switzerland's Givaudan to "hold". JPMorgan Cazenove estimates the European food ingredients sector on average will see 6 percent earnings growth in 2014, while European food producers will see no growth.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, a researcher at Northwestern University has revealed what grumpy old people have been telling us for years: Marriage isn’t what it used to be. That doesn’t mean marriage is worse than it was before, however. “The average marriages are…