Year: 2014

Nestle will disclose details of a planned share buyback when the sale of an 8 percent share in L'Oreal closes, its chief financial officer told investors on Thursday. Nestle said on Tuesday it was reducing its stake in L'Oreal to 23 percent, adding it wanted to use part of the proceeds for a share buyback. "We'll give details when the transaction closes," Wan Ling Martello said. Nestle said it expects the deal to close before the end of June.

Australia's competition regulator said on Thursday it was taking legal action against the local division of Pfizer Inc over the way it marketed its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor to pharmacies. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commision (AC) said Pfizer had, to deter competition, offered pharmacies "significant" discounts and rebates if they stocked at least a year's worth of the drug, which goes by the generic name atorvastatin and is prescribed to over one million Australians. The drug had generated annual sales exceeding A$700 million ($632.35 million) for Pfizer in Australia before the company's patent expired in there in May 2012, the ACCC said. Pfizer denied its methods were uncompetitive.

WASHINGTON (AP) — While states are having varying success getting people to sign up, January marked the first time since new health insurance markets opened last fall that a national monthly enrollment target was met.

WASHINGTON (AP) — January marked the first time since new health insurance markets opened last fall that a national monthly enrollment target was met, even though states are having varying success getting people to sign up.

A U.S. judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked a pharmacy from providing a compound execution drug to Missouri jailers to use in the February 26 lethal injection of Michael Taylor, guilty in the death of a 15-year-old girl. Missouri and several other U.S. states that have the death penalty have increasingly been forced to look for alternate drugs and sources of drugs for executions as pharmaceutical companies have raised objections to their products being used in capital punishment. Some states have turned to so-called compounding pharmacies, which produce small amounts of drugs by prescription and are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, prompting defense attorneys to question the quality of the drugs and whether they could cause undue pain during an execution. U.S. District Court Judge Terence Kern on Wednesday afternoon granted a temporary restraining order preventing one such pharmacy, The Apothecary Shoppe, from supplying compounded pentobarbital to the Missouri Department of Corrections.

By Mari Saito TOKYO (Reuters) – The operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant knew about record high measurements of a dangerous isotope in groundwater at the plant for five months before telling the country's nuclear watchdog, a regulatory official told Reuters. Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said late on Wednesday it detected 5 million becquerels per liter of radioactive strontium-90 in a sample from a groundwater well about 25 meters from the ocean last September. A Tepco spokesman said there was uncertainty about the reliability and accuracy of the September strontium reading, so the utility decided to re-examine the data. Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) taskforce on contaminated water issues at Fukushima, told Reuters he had not heard about the record high strontium reading until this month.