The European Court of Human Rights has told France not to remove life support from a man in a vegetative state for the past six years, blocking a landmark French court ruling.

France's highest administrative court earlier Tuesday gave the green light to end the life of Vincent Lambert, who has been a quadriplegic with severe brain damage since a road accident in 2008, in a decision that went against his parents' wishes.

A group has taken steps to become the first officially recognized marijuana-growing club in Uruguay, where lawmakers have made their country the world's first national marketplace for legal pot.

The Association of Cannabis Studies of Uruguay began the process by registering with the Education and Culture Ministry, Drug Control Chief Julio Calzada said Tuesday.

3-D mammograms may be better at finding cancer than regular scans, a large study suggests, although whether that means saving more lives isn't known.

The study involved almost half a million breast scans, with more than one-third of them using relatively new 3-D imaging along with conventional scans. The rest used regular mammograms alone.

Responding to a major case of research misconduct, federal prosecutors have taken the rare step of filing charges against a scientist after he admitted falsifying data that led to millions in grants and hopes of a breakthrough in AIDS vaccine research.

Investigators say former Iowa State University laboratory manager Dong-Pyou Han has confessed to spiking samples of rabbit blood with human antibodies to make an experimental HIV vaccine appear to have great promise. After years of work and millions in National Institutes of Health grants, another laboratory uncovered irregularities that suggested the results — once hailed as groundbreaking — were bogus.

A leading U.S. doctors' group Tuesday urged parents to read to their children starting in infancy, in order to boost language skills in an age of screens and smartphones.

Pediatricians have long encouraged reading to children, but the guidelines are the first official policy from the American Academy of Pediatrics telling doctors to talk to parents about daily reading to their children, from the first year of life until kindergarten.

Women with heart failure are less likely to get a special kind of pacemaker than men, but more likely to benefit from the device, a government analysis suggests.

The findings come from the first study of its kind conducted by researchers at the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has done similar analyses of prescription drugs, but not of medical devices, said lead author Dr. David Strauss, an FDA medical officer.

An epidemic of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa is now "out of control" with more than 60 outbreak hotspots, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Monday.

"The scale of the current Ebola epidemic is unprecedented in terms of geographical distribution, people infected and deaths," MSF said in a statement. 

Peru on Monday reported its first cases of the chikungunya virus, in two people who recently traveled to the Dominican Republic, authorities said. 

Health ministry director Henry Rebaza said the man and woman who were diagnosed in Lima had recently traveled to the Dominican Republic, a popular Caribbean vacation spot where the virus has been detected.

An epidemic of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa is now "out of control" with more than 60 outbreak hotspots, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Monday.

"The scale of the current Ebola epidemic is unprecedented in terms of geographical distribution, people infected and deaths," MSF said in a statement.

The British army has a global reputation for efficiency and performance, but new figures published on Sunday suggest that its soldiers might be getting a little soft.

More than 32,000 soldiers failed a basic fitness test at some point in the past three years, and more than 22,000 were found to be overweight and at risk of health problems, according to Ministry of Defense figures.