The British government was to announce plans on Wednesday for a minimum alcohol price of £0.45 ($0.72, 0.56 euros) in England and Wales in an attempt to restrain an infamous binge-drinking culture.

The interior ministry was unveiling a consultation on the per-unit price, having announced in March that it would introduce minimum pricing to curb the "scourge of violence" caused by drunken revelers in town centers.

The number of drugs when mixed with grapefruit that can lead to serious health problems, including sudden death, has skyrocketed, warns a Canadian researcher who first discovered the toxic link.

In an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, David Bailey, a scientist at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, said more than 85 drugs, many of them highly prescribed for common medical conditions, are known to interact with the pink fruit.

More than a quarter of new HIV infections in the United States strike young people aged 13 to 24 and 60 percent of those don't know they're sick, health officials said Tuesday.

An estimated 12,200 youth were infected with HIV in 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a new study.

Bus stops in the northern Swedish town of Umeaa have been fitted with light therapy panels to help commuters fight off the winter blues, the energy company behind the move said Tuesday.

In the depths of winter, daylight in Umeaa, around 500 kilometers (300 miles) north of Stockholm, lasts only around four and a half hours, meaning that many people catch a glimpse of the sun only through an office window.

Sri Lanka's health ministry announced plans on Tuesday to draw up new guidelines for donating food to the country's venerated Buddhist monks amid concerns about their weight and health.

The ministry said the faithful, who offer alms as a religious tradition, tended to give food that was too high in fat and sugar and monks were developing preventable health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

Campaigners against female circumcision scored a major victory Monday with the approval by a key U.N. committee of a resolution calling for a global ban on female genital mutilation.

The resolution, adopted by consensus by the U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee, calls the practice harmful and a serious threat to the psychological, sexual and reproductive health of women and girls.

Ever since her father had his heart attack years ago, 76-year-old Maria has been fiercely devoted to Spain's public hospitals. Now that authorities are planning to privatize parts of them, she is outraged.

"At half past three I saw he was not well. I called our private healthcare provider and they told me they had no doctors available," she said, standing in her local Madrid hospital, festooned with angry red-painted banners.

Dr. Joseph Murray, who won the Nobel Prize for performing the first-ever successful organ transplant, died late Monday at the age of 93, according to the Boston Globe.

After suffering a stroke Thursday, Murray passed away at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he had performed the landmark kidney transplant on Ronald and Richard Herrick on December 23, 1954, the newspaper reported.

The United Nations said on Monday that the number of people in Arab countries infected with HIV more than doubled to 470,000 in the eight years to 2009.

"The number of adults and children living with HIV has more than doubled between 2001 and 2009 from 180,000 to 470,000," according to data from UNAIDS, the U.N. program on HIV and AIDS.

Men who drink one normal-sized soft drink per day are at greater risk of getting more aggressive forms of prostate cancer, according to a Swedish study released Monday.

"Among the men who drank a lot of soft drinks or other drinks with added sugar, we saw an increased risk of prostate cancer of around 40 percent," said Isabel Drake, a PhD student at Lund University.