Current Events

Things got ugly during jury deliberations in a 2010 sexual assault trial in Colorado.

“I think he did it because he’s Mexican, and Mexican men take whatever they want,” a juror said of the defendant.

The juror, identified in court papers as H. C., was a former law enforcement officer.
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Samsung Electronics Co ) was sued on Friday by a Florida man who said he suffered severe burns after his Galaxy Note 7 smartphone exploded in his front pants pocket.

The lawsuit by Jonathan Strobel may be the first in the United States by a Samsung phone user against the South Korean company over a battery defect linked to the Note 7.

It was filed one day after Samsung recalled about 1 million Note 7s sold in the United States.

Samsung has received 92 reports of batteries overheating in the United States, including 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, U.S.
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In one of its larger recalls, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles will be urging owners of 1.4 million vehicles to bring their cars into dealers to fix an issue that could keep the air bags from deploying in a crash. The problem is believed linked to three deaths and five injuries in accidents.

At issue is a potentially flawed computer, called an "occupant restraint control module," that is supposed to work in tandem with a wire harness that detects frontal impacts.
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The manufacturer of an ovarian cancer screening test that was the focus of a Food and Drug Administration “safety communication” last week says it is suspending U.S. sales.

Abcodia, a privately held London-based company with a Boston office, launched the $295 ROCA (“Risk of Ovarian Cancer Algorithm”) test last December in a few states. Eventually, it became available in the District of Columbia and every state except Alaska, Florida, Hawaii and New York.
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 Models involved are certain 2016-2017 Maxima sedans, 2015-2017 Murano SUVs, and 2015-2016 Murano Hybrid SUVs.
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Concerns about automobile airbags lately have focused on ones that deploy too explosively or even spontaneously.

This week, General Motors announced a major recall over the opposite problem: airbags that, in rare instances, might not deploy when they are supposed to.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration put a notice on its website on Thursday that the company would recall 4.3 million vehicles worldwide — including 3.6 million in the United States — to fix the problem, which has been linked to at least one death and three injuries.
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After the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, Neal and other members of Indiana's Task Force One were sent to Ground Zero to help with recovery efforts. They wore respiratory protection. But when the masks came off, the smell washed over them. It was acrid, like burning plastic.
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This summer, a Pennsylvania woman was found to carry a superbug that is resistant to the antibiotic of last resort, causing alarm about the potential of dangerous drug resistance spreading across the United States. Ever since, health researchers have been looking for where else such germs might be lurking.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the superbug popped up in a 2-year-old girl in Connecticut. She got sick in June and was found to have a strain of E. coli bacteria with the antibiotic-resistance gene known as mcr-1, making her the fourth human case in the United States identified so far.
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Samsung Electronics is urging consumers worldwide to stop using Galaxy Note 7 smartphones immediately and exchange them as soon as possible, as more reports of the phones catching fire emerged even after the company’s global recall.

The call from the South Korean company, the world’s largest smartphone maker, comes after U.S. authorities urged users to switch the Galaxy Note 7 off and not to use or charge it during a flight. Several airlines around the world asked travelers not switch on the jumbo smartphone or put it in checked baggage, with some carriers banning the phone on flights.
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A Volkswagen engineer pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiring to defraud regulators and car owners, in the first criminal charges stemming from the American investigation into the German carmaker’s emissions deception.

The plea by the engineer, James Robert Liang, a Volkswagen veteran, suggests that the Justice Department is trying to build a larger criminal case and pursue charges against other higher-level executives at the carmaker.

Mr. Liang was central in the development of software that Volkswagen used to cheat pollution tests in the United States, which the company admitted last year to installing in more than 11 million diesels vehicles worldwide. He was also part of the cover-up, lying to regulators when they started asking questions about discrepancies in emissions.
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