Current Events

A Texas father has been arrested after leaving his 6-month-old daughter in an overheated car where she may have succumbed to heatstroke. But the young child's death was far from a rare occurrence.

So far this year, at least 16 children have reportedly died from heatstroke after being left in hot cars by their caregivers — more than double the number who perished by this time last year.

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DETROIT — In an era of unprecedented scrutiny of automotive safety, Fiat Chrysler is learning that one celebrity’s death can turn a seemingly routine recall into a corporate crisis.

The death on Sunday of the actor Anton Yelchin, crushed when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled backward down his driveway, has lent a new sense of urgency to a recall announced in April. And it has prompted Fiat Chrysler to accelerate its plans to modify gearshifts in 1.1 million vehicles linked to hundreds of rollaway accidents and dozens of injuries.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is defending a decision to accept more than 1,000 patient injury reports from Medtronic in summary form, years after they were supposed to be submitted.

The FDA responded earlier this month to questions from U.S.
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Front-seat passengers in some small sport utility vehicles may not be as well protected as drivers in certain types of crashes, according to recent tests of seven vehicles by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The tests, known as small overlap frontal tests, were similar to the kind that the institute conducts by directing the front-end impact to the driver’s side of the vehicle. But in these latest tests, whose results were released on Thursday, the impact was on the S.U.V.
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Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said today it will no longer be using any Takata air bag inflators that use ammonium nitrate without a protective powder as the propellant in any of its vehicles in North America by the end of next week.

Ruptures of those Takata inflators have been tied to ten deaths and more than 100 injuries in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and are part of the largest automotive recall in U.S. history.

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The death of the actor Anton Yelchin, killed when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled backward down a driveway and crushed him against a mailbox pillar last weekend, has cast a public spotlight on a problem with some models of Jeeps and other Fiat Chrysler vehicles.

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The 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee that rolled backward down a driveway and killed the actor Anton Yelchin early Sunday was a model that Fiat Chrysler has recalled for a gearshift issue that has confused drivers, leading them to accidentally leave the car in neutral when they think it is safely in park.

Los Angeles Police investigators and the carmaker said on Monday that it was too soon to determine the cause of the accident. But Mr.
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About $6.5 billion will go to car owners and $3.5 billion to the U.S. government and California regulators, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deal isn’t public yet.
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The US Supreme Court Thursday handed a partial victory to a Massachusetts family who sued the country’s largest owner of psychiatric hospitals over the death of their daughter. But the justices sent the case back to a lower court for further review.

Both sides seemed to find something to like in the complex decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas. And lawyers and organizations who had been following the case disagreed about the ultimate meaning of the decision, which was unanimous.

The question at hand was whether Universal Health Services, a Fortune 500 company that owns the Arbour psychiatric facilities in Massachusetts, violated the law when it allegedly permitted an unsupervised nurse practitioner to prescribe medication to 19-year-old Yarushka Rivera.
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ALBANY - A bill to help victims of medical malpractice died for a second straight year in the state Legislature.

The Senate and Assembly ended their legislative sessions in the wee hours of Saturday morning without taking up Lavern's Law, which would start the window to bring medical malpractice cases when an error is discovered by the patient, not when the mistake occurred as is current law.

The Republicans that control the Senate recently discussed the issue at length but couldn't come to a consensus, a GOP official said.

The measure had a strong backe in Senate GOP Deputy Majority Leader John DeFrancisco.

But it was strongly opposed by the deep-pocketed medical establishment, which has argued that many of the states that have similar measures in place also have caps on pain and suffering awards and limits on total damages.
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Nissan's (7201.T) Infiniti luxury brand will recall roughly 60,000 vehicles globally, a spokesman for the brand said on Thursday, as the steering system key to the Q50 sedan's autonomous driving capabilities could malfunction.

The recall will affect cars in all markets where the Q50 is sold, including China and North America, spokesman Stefan Weinmann said in a written statement.

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