Current Events

Thieves hacked into an Internal Revenue Service online service and gained access to information from more than 100,000 taxpayer accounts, the agency said Tuesday.

The criminals used personal data obtained from other sources, including Social Security numbers, street addresses and dates of birth, to get into the IRS "Get Transcript" service. The service has been temporarily shut down.

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A House Energy and Commerce panel will hold a June 2 hearing on the record-setting recall of nearly 34 million vehicles with potentially defective Takata air bags by 11 automakers.

The subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade will hold a hearing, its first in nearly six months on the issue of exploding air bags linked to at least six deaths and more than 100 injuries. It will come two weeks after Japanese air bag manufacturer Takata, under heavy pressure from the Obama administration, agreed to declare 33.8 million vehicles defective.

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The federal government on Tuesday unveiled a long-awaited regulatory package that sets national standards for managed care under Medicaid, marking the biggest changes to the growing program in more than a decade.

The nearly 700-page rule, described by some groups as an “uber rule,” contains instructions about what state Medicaid programs must do when hiring private health plans to handle long-term care for the elderly and disabled – also known as managed care.

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A little-noticed ruling by three federal judges may have tipped the scales in favor of the tobacco industry’s bid to put decades of smoker lawsuits behind it.

The appeals court panel in Atlanta said individual smokers, already blocked from suing as a group, must each prove the cigarettes they used were defective, rather than relying on an earlier jury’s findings. That decision adds time, expense and uncertainty to their cases.

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You might say Jacob Epstein, a lean, healthy, 88-year-old Floridian, died in early May from a broken arm. Following surgery to reset the bone, he was given an antibiotic to prevent postoperative infection, a common hospital practice.

His daughter, Beth Fidanza, recalled that within a week her father developed diarrhea caused by a particularly nasty intestinal bacterium called Clostridium difficile, or C. diff. Another antibiotic seemed to eradicate the disease, but a month later the gut infection recurred. Mr. Epstein was given another antibiotic, but within days developed a fatal combination of kidney failure, dangerously low blood pressure and gastrointestinal bleeding.

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State and federal health officials privately urged the Food and Drug Administration nearly six years ago to alert hospitals about contamination risks from specialized medical scopes that have been tied to a recent series of deadly superbug outbreaks.

The 2009 appeal came after duodenoscopes were linked to drug-resistant infections in dozens of Florida hospital patients, including 15 who died. In emails and a phone briefing, epidemiologists at the Florida Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the infections occurred because hospitals were having trouble cleaning the scopes properly, records obtained by USA TODAY show.

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House Democrats want to boost funding for an automated train control system that could have prevented the deadly Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia last week. Policymakers are offering a motion to authorize $750 million for the program as part of a surface transportation bill being voted on Tuesday, the Hill reported.

“Americans deserve better infrastructure that puts safety first,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement.

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A conductor critically injured in last week's deadly train derailment in Philadelphia has sued Amtrak, accusing the publicly funded passenger rail company of negligence, his lawyer said on Tuesday, adding to a string of lawsuits since the crash.

Emilio Fonseca, 33, was taking a restroom break in the first car during his work shift when the passenger train went off the rails, attorney Bruce Nagel told a news conference, saying the train suddenly surged forward and then crashed.

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For more than a decade, the Japanese company Takata, one of the largest suppliers of airbags, denied that its products were defective even as motorists were killed by exploding airbags and automakers around the world recalled millions of cars equipped with its products.

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More than a year before a medical scope infected patients with a superbug at UCLA and Cedars-Sinai medical centers, a similar outbreak in the Netherlands prompted Dutch regulators to ask the manufacturer to prove the device was safe.

Olympus Corp. failed to demonstrate a safe cleaning procedure, according to a new report. As a result, the Dutch hospital that suffered the outbreak, which sickened 22 patients, abandoned the scope for another model without the troublesome design.

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Ford is recalling about 12,300 2015 F-150 pickups in North America to check for a problem that could affect steering.

The issue is with the upper I-shaft that might have been riveted improperly, potentially causing it to separate, which could make it hard to steer and increase the risk of a crash.

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