Current Events

Volkswagen said that in October it will propose a fix to the diesel cars it rigged with manipulative software to fool regulators into believing the vehicles were compliant with emissions regulations.

The automaker said that "in the near future" it will begin notifying owners of the 11 million vehicles affected by the software, which causes the cars to emit harmful pollutants at rates of up to 40 times U.S. standards.

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Premeditation.

That's the difference between Volkswagen's faked diesel emission tests and earlier auto scandals. It's what makes this worse than GM's ignition switches, Toyota's runaway cars or Ford-Firestone's exploding tires.

Volkswagen set out to cheat emissions tests and sell cars that would damage human health and the environment. The other automakers seemed legitimately baffled and eager to address their crises.

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Hyundai is recalling nearly 500,000 Sonata sedans because a manufacturing problem could cause their engines to fail.

Hyundai has notified the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that engines produced at its powertrain plant in Alabama may not have been machined properly. As a result, metal debris can block the flow of oil to the connecting rod bearings. That could cause the engines to stall and, in turn, lead to a crash.

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BERLIN — As Germany has emerged as the dominant actor in Europe, it has lectured Greece and other debtor nations on the virtues of thrift and lately wagged its finger at countries that balk at receiving a share of refugees from the killing fields of Syria. Its right to lead, based on a narrative of self-sacrifice and obedience to rules, was generally acknowledged.

That is one reason the Volkswagen scandal has shaken the country’s very core. More than just a tale of corporate misdeeds, the disclosure of systematic cheating by one of Germany’s most iconic companies has delivered a sharp blow to its conception of itself as an orderly nation and tarnished its claim to moral leadership of the Continent.

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Volkswagen's emissions scandal ballooned Tuesday as the company admitted that software designed to fool regulators affects 11 million vehicles worldwide and could cost more than $7 billion to address, threatening to undermine its new position as the world's largest automaker.

The automaker's deception immediately qualifies as one of the most expensive automotive scandals in recent memory and could jeopardize CEO Martin Winterkorn's job as his contract comes up for renewal.

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The FDA has issued a Class I recall of a select number of SynCardia Systems Total Artificial Heart Freedom driver.

A Class I recall, the most serious type of recall, indicates “there is a reasonable probability that use of these products will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

The mechanical heart replacement is implanted to replace left and right ventricle function, and the Freedom Driver system is attached to the pump to operate and monitor the device.

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One of the biggest product defects in recent American manufacturing history, linked to at least 124 deaths and numerous injuries, was traceable to a mundane automobile part, the ignition switch. For General Motors, the debacle over how it handled that defect scarred the organization as it had to admit to repeated failures in simply identifying the problem that reflected a corporate culture that seemed to prize inaction and deflection.

The settlement with the Justice Department that requires G.M. to pay $900 million, along with the resolution of a number of private lawsuits for which it set aside another $575 million, means the company has largely put the controversy to rest.

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The U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that the recent Cyclospora outbreak sickened 546 people from 31 states from May to August. The numbers of reported cases in the U.S. have returned to baseline levels, the agency noted.

CDC stated that epidemiologic and traceback investigations conducted in Texas, Wisconsin, and Georgia by state and local public health and regulatory officials and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) indicated that some illnesses among residents in these states were linked to fresh cilantro from Puebla, Mexico. However, the vehicle(s) of infection for non-cluster-associated cases has not been identified, the agency added.

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The recall seemed to be straightforward enough: Recaro Child Safety needed to fix some of its car seats so that they would not break free during a crash.

But the path to that announcement, made last week, was anything but.

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They sounded like three deadly strikes.

The patient had a dangerously high level of LDL cholesterol, a high risk for heart disease and an intolerance for the most common cholesterol-fighting medication. Dr. William Averill, a Torrance cardiologist, thought he had a solution: Praluent, a cholesterol-lowering drug from pharmaceutical companies Regeneron and Sanofi that had just been approved by the FDA as a treatment for people who didn't benefit from the standard cholesterol treatment.

The only problem? The drug's $14,600-a-year sticker-shocker price — 140 times more expensive than generic statins that typically cost about $100 a year.

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Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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