Current Events

(Reuters) - Shares of Edwards Lifesciences Corp jumped 13 percent on Monday after a U.S. court temporarily halted sales of competitor Medtronic Inc's heart valve implant that uses a less-invasive procedure to spare patients from open-heart surgery.

The ruling, by a U.S. District Court in Delaware on Friday, came after earlier court decisions that found Medtronic's CoreValve infringed on Edwards' Sapien transcatheter valve product.

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At least nine of the 13 deaths tied to General Motors ignition switch recall occurred before the company exited bankruptcy in July 2009, precluding survivors from filing lawsuits, according to documents released today by a congressional committee’s staff.

The most recent fatality involving the 2003 through 2007 Chevrolet Cobalts and Saturn Ions occured last June in Quebec. There are two fatal accidents involving 2004 Ions in a database with identities of the victims and dates undetermined.

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DETROIT — The ignition-switch scandal at General Motors widened on Thursday as the automaker suspended two engineers and added another repair to its recall of cars with a faulty ignition switch that has been linked to 13 deaths.

The company is facing increasing pressure from lawmakers to warn owners of recalled cars to park their vehicles until they are fixed. And as the company scrambles to make the repairs, the financial toll of its mounting recalls continues to grow.

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Weeks after agreeing to pay the largest criminal penalty ever by an automaker for hiding safety defects from the public, Toyota on Wednesday announced a wide-ranging recall of nearly 6.4 million vehicles worldwide for problems with air bags that may not deploy or seats that could move in a crash.

The recall, which includes nearly 1.8 million vehicles in the United States, brings Toyota’s recall tally for 2014 to almost 2.9 million vehicles in the United States, well ahead of its pace from last year. General Motors faces a criminal investigation of its own over its decade-long failure to recall millions of cars to fix a defect that it has tied to 13 deaths.

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Federal safety regulators fined General Motors $28,000 on Tuesday, saying it had not provided much of the information requested for an investigation into a recall of about 2.6 million cars with an ignition switch defect that G.M. has linked to 13 deaths.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on March 4 demanded answers to 107 questions related to why G.M. waited until February to start recalling the cars, even though it had been alerted to the problem as early as 2001. The cars contain a faulty ignition switch that is prone to turn off while driving, shutting off the engine and disabling the air bags.

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In one of the biggest damages verdicts ever imposed, a jury in Louisiana has ordered a Japanese drug maker and its American partner to pay a combined $9 billion in punitive damages over a diabetes drug that has been linked to cancer.

Jurors in a district court trial in Lafayette, La., ordered the Japanese company, Takeda Pharmaceutical, to pay $6 billion in punitive damages on Monday after finding that the company had hidden the cancer risks of its drug, Actos.

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WASHINGTON — The questions came faster and harder at Mary T. Barra on Wednesday.

After facing a House subcommittee investigating General Motors’ ignition-switch recall a day earlier, G.M.’s chief executive was bombarded with a more aggressive line of questioning by senators.

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(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday defended its proposal to require generic drugmakers to update the prescribing information on their products if they become aware of new safety information, a move the industry says will open them to product liability lawsuits and raise drug costs.

Speaking at a hearing before a U.S. House of Representatives health subcommittee, Dr. Janet Woodcock, the FDA's top pharmaceuticals official, said the move is needed to "create parity" between branded and generic drug makers regarding labeling changes.

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GM has now recalled nearly 7 million vehicles worldwide this year as it seeks to more aggressively respond to safety issues. GM’s recall related to the ignition-switch defects now totals 2.59 million cars.

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WASHINGTON — Congressional investigators began poring over boxes of internal General Motors documents on Tuesday, seeking to understand the decade-long failure by regulators and the company to act on reports of a defect in Chevrolet Cobalts and other cars. Also, two senators introduced legislation on Tuesday intended to help identify problems earlier.

Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, both Democrats, introduced a Senate bill that would make the auto companies give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration copies of insurance claims made against them and lawsuits about fatal crashes in which they were defendants. They would also have to provide copies of internal safety studies related to the car model involved. Mr. Markey, when he was a congressman, wrote similar legislation in 2010, which passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but was not enacted.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Efforts to conceal the extent of dangerous car defects at Toyota Motor Corp. were so pervasive, prosecutors say, that an exasperated employee at one point warned that “someone will go to jail if lies are repeatedly told.”

Yet no one has gone to jail, nor is likely to.

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