Current Events

Sen. Charles Schumer on Friday called on the Long Island Rail Road to begin testing its locomotive engineers for sleep disorders to prevent an accident if one fell asleep at the controls.

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(Bloomberg) -- Honda Motor Co. is investigating a fatal crash in Houston this month related to air bags made by Takata Corp., the fifth U.S. death linked to the safety devices.

Carlos Solis IV, a 35-year-old father of two teenagers, was killed Jan. 18 in a Honda Accord he bought in April from a dealership that hadn’t performed a recall on the air bag issued in 2011, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

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The lead anesthesiologist in Joan Rivers’ doomed clinic visit was also the target of a malpractice lawsuit in the Bronx where a mother died in childbirth while undergoing a C-section, the Daily News has learned.

Dr. Renuka Bankulla and Bronx Lebanon Hospital ultimately settled the lawsuit in 2005 for $4 million: $1 million to the estate of the mother, Consuelo Martinez, and $3 million to her son, Erik, who sustained injuries, according to court papers filed in Bronx Supreme Court.

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Jan 27 (Reuters) - Pfizer Inc said on Tuesday it agreed to pay $400 million to avert a trial in a class action lawsuit accusing the pharmaceutical giant of misleading investors in connection with off-label marketing.

Pfizer disclosed the agreement-in-principle as it released its fourth-quarter results. The accord, which must be approved by a federal judge in Manhattan, came days ahead of a jury trial set for Feb. 10.

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Nissan is recalling almost 640,000 vehicles in two actions for a fire hazard and because the hood could open while the vehicle is moving, the automaker has informed federal regulators.

The largest action – for the fire hazard – covers almost 469,000 of the 2008-13 Rogue models, a small sport utility vehicle, according to a report from the automaker posted Wednesday on the website of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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The anesthesiologist was getting nervous.

Joan Rivers, the comic known for her sassy wit and raspy voice, had been complaining of more than the usual hoarseness. Now Ms. Rivers was on the operating table at an Upper East Side clinic and her private doctor, Gwen Korovin, wanted to send a small instrument into her windpipe to take a second look at her vocal cords, according to a malpractice lawsuit filed Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

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Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) some time back agreed to pay $2.2 billion to settle federal claims that it improperly marketed the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. But the drugmaker's legal hassles over the drug are not all done. Last week opening arguments were made in a case in which the drugmaker is accused of marketing the drug for use in young boys and then not sufficiently warning patients that the side effects for some included the possibility they would grow breasts.

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TAMPA — Donna Brown of Jacksonville started smoking cigarettes in high school and continued for 47 years, even after peripheral vascular disease forced amputation of both legs.

She tried to quit but couldn't.

This week, a Tampa jury decided tobacco giant Philip Morris USA owes the 64-year-old woman nearly $17.3 million for causing her disease and for hiding facts about the perils and addictive nature of cigarettes.

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Many women in the United States who are in their childbearing years are prescribed opioid pain relievers, powerful medications that can cause birth defects, a new study finds.

Researchers analyzed prescriptions for opioid pain medications among U.S. women ages 15 to 44 between 2008 and 2012. They found that each year, about a quarter of women (27.7 percent) who had private insurance, and nearly 40 percent of women on Medicaid, filed a prescription for an opioid pain medicine, according to the study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The deadly pattern of illnesses began to emerge in 2012 at hospitals in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Chicago. In each case, the culprit was a bacteria known as CRE, perhaps the most feared of superbugs, because it resists even "last defense" antibiotics — and kills up to 40% of the people it infects.

And in each case, investigators identified the same source of transmission: a specialized endoscope, threaded down the throat of a half-million patients a year to treat gallstones, cancers and other disorders of the digestive system. They found that the devices, often called duodenoscopes, accumulate bacteria that are not always removed by conventional cleaning, so infections can pass from patient to patient.

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court divided down the middle Tuesday in a case that requires them to choose between free speech and an independent judiciary.

The court's four liberal justices sided during oral arguments with the Florida Bar, which prohibits candidates for judgeships from soliciting campaign donations.

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