Current Events

When it was learned this year that General Motors had long failed to notify regulators and the public about fatal ignition-switch defects, the outrage in Congress was bipartisan. Recent reports in The New York Times that the Japanese manufacturer Takata hid deadly airbag defects are also sure to inspire rebukes from members of both parties. Takata has rebutted the reports, but lawmakers have appropriately scheduled a hearing for Thursday and called for a criminal inquiry by the Justice Department.

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Washington - As Americans shop in the health insurance marketplace for a second year, President Obama is depending more than ever on the insurance companies that five years ago he accused of padding profits and canceling coverage for sick.

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The attorney general of Arizona said on Wednesday that the state has filed suit against General Motors, claiming that that automaker had defrauded the state's consumers of an estimated $3 billion.

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Pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and academic medical centers would no longer be able to withhold the results of clinical trials under rules proposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

While millions of Americans participate in trials of experimental drugs and devices to help find new treatments for themselves and others, the findings often aren’t made public, said Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and health policy professor Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and head of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation.

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The new airbag propellant was supposed to be the next big thing for Takata in 1998.  An engineer for the company, Paresh Khandhadia, declared it "the new technological edge" in an interview with a trade magazine then.

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The fund established to compensate victims of General Motors’ deadly ignition-switch defect has extended the deadline for submitting claims by one month, officials announced Sunday night.

Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who administers the fund, has moved the claims deadline to Jan. 31 to give more time to families who may not know about the program.

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More than half of calls to U.S. poison control centers about energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster are for children younger than 6, some suffering seizures and heart problems.

The study bolsters the idea that energy drinks aren’t safe for children and should carry explicit risk warnings, said Steven Lipshultz, chairman of pediatrics at Wayne State University in Detroit. People of all ages with underlying health conditions should be vigilant about the heavily caffeinated beverages, he said. The data was presented yesterday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Chicago.

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The family of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan announced a confidential settlement Wednesday with Texas Health Resources and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas that will provide for Duncan’s four children and his parents and will start a foundation in his name.

“This deal we reached is an outstanding deal, and we have a foundation that needs our support,” Duncan’s nephew Josephus Weeks said at a news conference at the Dallas offices of attorney Les Weisbrod, who is representing the family.

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The Takata exploding air bags controversy continues to grow with Nissan reporting to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it will recall 52,000 more vehicles to fix the problem.

Meanwhile, a group of senators is asking the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into reports that the air bag supplier conducted secret tests on ruptures a decade ago but didn’t take action or report the results to safety regulators.

The problem is thought to affect close to 8 million vehicles in the U.S.

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Honda Motor Co.’s Accord, the best-selling car to U.S. individual buyers in the first half of this year, is being investigated by the U.S. after regulators received 24 complaints about power-steering failure in 2013 models.

Some 374,000 cars could be affected, according to a statement posted today by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defect Investigation.

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There are 1.27 million lawyers in the United States, one for about every 300 Americans — about 400,000 more of them than there are doctors. Their work is rarely glamorous, and especially for those just starting out in the profession, it can be grinding and repetitive. Jason Luckasevic, hired out of law school in 2000 by a firm in Pittsburgh, passed the bar exam on his first try and was quickly sworn in to practice. The ceremony, such as it was, took place on a Thursday in a clerk’s office, rather than in a courtroom in front of family and friends, because his bosses needed him to get started. The following Monday morning, he drove to Johnstown, about 90 minutes away, where he spent the day taking depositions from former employees of an enormous steel plant that had exposed them to asbestos. Late that afternoon, he climbed back into his Honda Civic and headed home. He repeated this routine for the next six months, five days a week, racking up some 400 depositions and about 20,000 miles on the road.

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