Current Events

The former chief executive officer of New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery, John R. Reynolds, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for taking almost $300,000 in kickbacks from a subordinate and lying about it, federal prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. sentenced Reynolds today in a hearing in Manhattan federal court, the office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

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In February 2011 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded a 10-month study finding that computer flaws had not caused Toyota sedans to speed up on their own. NHTSA engineers worked with NASA software experts who, in addition to poking and prodding Toyota throttles, bombarded test cars with electromagnetic radiation to see if that provoked a problem. “We enlisted the best and the brightest engineers to study Toyota’s electronics systems, and the verdict is in,” said Ray LaHood, then secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation. “There is no electronic-based cause for unintended high-speed acceleration in Toyotas.”

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A southern New Mexico man who was pulled over for not making a complete stop was taken to two hospitals and forced to have anal probes, three enemas, two body X-rays and a colonoscopy because police thought he was hiding drugs, according a federal lawsuit. In El Paso, a woman crossing the border was stripped searched, vaginally probed then taken to the hospital for more invasive tests, a forced bowel movement, X-rays and scans, the American Civil Liberties Union says.

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Curis Inc. (CRIS), a developer of cancer medicines, fell the most in more than three years after U.S. regulators placed a partial hold on a trial of its drug for solid tumors after a patient died from liver failure.

Curis dropped 21 percent to $3.08 at 10:16 a.m. New York time after falling to $3.03 in its biggest intraday decline since June 2010. The shares of the Lexington, Massachusetts-based company had risen 13 percent this year through yesterday.

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(Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a new warning on the use of the anticoagulant Lovenox in patients fitted with a spinal catheter because of the risk of spinal column bleeding and potential paralysis.

The FDA said on Wednesday that healthcare professionals should carefully consider timing when inserting or removing a spinal catheter in patients taking Lovenox, which is made by Sanofi SA, or its generic versions, which are sold under the name enoxaparin.

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On a day when consumers in Washington State were voting on whether to require food companies to label products containing genetically engineered ingredients, Cargill announced that it would begin labeling packages of ground beef containing what is colloquially known as pink slime.

Pink slime, or what the beef industry prefers to call “finely textured beef,” is made from beef trimmings left over after the processing of higher-quality cuts of meat that is washed in citric acid or ammonia to kill contaminates. It became the stuff of consumer nightmares last year after an ABC News report exposed its widespread use as a binder in ground beef, and companies from Kroger and Safeway to McDonald’s scrambled to drop it from their shelves and products.

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Vehicles Affected: Approximately 2,310 model-year 2014 versions of the Nissan Pathfinder crossover; only vehicles with almond-colored interiors built between July 25 and Sept. 5, 2013, are affected.

The Problem: An improperly manufactured seam on the instrument panel could cause the front passenger airbag to deploy incorrectly, increasing the risk of injury.

The Fix: Dealers will inspect and replace the affected instrument panel assemblies for free.

What Owners Should Do: Nissan will notify owners in early November. Owners can call Nissan at 800-647-7261 or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at 888-327-4236 for more information.

Information obtained here.

Not even three weeks since the shutdown ended, hundreds of federal employees who worked through the impasse have now filed paperwork to join a lawsuit against the government over having their paychecks withheld last month, according to the lawyers handling their case.

As HuffPost reported last week, the suit alleges that the federal government broke the Fair Labor Standards Act by delaying pay for "excepted" employees who were required to work during the shutdown. Although the suit originally named just five employees of the Bureau of Prisons, many more workers are expected to join the suit as plaintiffs in the coming weeks.

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Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay more than $2.2 billion in criminal and civil fines to settle accusations that it improperly promoted the antipsychotic drug Risperdal to older adults, children and people with developmental disabilities, the Justice Department said on Monday.

The agreement is the third-largest pharmaceutical settlement in United States history and the largest in a string of recent cases involving the marketing of antipsychotic and anti-seizure drugs to older dementia patients. It is part of a decade-long effort by the federal government to hold the health care giant — and other pharmaceutical companies — accountable for illegally marketing the drugs as a way to control patients with dementia in nursing homes and children with certain behavioral disabilities, despite the health risks of the drugs.

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Fannie Mae filed a lawsuit Thursday against nine of the world’s largest banks over losses that the mortgage finance giant suffered from the alleged ma­nipu­la­tion of the global interest rate known as Libor.

Fannie joins a long list of pension funds, asset managers and municipalities that have sued banks involved in setting the London interbank offered rate, which serves as a standard interest rate for loans between banks and as a benchmark for about $360 trillion in lending to businesses and consumers.

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The Virginia Supreme Court overturned a jury verdict in a wrongful-death suit brought by the parents of two students who were killed in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, delivering fresh pain to the victims’ families and a sense of relief to school and state officials.

In a unanimous decision released Thursday, the justices wrote that “there was no duty for the commonwealth to warn students about the potential for criminal acts” by student-gunman Seung Hui Cho after he shot two students in a dormitory. Nearly 2 ½ hours later, Cho chained the doors at Norris Hall and shot at least 47 people in 11 minutes before killing himself.

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