Current Events

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a federal grand jury are investigating General Motors Co. over its handling of the massive recall, as the government probes into the ignition switch crisis widens.

The SEC probe, revealed Thursday in a financial disclosure document filed with the government by GM itself, seeks to determine why it took GM a decade to recall some 2.6 million cars with faulty ignition switches that were linked to at least 13 deaths and 32 crashes.

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The Food & Drug Administration is warning that injections of corticosteroids into the spine's epidural space -- an extremely common treatment for radiating back or neck pain -- in rare cases may result in loss of vision, stroke, paralysis and death.

And that's even in the absence of fungal and other contamination introduced by compounding pharmacies that killed 48 people in 2012 and 2013.

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WASHINGTON General Motors Co. late Monday asked a federal bankruptcy judge to throw out more than four dozen court claims against it that are linked to a potentially deadly defect found in 2.6 million Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions and similar small-model cars.

As first reported in the Detroit Free Press last week, GM asked Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber in New York to order people filing claims against the company arising from the ignition switch recall to "cease and desist from further prosecuting," maintaining GM is protected from any claims related to anything the company did before July 2009.

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A New York judge ruled that Wells Fargo (WFC) can’t keep its Home Mortgage Foreclosure Attorney Procedure Manual out of a lawsuit in federal court.

U.S. Judge Allan Gropper agreed to allow the 150-page manual – a copy of which was obtained by plaintiff’s attorney – into a lawsuit being brought on behalf of a homeowner by attorney Linda Tirelli against Wells Fargo, the largest mortgage servicer in the United States.

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The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s appeal of a $105 million jury verdict it was ordered to pay for contaminating underground water in New York City with a gasoline additive.

The Irving, Texas-based oil and gas company argued unsuccessfully that any award was premature because the city isn’t planning to use the disputed wells in southeastern Queens for another 15 to 20 years.

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The first word from General Motors that the Chevrolet Cobalt had a dangerous safety problem came nine years ago, in a letter to dealers warning them that the cars could suddenly stall because of faulty ignition switches.

But it was not until February that G.M. recalled millions of the Cobalts and other small cars for an ignition defect that it has now linked to 13 deaths.

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(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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