Current Events

Some widely used over-the-counter cold and flu medicines may be exposing patients to unexpectedly high amounts of one ingredient, revealing a lapse in regulations and perhaps raising safety concerns, a company that develops such drugs reported on Wednesday.

The company, AFT Pharmaceuticals of New Zealand, said that when the nasal decongestant phenylephrine, or PE, was combined with the pain reliever acetaminophen, levels of PE in the blood were two to four times as high as when the same dose of PE was taken alone.

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Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY) and Sanofi were accused in a lawsuit by Hawaii of failing to disclose that the blood-thinning drug Plavix has little effect on 30 percent of the population and puts patients at risk for gastrointestinal bleeding.

From 38 percent to 79 percent of Pacific-Islanders and 40 percent to 50 percent of East Asians may respond poorly to Plavix because of a genetic predisposition to inadequately metabolize the drug, Hawaii Attorney General David Louie said in an e-mailed statement. The companies failed to disclose the information to protect their profit from Plavix prescriptions, he said in a complaint today in state court in Honolulu.

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It was a moment unlike any other at General Motors: the top executive stepping — personally and publicly — into the middle of one of the gravest safety problems in the company’s history.

But there was Mary T. Barra on Tuesday, barely two months into her job as chief executive, pledging to fix faulty ignition switches linked to 12 deaths and to explain why the automaker failed for 10 years to correct a problem it knew existed.

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Investigators Tuesday said they discovered a crack in the gas main outside the two buildings destroyed by last week's deadly explosion in East Harlem, an indication that a failure in the main caused the catastrophe.

In a carefully worded statement, the National Transportation Safety Board said the 8-inch cast iron and plastic main under the street "failed the pressure test," which showed that the low-pressure pipe had a leak "adjacent to" 1646 Park Ave., one of the destroyed buildings.

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A raft of lawsuits by more than 75 Apollo area residents claiming they contracted cancer from a neighboring nuclear fuel factory's plumes of radioactive uranium dust continues to move toward jury trials, with a new deadline in the case this week.

On Wednesday, the alleged victims' lawyers will continue fighting to have jurors -- if and when the individual cases reach trial -- to hear the expert testimony of Steve Wing. Mr. Wing, a radiation safety officer with a doctorate in physics and radiological sciences, has previously told the courts that both the Apollo uranium-processing facility and its fellow Parks plutonium factory founded by Nuclear Materials and Equipment Co., and later owned by Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group and Atlantic Richfield Co., "regularly emitted large amounts of radioactive material into the environment through airborne stack emissions, unfiltered stack emissions, ventilation problems" and other handling mistakes and that "these releases regularly and consistently exceeded federal regulatory limits," according to court documents.

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Wells Fargo created an elaborate guide for how to produce missing documents to foreclose on homeowners, according to a lawsuit that has caught the attention of state and federal regulators.

The bank denies wrongdoing, but the allegations rekindle claims that lenders, including Wells Fargo, used forged and shoddy paperwork during the recession to quickly foreclose on struggling homeowners, a practice known as “robo-signing.” Those charges led to a $25 billion national mortgage settlement that was supposed to put an end to such abusive practices, but bankruptcy lawyer Linda Tirelli says nothing has changed.

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Toyota is poised to pay more than $1 billion to settle a criminal investigation into disclosures around the sudden acceleration of its vehicles, a steep fine that caps a multiyear inquiry and provides a template for the authorities pursuing a similar case against General Motors.

While the government’s deal with Toyota is not yet final, it could be announced as soon as Wednesday, according to a person briefed on the matter. The Justice Department has scheduled a news conference for 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.

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An Indian company that says it supplies ingredients for major drugmakers was warned by U.S. regulators for forging test results and failing to properly clean equipment.

The Food and Drug Administration is stepping up enforcement in India where growing quality concerns have led the agency to ban U.S. sales from some factories. Canton Laboratories Private Ltd. of Vadodara, India, was warned in a letter dated Feb. 27 for a variety of manufacturing practices, including reporting results for tests it never performed to measure microorganisms in active ingredients and failing to ensure equipment was cleaned to prevent contamination.

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The U.S. attorney's office in New York has opened a criminal probe into the circumstances surrounding the General Motors ignition switch recall, according to reports on Tuesday by Reuters and the Associated Press, citing sources who asked not to be identified because the investigation is not public.

Federal prosecutors will examine, according to the reports, whether GM is criminally liable in the timing and handling of the switch problems that led to the recall last month of 1.37 million cars in the U.S. and a total of 1.62 million worldwide.

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Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (TEVA) agreed to pay the U.S. and Illinois $27.6 million to resolve allegations that its units illegally paid a doctor to prescribe a dangerous antipsychotic drug to patients in federal care programs.

Units of Teva, the biggest maker of generic drugs, violated the U.S. False Claims Act by seeking to induce prescriptions of generic clozapine for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries by agreeing to pay $50,000 to an Illinois doctor and providing trips to Miami for him, his family and his employees, according to a Justice Department statement.

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Federal safety officials on Thursday ordered child seat maker Graco to explain why it decided to exclude seven infant seat models from its recall of 3.8 million child seats last month and to hand over a trove of other related information.

In the child seats recalled, the buckles may not unlatch, making it difficult to remove the child from the seat. That could increase the risk of injury in a crash, fire or other emergency when a speedy exit from the vehicle is required.

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