Current Events

Four surviving spouses of reverse mortgage borrowers filed a lawsuit this week against Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan claiming they faced undue harm due to reverse mortgage statute.

The lawsuit comes several months following a previous suit filed by AARP on behalf of non-borrowing spouses of reverse mortgage borrowers, in which a court ruled against HUD and granted relief to the plaintiffs, to be determined by the agency. HUD appealed the ruling, but the appeal was later thrown out.

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At age 17, La Monica Greene began using a novel contraceptive device. The St. Louis teenager had obtained a prescription for NuvaRing — a vaginal, once-a-month birth control ring.

Several weeks later, she died.

Her mother, Monica Greene, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the manufacturers and sellers of NuvaRing, which include Dutch and U.S. companies now owned by New Jersey-based Merck & Co. Inc.

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Updated 3/2/2014

Unfortunately, consumer safety is not the number one priority of car manufacturers. GM's reckless behavior in ignoring this product defect has tragically caused too many fatalities and serious injuries. Recall the Chevrolet corvair once proclaimed as " unsafe at any speed". Then came the Ford Pinto's explosive gas tank upon minor collision causing loss of life and catastrophic injuries. The bean counters calculate that its cheaper to ignore the fix of hazards and unsafe Product defects even those causing loss of life and limb.In this most recent example of callous indifference GM has finally been forced to acknowledge this unsafe condition and issue recalls of over 1,000,000 cars and finally issue a meaningless and long belated public apology. This likely being done to minimize the amount of any proposed fine to be imposed. This will no doubt be a meaningless fine compared to the profits earned and tremendous harms and losses caused to too many innocent victims and their families.Government agencies such as NHTSA  have too often dropped the ball and do not adequately protect the public from such dangers which have been allowed to persist for years. Justice and accountability will again depend upon our civil justice system in which jurors will be called upon to decide GM's fate and fairly and justly compensate the victims and their families and determine the amount of punitive damages necessary to punish GM and deter it and other manufacturers from behaving in such an irresponsible manner. In such circumstances the civil justice system becomes the real defender of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Laura Christian's 16-year-old daughter, Amber, died inside a Chevy Cobalt, on July 29, 2005.

"I went downstairs and my phone rang," Christian recalled. "Amber had been in an accident and she didn't make it."

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The Food and Drug Administration has failed to monitor the effectiveness of generics that make up 80 percent of medicines sold in the U.S., according to doctors and researchers who said new regulatory efforts aren’t enough.

Generic heart drugs made by some India-based companies don’t work as they should, said Preston Mason, a researcher at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston who has studied the effectiveness of copies of Pfizer Inc. (PFE)’s Lipitor made in the U.S. and abroad. That may be because some companies are cutting corners to save money, he said.

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General Motors will more than double the size of a recall issued this month for an ignition switch defect in some of its small cars, the automaker said in a news release Tuesday. The expansion brings the number of vehicles covered by the recall to nearly 1.4 million in the United States.

The recall is aimed at vehicles with ignition switches that could inadvertently turn off the engine and vehicle electrical system – disabling the air bags – if the ignition key is jarred or the vehicle’s operator has a heavy key ring attached to it.

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Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH didn’t disclose a data analysis to U.S. regulators that indicated the blood-thinner Pradaxa may have caused more fatal bleeding after it was cleared for sale than the drug did in a study used to win approval, unsealed court filings show.

Boehringer gave U.S. regulators one analysis of data gathered after the drug’s October 2010 approval that showed the number of people who died from bleeding was less than expected, according to internal documents made public in lawsuits over the product. The company didn’t share a second analysis showing a higher death rate, the documents show.

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Acetaminophen, the most common drug taken by pregnant women, may be linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children, according to a large but preliminary new study from Denmark.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, found the disorder was more likely to develop in children whose mothers took the medication while pregnant.

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- A consumer advocacy group is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to add a bold warning label to popular testosterone drugs for men in light of growing evidence that the hormone treatments can increase the risk of heart attack.

The group Public Citizen says the agency should immediately add a "black box" warning - the most serious type - to all testosterone medications and require manufacturers to warn physicians about a higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death with the treatments.

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An upscale Marin County meat purveyor is purchasing a troubled San Francisco Bay Area slaughterhouse at the center of a recall of nearly 9 million pounds of beef.

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General Motors in 2006 sent dealers a technical service bulletin warning that because of an ignition problem, a heavy key chain hanging from the ignition could turn off the engine on six models. But only two of those models were covered in last week’s recall of 778,000 vehicles in the United States and Canada for the problem that the automaker now says could keep air bags from deploying in a crash.

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