Current Events

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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GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK)’s anti-seizure drug Potiga now carries a black-box warning in the U.S. on risks including potential vision loss.

The warning, the most serious type the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issues, underscores risks of abnormalities in the eye, vision loss and skin discoloration, all of which may become permanent, the FDA said in a statement today. The revised label comes after the risks were flagged by the FDA in April.

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Sales of a promising leukemia drug, Iclusig, are being suspended because of “the risk of life-threatening blood clots and severe narrowing of blood vessels,” the Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday.

The drug, also known as ponatinib, has been linked to severe and sometimes fatal heart attacks and strokes, blindness and loss of blood flow in the extremities serious enough to require amputation. In some cases, the problems or deaths occurred as soon as two weeks after patients began taking the drug, the agency said in a statement. It also said some of the people affected had no risk factors for heart disease, and some were in their 20s.

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Terry, a construction worker from Bedford-Stuyvesant who left behind a 13-year-old son, was a healthy, active nonsmoker — and an avid Red Bull drinker, his grandmother Patricia Terry said.

“He drank that stuff all the time. He said it perked him up,” she recalled.

On the evening of Nov. 8, 2011, Terry was playing hoops in a gym at Stephen Decatur Middle School. After about 45 minutes, he gulped a can of Red Bull, became lightheaded and collapsed, records show.

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By some measures, Federico C. Vinas was a star surgeon. He performed three or four surgeries on a typical weekday at the Daytona Beach, Fla., hospital that employed him, and a review showed him to be nearly five times as busy as other neurosurgeons. The hospital paid him hundreds of thousands in incentive pay. In all, he earned as much as $1.9 million a year.

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Toyota agreed on Friday to a settlement with the families of two women in a fatal crash the morning after an Oklahoma jury became the first to find the company responsible for the unintended acceleration of a car.

The verdict came after Toyota had won its first three trials over the acceleration issue. Legal analysts said it could embolden plaintiffs in hundreds of other lawsuits that have been filed against the automaker.

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Liggett Group says it struck a $110 million deal with thousands of Florida smokers, announcing the first major out-of-court settlement of tobacco litigation stemming from a historic state court ruling.

The company, whose brands include Liggett Select and Pyramid, says it’s settled claims with more than 4,900 of the roughly 5,300 individual plaintiffs seeking compensation for cancers and other illnesses. The individual settlements range from four to six figures, depending on the illness and smoking habits of each plaintiff, industry experts said.

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Boston Salads and Provisions Company, Inc., of Boston, MA, is recalling approximately 222,959 pounds of ready-to-eat chicken salad products due to possible contamination with Listeria monocytogenes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced Thursday evening.

The products were produced between Aug. 23, 2013, and Oct. 14, 2013, and shipped to wholesalers for further distribution to retail locations in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. A list of the products subject to recall can be found here.

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CDC study looked at meningitis, other conditions in 6 hardest-hit states

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 23 (HealthDay News) -- The tainted steroid injections that caused a deadly meningitis outbreak last year seem to have triggered a broad range of symptoms in patients, according to a new study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since it began in September 2012, the outbreak of fungal meningitis has sickened 750 people in 20 states, resulting in 64 deaths, based on the latest CDC figures from last month.

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NEW YORK — Bank of America was found liable for fraud Wednesday for a program — dubbed "the Hustle" — that caused millions in losses to federally backed mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac amid fallout from the financial crisis.

The civil verdict by a Manhattan federal court jury similarly found the bank's Countrywide Financial unit found liable, and also determined that former Countrywide executive Rebecca Mairone committed fraud while overseeing the loan-origination program.

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Brake problems have prompted Nissan to recall about 153,000 sport utility vehicles from the 2013-14 model years and Suzuki to recall 210,000 motorcycles, the manufacturers have informed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The Nissan recall covers the 2013-14 Nissan Pathfinder, the 2013 Infiniti JX35 and the 2014 Infiniti QX60, according a report Nissan posted on the N.H.T.S.A. Web site. About 101,000 of those are Pathfinders. Nissan says that during light braking on rough roads, the antilock braking system can allow “stopping distances that are longer than customer’s expectation for the given pedal force. This may increase the risk of a crash.”

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