Current Events

The open-door helicopter tour in which five people died in a crash landing in the East River off Manhattan on Sunday was operating under safety restrictions reserved for photography flights that are looser than those for commercial air-tour rides.

Federal regulations exempt certain operations, including crop-dusting and aerial firefighting, from some of the safety rules that apply to commercial operators. It includes “aerial photography or survey” operations in that category.

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(Reuters) - Yahoo has been ordered by a federal judge to face much of a lawsuit in the United States claiming that the personal information of all 3 billion users was compromised in a series of data breaches.

In a decision on Friday night, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California rejected a bid by Verizon Communications Inc, which bought Yahoo’s Internet business last June, to dismiss many claims, including for negligence and breach of contract.

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The lawyer who filed notice of a lawsuit on behalf of a student shot five times in the massacre at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School says he expects to be filing legal papers for more families of victims soon.

Lawyer Alex Arreaza told USA TODAY that evidence increasingly reveals mistakes by the Broward County Sheriff's Office and school district leading up to the Feb. 14 rampage that killed 17 people. Nikolas Cruz, 19, a former student at the Parkland school, has admitted to the shootings, authorities say.

"They failed those kids completely, right from the beginning," Arreaza said.
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Hundreds of families’ dreams of having a baby using frozen eggs or embryos may have been dashed due to a storage tank malfunction at an Ohio fertility center.

The temperature in one of the site’s two liquid nitrogen tanks storing specimens at University Hospitals’ UH Fertility Center in suburban Cleveland rose above acceptable limits overnight Saturday, according to the Plain Dealer.

The liquid nitrogen freezer held about 2,000 egg and embryo specimens, according to James Liu, chairman of the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UH Cleveland Medical Center. Some patients had more than one sample stored. Some of the samples were provided in the 1980s.
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As tens of thousands of Americans die from prescription opioid overdoses each year, an exclusive analysis by CNN and researchers at Harvard University found that opioid manufacturers are paying physicians huge sums of money -- and the more opioids a doctor prescribes, the more money he or she makes.

In 2014 and 2015, opioid manufacturers paid hundreds of doctors across the country six-figure sums for speaking, consulting and other services. Thousands of other doctors were paid over $25,000 during that time.

Physicians who prescribed particularly large amounts of the drugs were the most likely to get paid.

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Top public-health officials descended on Capitol Hill last Thursday to sound the alarm about a grim future without antibiotics. These life-saving drugs are losing their mojo as germs adapt to them. It’s a process scientists call antibiotic resistance.

In the US, 2 million people a year catch drug-resistant infections, 23,000 die and the toll “is growing, ” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Most are hospital patients.
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NEW YORK/TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. consumers have filed a lawsuit against Kobe Steel Ltd (5406.T) and Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) accusing the companies of violating consumer protection laws and engaging in fraud by concealing the use of substandard metal components in vehicles.
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More than 142,000 people were taken to emergency departments for opioid overdoses during a recent 15-month period, the latest sign the drug epidemic continues to worsen despite the efforts of public health authorities.

The 142,557 emergency visits in 45 states marked a nearly 30 percent increase between the third quarter of 2016 and the same period of 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. In 16 states that have suffered high rates of overdose deaths, the jump was even higher, at 34.5 percent. No region or demographic group was spared, and two states — Wisconsin and Delaware — saw overdose visits to their emergency rooms more than double.
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Thomas “Bud” Brown makes his way out the back door and stops a few steps to the right, raising a trembling arm, pointing at something. It’s where he found his boy slumped against the cold back wall of the house around 7:15 a.m. on the last day of 2016, bleeding out.

Brown is telling the story now, about how he was sitting in his chair in the living room when he heard the shot.
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Equifax Inc., the credit bureau breached by hackers last year, said the card-payments industry may cut off its access to certain data or impose fines if the company can’t prove it’s addressed weaknesses.

Equifax disclosed the latest fallout from the cyber attack in a regulatory filing on Thursday, hours after announcing it had identified more consumers affected by the hacking. To tap into certain data or accept payments via cards, companies must maintain so-called ISO certifications. In light of the breach, an international organization overseeing that process suspended some of the firm’s certifications, requiring it take steps to retain them, Equifax said

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday that a new task force would target drug manufacturers and distributors for their roles in the opioid epidemic, raising the possibility of filing criminal charges against them.

The Justice Department also said it would file a statement of interest in hundreds of lawsuits against drug companies brought by cities, counties and medical institutions seeking reimbursement for the cost of the drug crisis. Sessions said the Justice Department would seek repayment as well, arguing that the federal government has borne substantial costs.

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