Current Events

General Motors announced a pair of recalls Thursday covering more than 12,000 vehicles.

The first recall is for 8,519 Chevy Malibu sedans from the 2013 model year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said one or more bolts in the vehicles' rear suspension may not have been fastened tight enough.

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Toyota Motor on Wednesday announced recalls involving more than 1 million vehicles in the U.S.

Some 752,000 Corolla and Corolla Matrix cars in the U.S. and thousands of similar vehicles in Japan, Mexico and Canada that were manufactured from December 2001 to May 2004 are being recalled for air bags that can improperly inflate.

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A federal judge in New Orleans accepted an agreement for BP to plead guilty to manslaughter and other charges and pay a record fine in connection with the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which ranks as one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters.

The agreement, announced in November, allowed a unit of the London-based oil giant to plead guilty Tuesday to 11 counts of seaman’s manslaughter in connection with the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the gulf. The company also entered a guilty plea to one felony count of obstruction of Congress and two environmental misdemeanors.

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Johnson & Johnson executives knew years before they recalled a troubled artificial hip in 2010 that it had a critical design flaw, but the company concealed that information from physicians and patients, according to internal documents disclosed on Friday during a trial related to the device’s failure.

The company had received complaints from doctors about the device, the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R., even as it started marketing a version of it in the United States in 2005. The A.S.R.’s flaw caused it to shed large quantities of metallic debris after implantation, and the model failed an internal test in 2007 in which engineers compared its performance to that of another of the company’s hip implants, the documents show.

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Olean General Hospital announced Thursday it mailed letters to 1,915 patients after an internal review raised the possibility that some of them may have received an injection from another patient’s insulin pen.

The issue follows recent news that 716 patients at the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Medical Center may have been exposed to HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C because of the inadvertent reuse of insulin pens that were intended to be used only once.

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An internal analysis conducted by Johnson & Johnson in 2011 not long after it recalled a troubled hip implant estimated that the all-metal device would fail within five years in nearly 40 percent of patients who received it, newly disclosed court records show.

Johnson & Johnson never released those projections for the device, the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R., which the company recalled in mid-2010. But at the same time that the medical products giant was performing that analysis, it was publicly playing down similar findings from a British implant registry about the device’s early failure rate.

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Target Corp. has announced a massive recall of children's pajamas because the items failed to meet U.S. federal flammability standards for children's sleepwear. An announcement was issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

On Jan. 15, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced a recall with cooperation of Target Corp. In this voluntary recall, 560,000 sets of children's pajamas were affected.

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Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which is fighting more than 10,000 lawsuits over its recalled hip implants, is negotiating a potential settlement with patients that may eventually total more than $2 billion, according to five people familiar with the matter.

J&J, the world’s biggest seller of health-care products, offered to pay more than $200,000 a case, according to the people, a deal which could exceed $2 billion if most plaintiffs accept the terms. Lawyers for hip recipients have so far rejected the offer as too low, the people said.

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Metal hip implants, the subject of thousands of consumer lawsuits, will have to navigate a longer U.S. review process and should only be offered to patients after safer options are considered, government regulators said.

The proposed tightening of regulations by the Food and Drug Administration would apply to metal-on-metal hip implants, which have a higher danger of causing tissue damage and complications than similar devices made from different material. Makers of all-metal, total-hip replacement products will now have to file approval applications for the strictest level of agency device review, the FDA said today in a statement on its website.

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After an estimated 500,000 patients in the United States have received a type of artificial hip that is failing early in many cases, the Food and Drug Administration is proposing rules that could stop manufacturers from selling such implants.

Under the proposal, which the agency is expected to announce on Thursday, makers of artificial hips with all-metal components would have to prove the devices were safe and effective before they could continue selling existing ones or obtain approval for new all-metal designs.

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The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released a sharply worded warning letter to St. Jude Medical in which it said it might soon fine or take other actions against the company for failing to address agency concerns about a widely used heart device component.

The component — an electrical wire, or lead, called the Durata — connects an implanted defibrillator to a patient’s heart. In the letter, dated Jan. 10, the agency said that St. Jude had failed to address a variety of concerns about the component arising from an F.D.A. inspection last fall of a company factory in California.

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