Current Events

Both sides of Wells Fargo & Co.’s $142 million settlement over its fake-accounts scandal made last-ditch efforts to salvage the class-action pact after a federal judge voiced misgivings about some of its terms.

Lawyers for the bank and customers submitted new information late Wednesday in an attempt to address U.S District Judge Vince Chhabria’s concerns that the deal shortchanges consumers and gives the lender protection from other legal claims.

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Davis Cripe left home April 26 an active and healthy teenage boy, but in art class that afternoon he fell to his knees and told worried classmates that he felt lightheaded.

He passed out on the floor and was rushed to a nearby hospital. By 3:30 p.m., around the time the final bell rang at school, he was dead.
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By the end of December, a lethal bacterium had swept through UC Irvine Medical Center’s intensive care unit, sickening seven infants. Dr. Susan Huang, the hospital’s infection control expert, had a plan.

The strategy — which she had promoted so successfully that most U.S.
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When Medicare was facing an impossible $13 trillion funding gap, Congress opted for a bold fix: It handed over part of the program to insurance companies, expecting them to provide better care at a lower cost. The new program was named Medicare Advantage.

Nearly 15 years later, a third of all Americans who receive some form of Medicare have chosen the insurer-provided version, which, by most accounts, has been a success.

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 The Supreme Court sided with a Kentucky nursing home Monday in a case challenging the use of forced arbitration agreements in nursing home admissions.

In a 7-1 ruling, the justices said the lower court violated the Federal Arbitration Act when it declined to give effect to the agreements Beverly Wellner and Janis Clark had signed with power of attorney on behalf of their relatives.

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Raylene Hollrah was 33, with a young daughter, when she learned she had breast cancer. She made a difficult decision, one she hoped would save her life: She had her breasts removed, underwent grueling chemotherapy and then had reconstructive surgery.

In 2013, six years after her first diagnosis, cancer struck again — not breast cancer, but a rare malignancy of the immune system — caused by the implants used to rebuild her chest.

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Fiat Chrysler said early Friday that it would recall more than 1.25 million Ram pickup trucks to fix a software bug that could cause certain airbags and seatbelts to fail in rollover crashes.

The automaker said it had identified two crashes involving one death and two injuries that could be connected to the error.

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Healthcare conglomerate Johnson & Johnson said on Monday the U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation concerning management and advisory services provided to rheumatology and gastroenterology practices that bought two of its drugs.

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A federal judge in New Jersey has declined to dismiss most of a lawsuit by car buyers in 22 states accusing Volkswagen AG, Audi AG and their U.S. subsidiaries of hiding an engine defect that allegedly caused cars to lose power on the road.

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Of the more than 200 drugs cleared by the FDA between 2001 and 2010, nearly one-third exhibited safety risks that were only identified after their approval, according to a new study published in JAMA.

To be clear, most of the concerns were not severe enough for a recall (only three drugs were withdrawn from the market). In the vast majority of cases, a postmarket safety event resulted in “a black box warning, or drug safety communication issued by the FDA to let physicians and patients know that new safety information has been determined," Joseph Ross, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.

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A patient taking an experimental cancer drug from Kite Pharma died after experiencing severe brain swelling, the company said Monday.

The news sparked alarm on the heels of a series of patient deaths at competitor Juno Therapeutics, which is developing the same type of cutting-edge cancer immunotherapy, called CAR-T.  The report may raise caution about the immunotherapy drugs that have sparked sky-high hopes even as their downsides have become increasingly apparent.

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