Current Events

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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The lawsuit was filed by Angela W., a woman from Marion County, Indiana who was injured by the Celect® Inferior Vena Cava Filter (“IVC Filter”) manufactured by Cook Medical and William Cook Europe ApS.

The IVC Filter was surgically implanted in her inferior vena cava for the purpose of preventing a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lungs).

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Drugmakers are racing to scoop up patient health records and strike deals with technology companies as big data analytics start to unlock a trove of information about how medicines perform in the real world.

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BOSTON (Reuters) - A Massachusetts pharmacist was sentenced on Wednesday to eight years in prison after being convicted on racketeering and fraud charges stemming from his role in a 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak that killed 76 people and sickened hundreds more.

Glenn Chin, the former supervisory pharmacist at New England Compounding Center, was convicted by a federal jury in Boston in October but was cleared of second-degree murder charges, which would have exposed him to a maximum prison sentence of life.

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>BOSTON (Reuters) - A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced Aegerion Pharmaceuticals Inc for improperly marketing a cholesterol drug and ordered that some of the $40.1 million it agreed to pay to resolve a U.S. investigation go to the company’s victims.

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The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple Inc. violated securities laws concerning its disclosures about a software update that slowed older iPhone models, according to people familiar with the matter.

The government has requested information from the company, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the probe is private.
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In October 2003, Billy Wayne Woods and his family packed into a luxury $181,000 motorhome for a fun getaway to Florida. Call it a textbook American vacation: their destination was Disney World, and with his wife, Shirley, his son and daughter-in law and two grandchildren in tow, the trip would surely be one to remember. But on the return home for the Alabama family, the vacation took an abrupt turn for disaster.

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(Reuters Health) - For black people, smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day is tied to a higher risk of developing diabetes, a U.S. study suggests.

While previous research has found that smokers and black people both have higher risks of diabetes than nonsmokers and individuals from other racial and ethnic backgrounds, the current study offers fresh evidence that the amount of cigarette use can impact this risk.

Researchers examined data on 2,991 black adults who didn’t have diabetes, including 361 who were current smokers and 502 who were ex-smokers.
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Was Autopilot on when a Tesla Model S smashed into the back of a parked Culver City fire truck on the 405 Freeway on Monday in broad daylight?

That's what the driver told police. Tesla Inc. — which would have such information because it monitors car and driver behavior over wireless networks — has not yet said yes or no.

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