Current Events

(Reuters) - Novo Nordisk will pay nearly $58.7 million to resolve claims the drugmaker’s sales staff downplayed the importance of U.S. Food and Drug Administration-mandated warnings about the cancer risks of its diabetes medication Victoza.

The U.
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Pet chicks and ducklings seem unlikely culprits in a serious public health problem. But they’re responsible for infecting more than 900 people with salmonella this year — the highest number to date, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency is investigating multistate outbreaks of salmonella infections linked to people who keep poultry in their backyards. As the local-food movement grows across the nation, more people are raising chickens, ducks and other birds. But along with the benefits of connecting with nature and easy access to fresh eggs comes the risk of disease.

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Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. It’s a staggering rise of more than 22 percent over the 52,404 drug deaths recorded the previous year — and even higher than The New York Times’s estimate in June, which was based on earlier preliminary data.

Drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, accompanied by an upturn in deaths involving cocaine and methamphetamine. Together they add up to an epidemic of drug overdoses that is killing people at a faster rate than the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.

(Reuters) - A U.S. judge said Yahoo must face nationwide litigation brought on behalf of well over 1 billion users who said their personal information was compromised in three massive data breaches.

Wednesday night’s decision from U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, was a setback for efforts by Verizon Communications Inc, which paid $4.76 billion for Yahoo’s Internet business in June, to limit potential liability.

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Wells Fargo & Co.’s disclosure Thursday that employees may have opened significantly more unauthorized accounts than previously stated could jeopardize a $142 million class-action settlement with customers that won preliminary approval from a judge in July.  

The scandal that helped hasten the lawsuit came to light almost a year ago, after regulators slapped Wells Fargo with fines of $185 million over its sales practices. Afterward, lawmakers called congressional hearings, and the bank named new leaders, clawed back executives’ pay and began an overhaul of its retail division. Wells Fargo’s stock lagged, and it lost its title as the world’s most valuable bank.
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Amazon blindsides competitors all the time. Now, it’s getting accused of blurring its customers’ vision.

The online behemoth has been slapped with a lawsuit from a couple in South Carolina who say they’re suffering from blurred vision, headaches and other symptoms after watching the solar eclipse last week through a faulty pair of eclipse glasses they bought on Amazon.

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The Food and Drug Administration has recalled 465,000 pacemakers after discovering security vulnerabilities that could let hackers reprogram the devices, potentially putting patient lives at risk.

Several devices from Abbott (formerly known as St. Jude Medical) are included in the recall, which the FDA says is intended as a "corrective action", including the Accent, Anthem, Accent MRI, Accent ST, Assurity, and Allure.

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Wells Fargo's fake accounts scandal expanded Thursday with the disclosure of roughly 1.4 million more potentially unauthorized accounts than the bank originally estimated when the embarrassing episode emerged nearly a year ago.

The announcement confirmed Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan's Aug. 22 forecast that the investigation likely would confirm wider consumer damage from the scandal by disclosing a new detail: unauthorized enrollment of customers in the bank's online bill payment system.

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Pet turtles have been linked to a multi-state outbreak of salmonella infections, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.

In an advisory, the CDC said from March to August there have been 37 cases and 16 hospitalizations across the country. New York state saw the most cases, reporting 11 people infected with salmonella.
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Medical device maker Abbott on Monday announced it is voluntarily recalling some 465,000 pacemakers to install a firmware update to patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the devices.

The recall affects six pacemaker models—Accent, Accent MRI, Accent ST, Allure, Anthem and Assurity—that Abbott acquired when it completed its purchase of St. Jude Medical last January.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit by a couple who claims defective eclipse glasses purchased through the online retailer damaged their eyes.

In the lawsuit, filed in federal court in South Carolina on Tuesday evening, Corey Payne and his fiancée, Kayla Harris, said they purchased a three-pack of eclipse glasses on Amazon in early August, assuming that the glasses would allow them to safely view the United States’ first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in a century on Aug. 21.
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