Current Events

When you buy a BMW i3 electric vehicle, you have the option to include a range-extending gas motor. The REx, as it's known in car-geek parlance, is a 34-horsepower, two-cylinder engine that provides juice to the battery to boost range from about 80 miles to somewhere around 150. But in certain conditions, engaging the REx can get...
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An outbreak of a life-threatening illness that has been linked to foods packaged by a processing plant in Washington State has prompted a large-scale voluntary recall of frozen fruits and vegetables marketed under 42 brand names.

The scale of the recall reflects the severity of the outbreak of the illness, listeria, and of concerns about how the contaminated food might have “trickled down” into other products, said Brittany Behm, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The processing plant, CRF Frozen Foods in Pasco, Wash., has voluntarily recalled more than 350 frozen foods — including carrots, onions, peaches and strawberries — that were sold in all 50 states and Canada. The recall began on April 23, with 11 frozen vegetables, but was significantly expanded on May 2.
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Taking pregabalin (Lyrica) during pregnancy may be associated with a higher risk of major birth defects, researchers found.

In a prospective, nonrandomized study, women who took pregabalin while pregnant were more likely to have babies with major birth defects (6.0%) compared with women who did not take the drug (2.1%; odds ratio 3.0, P=0.
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For the many folks concerned about cyberthieves hacking emails and stealing personal information from online accounts, here comes another worry:

A cyberattack on your car – while you’re driving.

That’s one of the threats outlined in a report on “Vehicle Cybersecurity” by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
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Another big name has surfaced in the tsunami of Flint water lawsuits: the NAACP,  which is suing several state officials and two engineering firms, alleging they poisoned a city with toxic drinking water by failing to detect that something was wrong, pretending a problem didn't exist and ignoring numerous red flags.

"Just the color of Flint's water should have led any reasonable engineer to the conclusion that Flint's pipes were dangerously corroded," the 103-page lawsuit states.

The NAACP announced the lawsuit today,  though it was filed on March 31 in U.S. District Court, where at least two dozen other Flint-related lawsuits are pending.
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New research presented this week at the American Thoracic Society’s annual meeting suggests that the ongoing opioid crisis is making waves across the country’s intensive care units (ICU) every bit as much as it is inside people’s homes.

The authors analyzed hospital admissions from 2011 to 2015 for adults over the age of 18 in a nationwide healthcare system, Vizient, Inc. Out of 272 hospitals, there were 17.6 million admissions throughout the study period, with 41,369 related to an opioid overdose. While that figure may seem miniscule in the grand scheme of things, the rate of opioid-related admissions has steadily increased 42 percent since 2009.
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Eating potatoes four or more times a week may increase the risk for high blood pressure, a large new study has found.

Researchers pooled results from three observational studies involving 187,453 men and women followed for more than 25 years. The participants returned health and diet questionnaires every two years, including whether a doctor had diagnosed hypertension. The study is in BMJ.

After controlling for body mass index, physical activity, smoking and other factors, they found that compared to eating potatoes only once a month, having one potato — baked, boiled or mashed — four to six times a week increased the risk for hypertension by 11 percent.
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DETROIT -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is extending its oversight of General Motors' safety practices for another year as part of a sweeping consent order signed in 2014 when the company issued a broad recall of cars for faulty ignition switches.

Paul Hemmersbaugh, chief counsel at NHTSA, said Tuesday that the agency unilaterally extended the order for a third and final year and that terms of the oversight won't change. He was a panelist at Crain’s General & In-House Counsel Summit here on Tuesday.

GM, Hemmersbaugh said, thought it was appropriate to have another year of oversight.

“It isn’t that GM has done anything in particular that is to warrant this, it’s just that they think it’s productive, too, and so we’ve extended it for a year,” he said.
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A National Transportation Safety Board report about an Amtrak train accident last year in Philadelphia that killed eight people highlights the need for railroads to move faster to install a life-saving technology that the safety board first recommended decades ago.

Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train No. 188 derailed on May 12, 2015 because it entered a curve at 106 miles per hour, more than twice the speed at which it should have been traveling. The safety board said it appears that the engineer operating the train, Brandon Bostian, did not realize the train was approaching that curve because he was distracted by radio transmissions about another train. More than 200 people were injured in the derailment.
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National Transportation Safety Board members clashed Tuesday over what caused last year’s fatal Amtrak derailment near Philadelphia, before the split body pinned blame on the speeding engineer.

The board voted, 3-1, in finding that Train 188 crashed because the operator failed to notice his speed had reached 106 mph, hitting a 50 mph curve just north of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

Board vice chairwoman T. Bella Dinh-Zarr cast the dissenting vote after she had proposed shifting primary blame to the train’s lack of state-of-the-art GPS technology known as Positive Train Control (PTC).

“Positive train control would have provided this critical redundancy that would have prevented the accident,” Dinh-Zarr said.
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Japanese air bag manufacturer Takata Corp on Monday filed reports with U.S. auto safety regulators declaring nearly 14 million air bag inflators defective.

Earlier this month, Takata said it would expand recalls for defective air bag inflators by 35 million to 40 million in several tranches through 2019, adding to the 28.8 million recalled before May 4.
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