The Justice Department announced today that General Electric Hitachi Nuclear Energy Americas LLC (GE Hitachi) has agreed to pay $2.7 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act that it made false statements and claims to the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) concerning an advanced nuclear reactor design.

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with SD Staffing LLC (SD Staffing), aka Atwork Personnel Services Inc., a company based in Methuen, Mass., resolving claims that the staffing company engaged in citizenship status discrimination in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Sanborn Map Company Inc. has agreed to pay $2.1 million to the U.S. government to resolve allegations that it submitted false claims in connection with U. S. Army Corps of Engineers contracts.

The heads of the antitrust agencies of the United States, Canada and Mexico – Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, Chairwoman Edith Ramirez of the Federal Trade Commission, Canadian Commissioner of Competition John Pecman and President Alejandra Palacios Prieto of the Mexican Federal Competition Commission – met today in Washington, D.C., to discuss their mutual efforts to ensure continued effective antitrust enforcement cooperation in our increasingly interconnected markets.

Three individuals charged in connection with operating a series of fraudulent business opportunity companies pleaded guilty this week in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Mitchell Berman (aka Brian Griffin) of Boca Raton, Fla., and Robert Gallo (aka Bobby Pace, Vincent Pastone, Joe Barone, Bobby Marino, Anthony Russo) of Coconut Creek, Fla., pleaded guilty this morning to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud.

The Barrio Azteca Lieutenant who ordered the murders of a U.S. Consulate employee, her husband and the husband of another U.S. Consulate employee was found guilty by a jury on all counts charged.

The Department of Justice announced that this morning John W. Ng, 58, of Albuquerque, N.M., made his initial appearance in federal court on a criminal complaint charging him with a hate crime offense.

American Family Care Inc. has agreed to pay the government $1.2 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act that it knowingly submitted claims to Medicare for outpatient office visits that were billed at a higher rate than was appropriate.

As we convene this morning, I know we’re all mindful of yesterday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood. I am being regularly briefed on the situation and have directed that the full resources of the Department of Justice and the FBI be made available to ensure the security of everyone on base. We will work with local officials and the Department of Defense to provide assistance to those who need it and to help conduct a full and thorough federal investigation.

Despite significant challenges, the past year has been characterized by remarkable progress – from expanding civil rights for all Americans to holding private corporations accountable for wrongdoing. In the financial sector, concerns have been raised recently about a practice called “high-frequency trading.”

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with Potter Concrete, a company based in Dallas, resolving claims that the company engaged in a pattern or practice of document abuse in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with SK Food Group Inc., a company based in Seattle, resolving claims that the company used discriminatory document practices when verifying the work authority of non-citizens.

Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, aka “Benny,” “Farmero,” “51,” “Guero,” “Pecas,” “Tury,” and “86,” 35, of Chihuahua, Mexico, the Barrio Azteca Lieutenant who ordered the March 2010 murders of a U.S. Consulate employee, her husband and the husband of another U.S. Consulate employee, was sentenced today to serve life in prison.

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with Mexico Foods LLC, aka El Rancho Corp., a supermarket chain based in Garland, Texas, resolving claims that the company engaged in discrimination during the employment eligibility verification process in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with Master Klean Janitorial, a company based in Denver, resolving claims that the company engaged in a pattern or practice of discriminatory documentary requests based on citizenship status in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Swisspartners Investment Network AG, a Swiss-based asset management firm, and three of its wholly-owned subsidiaries (collectively, the Swisspartners Group), entered into a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and agreed to pay $4.4 million to the United States.

The owner and operator of a Tennessee salvage and demolition company, A&E Salvage Inc., pleaded guilty today in federal court in Greeneville, Tennessee, for conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act.

Evgeniy Bogachev and the members of his criminal network devised and implemented the kind of cyber crimes that you might not believe if you saw them in a science fiction movie. By secretly implanting viruses on computers around the world, they built a network of infected machines – or “bots” – that they could infiltrate, spy on, and even control, from anywhere they wished.

A former Coöperatieve Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank B.A. (Rabobank) Japanese Yen derivatives trader pleaded guilty today for his role in a conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud by manipulating Rabobank’s Yen London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR) submissions to benefit his trading positions

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with Commercial Cleaning Systems, a janitorial services company with headquarters in Denver. The agreement resolves claims that the company discriminated against work-authorized non-U.S. citizens in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)

The Justice Department announced that Christopher Hall, a former sergeant for the Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Macon State Prison (MSP) in Oglethorpe, Georgia, and two former CERT officers, Ronald Lach and Delton Rushin, were convicted on Friday night by a federal jury on federal offenses related to the beating of an MSP inmate in 2010 and the cover-up that followed

BNP Paribas S.A. (BNPP), a global financial institution headquartered in Paris, pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge Lorna G. Schofield in the Southern District of New York to a one-count information charging the bank with conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), for its role in processing billions of dollars of U.S. dollar transactions through the U.S. financial system on behalf of Sudanese, Iranian, and Cuban entities subject to U.S. economic sanctions from 2004 through 2012

Attorney General Eric Holder and United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara announced today the completion of the Justice Department’s multi-year civil investigation pursuant to the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (“CRIPA”) into the conditions of confinement of adolescent male inmates on Rikers Island. The investigation, which focused on use of force by staff, inmate-on-inmate violence, and use of punitive segregation during the period 2011-2013, concluded that there is a pattern and practice of conduct at Rikers Island that violates the rights of adolescents protected by the Eighth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The investigation found that adolescent inmates are not adequately protected from physical harm due to the rampant use of unnecessary and excessive force by New York City Department of Correction (“DOC”) staff and violence inflicted by other inmates

The Justice Department announced today that it reached an agreement with Isabella Geriatric Center (IGC), a nursing home located in New York City, resolving a claim that IGC engaged in a pattern or practice of citizenship discrimination during the employment eligibility reverification process in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Today, a federal grand jury in Milwaukee returned a 15-count superseding indictment charging two Milwaukee men, Paul Carter aka “Pimpin’ Paul” and David Moore aka “King David” with conspiracy, sex trafficking and related offenses spanning from the years 2007 to 2013

McKesson Corporation has agreed to pay $18 million to resolve allegations that it improperly set temperature monitors used in shipping vaccines under its contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Justice Department announced today. McKesson is a pharmaceutical distributor with corporate headquarters in San Francisco

Attorney General Eric Holder released the following statement Thursday following his meeting earlier today with President Obama to discuss the latest developments in Ferguson, Missouri

The Justice Department reached an agreement today with Real Time Staffing Services LLC, doing business as Select Staffing, a company based in Santa Barbara, California. The settlement resolves the department’s claims that Select Staffing discriminated against work-authorized non-U.S. citizens in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The following statement was released Sunday by Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon concerning the federal civil rights investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

A former Coöperatieve Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank B.A. (Rabobank) Japanese Yen London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR) submitter pleaded guilty today for his role in a conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud by manipulating Rabobank’s Yen LIBOR submissions to benefit trading positions

Attorney General Eric Holder released the following statement Monday following his briefing of President Obama on the latest developments in the federal civil rights investigation in Ferguson, Missouri

Political consultant Gregory Naylor, 66, of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty today to making false statements to federal agents and misprision of a felony in connection with his role in attempting to conceal two campaign finance-related fraud schemes

The Justice Department announced today that it reached an agreement with Culinaire International, a catering and restaurant management company headquartered in Houston, Texas, resolving a claim that Culinaire engaged in citizenship discrimination during the employment eligibility reverification process in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

John Francis Mills, the owner of more than a dozen properties in Malone, New York, and Terrance Allen, the maintenance manager of Mills’ properties, were sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McAvoy to serve 21 months each in prison for conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act standards for the safe removal of asbestos.

On January 15, 2009, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISC-R) published an unclassified version of its opinion in In Re: Directives Pursuant to Section 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 551 F.3d 1004 (Foreign Intel. Surv. Ct. Rev. 2008). The classified version of the opinion was issued on August 22, 2008, following a challenge by Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!) to directives issued under the Protect America Act of 2007 (PAA). Today, following a renewed declassification review, the Executive Branch is publicly releasing various documents from this litigation, including legal briefs and additional sections of the 2008 FISC-R opinion, with appropriate redactions to protect national security information. These documents are available at the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), www.dni.gov; and ODNI’s public website dedicated to fostering greater public visibility into the intelligence activities of the U.S. Government, IContheRecord.tumblr.com. A summary of the underlying litigation follows.

Though it issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for anti-malaria drugs to treat or prevent coronavirus (COVID-19), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reiterated its warning about the known side effects of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, including serious and potentially life-threatening heart rhythm problems.

Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials are key consumer target groups for marketers, with three different sets of needs and buying propensities; it’s important that brands define their unique selling propositions.

Latest innovation in quadrivalent meningococcal vaccination designed for use in persons 2 years of age and older in the U.S.

by Derek Willis

In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.

However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.

The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”

PILF regularly sues state and local election officials to force them to purge some voters from registration rolls, including those it claims have duplicate registrations from another state or who are dead. It is headed by J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney who was a member of the Trump administration’s disbanded commission on election integrity.

The report describes as “missing” all mail ballots that were delivered to a valid address but not returned to be counted. In a statement accompanying the report, Adams said that unaccounted-for ballots “represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat.” In particular, the organization argues that the number of unreturned ballots would grow if more states adopt voting by mail.

Experts who study voting and use the same data PILF used in the report, which is from the Election Administration and Voting Survey produced by the federal Election Assistance Commission, say that it’s wrong to describe unreturned ballots as missing.

“Election officials ‘know’ what happened to those ballots,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College, who is the director of the Early Voting Information Center, a research group based there. “They were received by eligible citizens and not filled out. Where are they now? Most likely, in landfills,” Gronke said by email.

A recent RealClear Politics article based on the PILF report suggested that an increase in voting by mail this year could make the kind of fraud uncovered in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in 2018 more likely. In that case, a political consultant to a Republican candidate was indicted on charges of absentee ballot fraud for overseeing a paid ballot collection operation. “The potential to affect elections by chasing down unused mail-in ballots and make sure they get counted — using methods that may or may not be legal — is great,” the article argues.

PILF’s report was mentioned in other news outlets including the Grand Junction Sentinel in Colorado, “PBS NewsHour” and the New York Post. The Washington Times repeated the inaccurate claim of 1 million undeliverable mail ballots.

In a statement, the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy group, challenged the characterization of the 28.3 million ballots as missing. Of those ballots, 12 million were mailed by election officials in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which by law send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter, roughly 30% of which are not returned for any given election. “Conflating voters choosing not to cast their ballots with ‘missing’ ballots is a fundamental flaw,” the statement reads.

In an interview, Logan Churchwell, the communications director for PILF, acknowledged the error in the number of undelivered ballots, but defended the report’s conclusions, saying that it showed potential vulnerabilities in the voting system. “Election officials send these ballots out in the mail, and for them to say ‘I have no idea what happened after that’ speaks more to the investments they haven’t made to track them,” he said in a telephone interview.

But 36 states have adopted processes where voters and local officials can track the status of mail ballots through delivery, much like they can track packages delivered to a home. Churchwell said there are other explanations why mail ballots are not returned and that state and local election officials could report more information about the status of mail ballots. “If you know a ballot got to a house, you can credibly say that ballot’s status is not unknown,” he said.

The EAVS data has been published after every general election since 2004, although not every local jurisdiction provides complete responses to its questions.

In the data, election officials are asked to provide the number of mail ballots sent to voters, the number returned to be counted and the number of ballots returned as undeliverable by the U.S. Postal Service, which provides specific ballot-tracking services. The survey also asks for the number of ballots that are turned in or invalidated by voters who chose to cast their ballots in person. It asks officials to report the number of ballots that do not fit into any of those categories, or are “otherwise unable to be tracked by your office.”

Gronke described the last category as “a placeholder for elections officials to put numbers so that the whole column adds up,” and said that there was no evidence to support calling those ballots a pathway to large-scale voter fraud.

Numerous academic studies have shown that cases of voter fraud are extremely rare, although they do occur, and that fraud in mail voting seems to occur more often than with in-person voting.

Supplies of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, sertraline, are returning to stock after manufacturers reported “industry-wide” supply challenges, exacerbated by export bans and border closures implemented as a result of COVID-19. 

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All the most important developments in the COVID-19 pandemic for pharmacists and their teams, as they happen.

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April 20, 2020 – With additional changes to the regulations still in administrative review and businesses grappling with pressing COVID-19 issues, a group of nearly 100 advertising trade associations, organizations and companies asked California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) to delay the July 1 enforcement date for the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). But it […]

Temple University researchers discovered that boosting levels of a protein called Lin28 in injured spinal cords of mice prompts the regrowth of axons and repairs communication between the brain and body. They believe the discovery could be used to develop new treatments for both spinal cord and optic nerve injuries.

Come on in, the water’s warm. After billions already raised by VC firms since the advent of the pandemic for life science companies, Oberland Capital has tossed more than $1 billion into the pot.

Sanofi and Regeneron’s Dupixent has become a popular treatment for atopic dermatitis and asthma. Now, a research team in Japan has discovered that IL-4 and its receptor—which Dupixent inhibits—could be promising targets for treating the eye disease age-related macular degeneration.

Researchers working with a group of postmenopausal women found that a technology using casein to encapsulate calcium nanoparticles reduced GI issues compared with more conventional calcium carbonate or calcium citrate supplements.

What is this recommendation about? Obviously this recommendation is an attempt of the Commission to manage administative barriers to placing PPE (personal protective equipment) and medical devices on the market that would be needed in the struggle to get the current Covid-19 pandemic under control. In my view you can also see this as a […]

When it rains guidance, it pours. The MDCG just released Guidance on temporary extraordinary measures related to medical devices Notified Body audits during COVID-19 quarantine orders and travel restrictions. The guidance takes immediate effect and is valid for the whole period of duration of the pandemic COVID-19 as declared by the World Health Organisation. It […]

Roy Horn, the dark-haired half of Siegfried & Roy, raised the white tigers and other animals in the duo's extravagant shows that were one of the biggest draws on the Las Vegas Strip.

By Karla L. Palmer —