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The city of Chicago has filed a lawsuit against five pharmaceutical manufacturers, accusing the companies of deceptively marketing addictive painkillers. The lawsuit against five of the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers—Purdue Pharma, Cephalon, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Endo Health Solutions, and Actavis—was filed in state court, according to a statement from the mayor’s office. The suit alleges the companies misrepresented the benefits of opioids while concealing the serious health risks associated with “highly addictive narcotics painkillers,” according to the statement. The suit claims the companies target marketing to the elderly and veterans, promising the drugs would improve their quality of life. The city’s...

Just 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Sharrissa Cook gave birth to a critically ill baby boy. Dreshan weighed in at a fragile 1 pound, 11 ounces. He lay motionless in the incubator, connected to tubes and monitors in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital. “He was so tiny,” Cook recalls. “I was a first-time mom. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what to expect.” It was Oct. 11, 2006. Medical personnel asked Cook, then a 26-year-old single mother, to enroll little Dreshan in a study. She says they described it as...

Since we can't post out of the Military Times you will have to copy/paste link. Boy in 'workout gear' refused admission to commissary http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140523/NEWS/305230060/Boy-workout-gear-refused-admission-commissary

A coronal mass ejection burst off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014 and NASA's newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. The giant sheet of solar material erupting was the first CME seen by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS. The field of view seen here is about five Earths wide and about seven-and-a-half Earths tall.

In office only five days, India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi is already showing people how a small government, conservative head of state acts. Without even touching his people’s services or their quality, he began on his very first day in office fulfilling his promise to cut the size of his country’s bloated government. He began by swearing in only 23 cabinet ministers, combining several portfolios and eliminating others. It was the smallest number of cabinet posts in 16 years. Only five days later, the Prime Minister did away with an entire layer of government by summarily abolishing the country’s...

A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA's newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere with better resolution than ever before. Watch the movie to see how a curtain of solar material erupts outward at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour.

Two months ago I wrote a column that addressed the first part of a report on the future of Los Angeles. The commission formed to address the issues facing the residents and their government has now delivered the second part of their report which lists solutions to the problems facing America’s second largest city. The report may be a bigger failure than the city itself. In the interim period, the Anderson School of Management issued a forecast which stated that Los Angeles has not had positive job growth over the last 23 years. The county has lost more net...

My wife and I are in our mid fifties. We are grandparents. We have tried to play by the rules. Yesterday, I came home from lunch to find his and her notices in our mailbox from the IRS. The fiends have recalculated our income from a few years back and now suddenly want over 21,000 dollars in fees and penalties. They don't even audit you anymore. They just recalculate and demand payment. This is how they operate. So if this thing is worked out, we will pay five hundred bucks a month to the IRS for most of our remaining...

University of Minnesota public affairs professor Morris Kleiner has written extensively on the topic of occupational licensing and has been featured before on CD here and here, and by Jimmy P here. Among his key findings: 1. Occupational licensing drives up costs to consumers. Licensed workers earn 15% more on average than their unlicensed counterparts in other states. Across the U.S. economy, occupational licensing adds at least $116 billion a year to the cost of services.2. For several occupations that are regulated in some states but not others (e.g. librarians, nutritionists and respiratory therapists), employment growth for those professions was...

In Washington State, a homeowner is asking why the City of Renton is not willing to pay for extensive damages done to her home by a City SWAT team, on a search for her son who was not there. From kirotv.com: For more than four hours, SWAT team members fired grenades through walls and windows and blasted in the doors with explosives. De La Torre came home from work while police were still there. “(An officer) just kinda shook his head and said, ‘I am so sorry, ma’am. It’s your house and it’s…ruined; we destroyed it,’” she said. “Police...

EAST MEMPHIS, Tenn. (FOX13) - As reports of problems at VA hospitals around the country continue to surface a town hall meeting was held in Memphis Tuesday to find out if veterans are having problems in the Mid-South. The town hall was held at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library on Poplar Avenue. MORE: Memphis vet fights 'death row' conditions at VA hospital MORE: Reaffirming promises to reform troubled VA hospitals The vets came with story after story of how badly they have been treated just trying to get medical help at the one place you would think they would...

Will Israel be the first cashless society on the entire planet? A committee chaired by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff has come up with a three phase plan to “all but do away with cash transactions in Israel”. According to a study conducted by MasterCard, approximately 80 percent of all consumer transactions in the United States are now cashless. If a government can track all of your transactions, it will essentially be able to monitor everywhere you go and pretty much keep track of virtually everything that you do.

One government agency has decided that the results of employee ratings are too discriminatory, and eliminated the process entirely. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on Monday that it will now award all employees the highest rating regardless of performance reviews. The CFPB, which oversees transactions in the financial sector for the federal government, decided to no longer conduct employee reviews because there were just too many apparent “significant disparities” between the races, ages, and locations of its employees. According to American Banker, this new policy is set to cost over $5 million dollars, as it will now pay employees...

Sinn Féin has emerged as the biggest party in Northern Ireland following the local government elections—but the DUP has claimed the greater number of council seats. The republican party claimed 24.1% of all first preference votes with the DUP on 23.1%. Both parties, however, saw their share of the vote slip with the DUP down by 4.1% and Sinn Féin marginally down by 0.7%. …

Three Senate Democrats on Thursday unveiled a bill that would lift the cap on the maximum civil fine the government can slap on automakers for failing to report known defects. Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, and Bill Nelson of Florida came out with the legislation in response to last week’s $35 million fine on General Motors Co. GM +0.67% as part of a settlement for delays in recalling vehicles with faulty ignition switches.

You can't really blame Attorney General Martha Coakley for not knowing how much the state tax on gasoline is. How could she? She hasn't paid it in years, at least since 2006 when she was elected attorney general. Since then, as the state's chief law officer, she has had a state car and a state driver, usually a state cop, driving her around. Consequently, although you might find the 60-year-old Democrat candidate for governor pumping iron to get in shape, you would never catch her pumping gas. Pumping iron, yes. Pumping gas, no. The state limo arrives with a full...

Are we content to depend on them?Here is a video by Bill Whittle about how many are becoming Eloi and some are becoming Morlocks. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBVjbYMG6dE] Video linkAccording to the organizers of the 2012 Democrat National Convention, we all belong to the Morlocks Government. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHbNCWSVOjc] Video linkFreedom? Integrity? Phooey! They are unnecessary as long as we trust "our" Government and allow it to care for us. Here -- let's listen to President Obama read a comforting story. Nobody can do it better. Please, Great One, tell us more storiesSince only Tea Party "Terrorists" and global warming climate change are seen dangerous to life as we...

"WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of Americans would no longer get mail delivered to their door but would have to go to communal or curbside boxes instead under a proposal advancing through Congress. The Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, on an 18-13 party-line vote, approved a bill Wednesday to direct the U.S. Postal Service to convert 15 million addresses over the next decade to the less costly, but also less convenient delivery method."

This past weekend on his HBO show, host Bill Maher suggested that conservatives were fine with the federal government until five years ago after Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. The headline of a video clip on the Real Clear Politics website of Maher's statements stated, "Why Were Conservatives Okay With Government Up Until Five Years Ago?" While Maher never actually posed that question verbatim, some of his other statements and questions lead to the summary contained in the headline. The video clip can be found here. For those who cannot handle the video, here are a couple of...

Federal employees and a contractor diverted more than $1 million of charitable contributions to spending on themselves for in-office massages, meals at every meeting and other luxuries and unnecessary expenses, a government audit found. They called themselves "volunteers" and said they needed "motivation" to help the less fortunate, even though some 41 federal workers were being paid full-time salaries to administer just one local chapter of the government's annual workplace charity drive, the Combined Federal Campaign.