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Blog, Drug Companies, Family, Legal News, Personal Injury, Supreme Court

Judge clears way for San Francisco’s ‘public nuisance’ opioid lawsuit to go to trial

Defendants, including Walgreens, Endo Pharmaceuticals and Teva Pharmaceuticals had tried to get the case thrown out.

(CN) — A federal judge on Thursday cleared the way for San Francisco’s opioid lawsuit against Walgreens and a number of pharmaceutical companies to head to trial, which is set to begin on April 25.

Thousands of states, cities and counties have sued pharmaceutical companies over their role in the opioid epidemic, which is believed to have been caused by the marketing and overprescription of prescription drugs like Oxycontin. Many patients who were prescribed an opiate later switched over to using illegal narcotics like heroin. According to the CDC, nearly half a million people died from opiate overdoses between 1999 and 2019.

The biggest culprit was Purdue Pharma, which manufactured and marketed Oxycontin, and which entered bankruptcy in 2020. That proceeding hit the pause button on all lawsuits against Purdue, and eventually lead to a massive settlement, in which cities and states will effectively take over ownership of Purdue. The former owners of the company, the Sackler family, contributed $6 billion to the settlement, a good deal of which went to the governmental entities, in exchange for immunity from future lawsuits.

The drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and three pharmaceutical distributors agreed to a $26 billion settlement with states and municipalities in February.

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Blog, Criminal, Legal News

I-65 killer: Could he be the I-70 serial killer?

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV) – News 4 has learned that the person identified earlier this week as the I-65 serial killer is now being looked at as a possible suspect in the I-70 murders, with a local task force scrambling to compare notes with police authorities in Indiana.

Indiana State Police announced this week that numerous pieces of DNA evidence tied Harry Edward Greenwell to three motel highway killings in Indiana and Kentucky between 1987 and 1990. The I-70 killings happened just two years later in 1992.

Now-deceased man IDed in 1980s slayings of 3 motel clerks

Greenwell died of cancer in 2013 at the age of 68. The I-65 killer was also known as the Days Inn Killer. His first victim was at the Super 8 motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, before he killed again at the Days Inn in Merrillville, Indiana, and then finally at the Remington, Indiana Days Inn. Police say Greenwell attacked a fourth victim later at the Days Inn in Columbia, Indiana, but she survived and gave police a composite sketch, which matched Greenwell.

“We are talking with the Indiana task force,” said Detective Raymond Floyd, who is heading up the St. Louis task force investigating the I-70 murders. “Right now, it is preliminary. But there are definitely some similarities, and we are going to pursue them.”

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Blog, Criminal, Legal News, Organized Crime

Convicted hit man’s escape evokes mob’s ‘ruthless’ heyday in one American city

(CNN)Dominic Taddeo was in his early 20s when a US Justice Department lawyer appeared before a Senate subcommittee with a dire warning about the future mafia hit man’s hometown.”Rochester, the home of Kodak, Xerox, and other thriving corporations … is a wealthy city, a ripe plum ready to be plucked by the strongest and most ruthless mob,” Gregory Baldwin, an attorney with the department’s organized crime and racketeering section, said during the 1980 hearing.

In the upstate New York city, the mob was known for detonating homemade bombs by remote control under the cars of rivals, according to Baldwin’s testimony and news reports.But Taddeo plied his deadly trade in the 1980s with a more conventional weapon — a .22-caliber pistol.A man who federal officials say began a life of crime at the age of 16, Taddeo, 64, was a largely forgotten crime figure until his March 28 escape — less than a year before his likely release — from a Florida halfway house while on a medical appointment.

His short-lived breakout took mob observers back to the heyday of La Cosa Nostra in the Lake Ontario city of about 200,000 — where the tragicomedy antics of rival factions at times evoked the third-rate mobsters in Jimmy’s Breslin’s novel “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

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Blog, Business Law, Drug Companies, Legal News, Supreme Court

Moderna Faces Patent Lawsuit on Covid-19 Vaccine

Two small biotech firms filed a long-awaited lawsuit against Moderna, alleging that its Covid-19 vaccine infringes on a number of patents they control.

The companies, Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences, a subsidiary of Roivant Sciences, say that they hold patents covering the lipid nanoparticle wrappers used to carry the messenger RNA in Moderna‘s (ticker: MRNA) Covid-19 vaccine through the bloodstream and into the cells.

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Blog, Criminal, International, Legal News, Organized Crime

Criminal Record: Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the Russian mafia

While the criminal underworld is thriving in Europe nobody really paid much attention as the “Bratva” – various organised crime groups who originated in the former Soviet Union – rose to become the largest in the world.

When Vladimir Putin appeared on television surrounded by his silent stony-faced generals as he threatened to unleash terror on Ukraine I was reminded of a quote by Bill Browder – an anti-corruption campaigner and financier.

“Imagine that Russia is like The Sopranos. In The Sopranos you had the Philadelphia mafia, the New Jersey mafia, the Manhattan mafia and the Brooklyn mafia and then you had the head capo who is above all of them. Vladimir Putin is the head capo.”

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