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Insurance claims from the recent spate of California wildfires, including one ranked as the most deadly and destructive in state history, have topped $9 billion and are expected to grow, the state insurance commissioner reported on Wednesday. The Camp Fire, which erupted on Nov. 8 and quickly incinerated most of the Sierra foothills town of Paradise, about 175 miles (280 km) north of San Francisco, has accounted for the bulk of the claims, just over $7 billion of the total.

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 18:39:34 -0500

The testimony came at the start of the trial in federal court in Concord, New Hampshire, of Christopher Clough, a physician assistant who prosecutors say accepted nearly $50,000 from Insys in exchange for prescribing its powerful opioid pain drug, Subsys. The trial could provide a glimpse into some of the evidence prosecutors will use in next month's trial of six former Insys executives and managers, including John Kapoor, a onetime billionaire who was the company's founder and chairman. Prosecutors say they conspired to pay kickbacks to doctors and others like Clough by paying them fees to participate in "sham" speaker programs ostensibly meant to educate medical professionals about the drug.

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 18:09:40 -0500

An "ineffective" safeguard failed to prevent an explosive mixing of air and fuel at a Husky Energy refinery in Superior, Wisconsin, leading to a blast and fire in the plant's gasoline-producing unit in April, a U.S. industrial safety group said on Wednesday. Air seeped through a hole in a valve within a fluidic catalytic cracking unit (FCCU), the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) said, causing an April 26 explosion that led to a massive fire and a 24-hour-long evacuation of residents living within miles of the plant. The board said 36 people sought medical treatment after the blast, including 11 working at the refinery.

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 16:45:34 -0500

Erica Treadway, 31, Kayla Williams, 25, and Cody Beverly, 21, have been stranded deep inside the Rock House Powellton mine near the town of Clear Creek since they crawled through a ventilation shaft into the caverns on Saturday after riding to the site on all-terrain vehicles. A fourth person who was with the group when they entered the mine, 43-year-old Eddie Williams, found his way out on Monday to alert authorities that his friends were missing, Raleigh County Sheriff's Office Lieutenant Mark McCray said.

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 16:37:59 -0500

Mayor Rahm Emanuel laid out a multi-pronged plan on Wednesday to tackle Chicago's huge pension burden, urging the city council to approve the issuance of $10 billion of bonds to boost funding for the city's four retirement systems. Emanuel, who leaves office in May after declining to run for a third term as mayor, also called for changing the Illinois Constitution and earmarking new revenue from a possible casino and legalized marijuana for pensions. "Issuing these bonds and depositing the proceeds directly into our pension funds would immediately increase the health of our pension funds to levels not seen in at least a decade before asking more of Chicago's hard-pressed taxpayers," the mayor said in a speech to the city council.

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 16:33:53 -0500