[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] ….heart surgeries is hit with huge $15million fine
Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center and College of Medicine paid settlement
Doctors allegedly left one heart surgery to perform another
A Texas hospital and a medical practice group have agreed to pay prosecutors $15 million after they were accused of double, and sometimes triple, booking heart surgeries - which medical residents were forced to perform instead.
Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, its associated College of Medicine, and the Surgical Associates of Texas PA jointly agreed to pay the settlement on Monday for the alleged actions between June 2013 and December 2020, the Justice Department announced.
During that time, court documents say Dr. Joseph Coselli, now 71, and Dr. Joseph Lamelas, now 63, would schedule several heart surgeries at once.
They would then allegedly leave one surgery to go perform another, without even informing their patients that they were being operated on by a trainee or a fellow, prosecutors said.
A third doctor, Dr. David Ott, 77, of Houston, was also named as being a part of the misconduct - but is listed as a cardiothoracic surgeon with the medical practice group Surgical Associates of Texas PA.
The investigation into the alleged actions at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center - a teaching hospital that employs Baylor College of Medicine physicians and residents - began on August 7, 2019 when an anonymous whistleblower filed a complaint.
The whistleblower alleged the hospital 'engaged in a regular practice of running two operating rooms at once and delegating key aspects of extremely complicated and risky heart surgeries to unqualified medical residents.'
According to federal prosecutors, those surgeries were 'some of the most complicated operation performed at any hospital, including coronary artery bypass grafts, valve repairs and aortic repair procedures.'
'These surgeries typically involve opening a patient's chest and placing the patient on the bypass machine for some portion of time.'
Under Medicare regulations, surgeons who are teaching trainees how to perform these - or any - are only allowed to leave the operating rooms at specific times.
But when the doctors were running two or more operating rooms at once, they would not designate a backup surgeon to take over, prosecutors say.
They also allegedly did not call for a surgical 'timeout' which would allow for the surgeons to pause and discuss key risks to prevent errors.
Instead, federal prosecutors claimed trainees were forced to pick up the slack and perform critical tasks - like making the initial incision, Chron reports.
The medical staff would then hide from the patients that the surgeon planned to leave the room to perform another operation.
Meanwhile, Lamelas would record that he was present for 'hundreds of simultaneous overlapping surgeries' during his two years at Baylor, court documents obtained by USA Today reveal. He was being paid per procedure.
The complaint also claimed that Baylor College of Medicine not only knew about these false claims and overlapping surgeries, but actually scheduled the operating rooms for the multiple surgeries, provided resources for the simultaneous procedures and provided residents to perform the surgeries.
Federal prosecutors have also claimed that four patients died under Ott's care without an adequate review of his procedures, and said that the practice of running concurrent surgeries led to longer periods of anesthesia use and excessive internal bleeding, Chron reports.
'Patients entrusted these surgeons with their lives - submitting to operations where one missed cut is the difference between life and death,' US Attorney Alamdar Hamdani said in a statement.
'This settlement reaffirms the importance of Medicare requirements governing surgeon presence and ensuring that no physician - no matter how prominent or successful - can skirt the rules,' he added.
But an attorney for Baylor College of Medicine noted they have not admitted to any wrongdoing.
'Baylor College of Medicine did not engage in conduct that violated any applicable federal law or regulation,' Robert Corrigan Jr. said in a statement to USA Today.
'The settlement acknowledged that BCM disputed that any violations of federal law occurred and that the college being a party to the agreement is not an admission of liability by Baylor.
'The college decided to amicably resolve the dispute prior to a trial on the merits after considering the cost and expenses, including attorneys fees,' he noted.
DailyMail.com has also reached out to Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center and the Surgical Associates of Texas PA for comment.
#2
Have a nephew on the staff there. Says what's going on is the heart surgeons are using residents to start the surgery, crack the chest, and set up, and then close afterwards. The heart surgeon is only in the room for the actual heart surgery part.
I suppose it works, but it needs to spelled out ahead of time for everybody, and the assembly line approach seems like a wonderful chance to spread infections from room to room.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
06/26/2024 12:52 Comments ||
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[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Farmers in Oklahoma are warning residents about cannabis farms owned by China backed heavily armed workers using phony Amazon trucks.
Authorities in Oklahoma, Oregon, California, New Mexico and Maine have all been battling a surge in Chinese weed farms, with some thought to be linked to criminal gangs known as 'triads'.
The spread is seemingly uncontainable, with police in Penobscot County, Maine, in February arresting three Chinese nationals at a weed farm and seizing 40 pounds of the drug alongside $4,700 in cash.
It's reported that authorities in Oklahoma have shut down at least 15 black market farms per day.
The native, local farmers like Larry Williams have been intimidated by stories that the Chinese-owned growers arm themselves with AK-47s.
There are other signs of the illegal grow-houses that separate them from the ones native to Oklahoma.
Some of them have air condition units outside the barns, or fencing that none of the other farms have, as many shoot up and are ready to go after just a few months of construction, Williams claims.
They also use disguised Amazon trucks, according to investigators, as well as look-a-like Amazon packaging.
The marijuana is sold on the black market to dealers on the east coast, who profit despite many states on the eastern seaboard legalizing recreational cannabis.
The profits are then returned to mainland China.
'The Chinese are not dumb. I mean, they recognize it, and they can exploit and drive behavior of unsuspecting Oklahomans through this cash transaction,' Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told NewsNation's On Balance With Leland Vittert.
Governor Kevin Stitt claims that the state has gotten rid of 6,000 fake houses since 2021, 80 percent of which were tied to China.
[WIRE] The Department of the Interior published a guide to "inclusive language," exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, that tells bureaucrats to avoid gendered terms like "husband," "son," and "daughter," and even instructs them to use the "they/them" pronouns for individuals rather than assume someone’s gender.
The 24-page document, called the U.S. Department of the Interior Inclusive Language Guide and published this month "for official use only," was published this month and details what terms bureaucrats should use or avoid when discussing gender and sexuality.
The guide includes a list of 104 different terms that the Interior recommends bureaucrats replace with alternate, approved words. "Husband" and "wife," for example, should be replaced with "spouse, partner, significant other," the federal agency says. "Daughter" and "son" should also be replaced with "child" or "kid" according to the guide, which even asks bureaucrats to replace "cockpit" with "flight deck."
The revelation comes as the executive agencies of federal government have been transformed under the Biden administration, with agencies from Interior to the National Security Agency embracing and institutionalizing the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
Another section of the guide asks bureaucrats to use "identity-first" language, substituting "blind person" and "amputee," with "a person who is blind," and "a child with an amputation." The Interior guide even tells bureaucrats to refrain from assuming anyone’s gender and to instead refer to everyone with the pronouns "they/them" to "avoid making assumptions."
[Washington Examiner] Judge Juan Merchan, who has presided over former President Donald Trump’s hush money case, has been removed from Trump ally Steve Bannon’s New York criminal trial relating to his "We Build the Wall" fundraising campaign.
A court statement from Judge Ellen Biben said Merchan is no longer on the case because of a conflicting schedule. "Merchan ... who is assigned to this matter, is engaged to preside over a six-defendant trial that is scheduled to commence on 09/16/24 and expected to last at least three months," she wrote, while Bannon’s trial is set to begin on Sept. 23.
The statement ends by saying Judge April Newbauer will preside over Bannon’s case and "follow up with the parties to schedule a status conference and for any further communication."
#3
"A court statement from Judge Ellen Biben said Merchan is no longer on the case because of a conflicting schedule. “Merchan … who is assigned to this matter, is engaged to preside over a six-defendant trial that is scheduled to commence on 09/16/24 and expected to last at least three months,” she wrote, while Bannon’s trial is set to begin on Sept. 23."
[FoxNews] Haiti's violent gangs have left over 580,000 people homeless.
The first U.N.-backed contingent of foreign police arrived in Haiti on Tuesday, nearly two years after the troubled Caribbean country urgently requested help to quell a surge in gang violence.
A couple hundred police officers from Kenya landed in the capital of Port-au-Prince, whose main international airport reopened in late May after gang violence forced it to close for nearly three months.
It wasn’t immediately known what the Kenyans’ first assignment would be, but they will face violent gangs that control 80% of Haiti’s capital and have left more than 580,000 people homeless across the country as they pillage neighborhoods in their quest to control more territory. Gangs also have killed several thousand people in recent years.
The Kenyans’ arrival marks the fourth major foreign military intervention in Haiti. While some Haitians welcome them, others view the force with caution, given that the previous intervention — the U.N.’s 2004-2017 peacekeeping mission — was marred by allegations of sexual assault and the introduction of cholera, which killed nearly 10,000 people.
#1
Her family filed a lawsuit in a Texas court in 2021, which claimed that River Subs failed to provide her with a safe place to work despite knowledge of a substantial risk of violence against her.
I believe numerous Donk city and state administrations are guilty of that immediately when they invoke 'gun control' that basically disarms the law abiding at the hands of criminals.
Use to eat at a Subway 2x a month.
However, 2x in the last 6 months so far.
Mainly because of cost, less meat in the sandwich, and ingredients taste different and less fresh lately.
Which might explain the new encloses popping up in the shops. Which have stainless steel covers now. Thus, hiding the customer view of the ingredients.
One of the best in the area that was usually standing room only at meal times. It closed down due to the new post COVID-19-21 student age staff that were plain rude to certain customers.
#9
Seems a bit harsh without other information. At what point is the business not responsible for the employees not-at-work life? Maybe its a shitty parking lot?
Shows how tight cash is right now. Except I wouldn't reorganize I'd GTFO, especially after this ruling, people losing their shit and shooting employees because a large fry comes with only a medium amount of product at twice the price, and this case sets and confirms precedent.
Cost of turning your employee hub into a bank teller vs. sandwich robot vending machine vs. hitting the beach stress free. Of course, if there are investors wanting to get into the business.
DM finally gets past itself and notices that there is a disturbing trend of chain restaurants closing shop.
Makes me wonder how many mom and pops are on the rocks; the only reason IMHO that coffee shop chain in Philly was mentioned is to shame any owners have the guts to say "I'm not playing this stupid game. I'm out." Seriously, the tone of the article, they way the unionize campaign was described and commented, you know the store were chock full of self-anointed kool-aid haired tackle faces who made customers play Jeopardy, pronouns for $1000.
Honestly given the choice, I'd rather have a robot make my fast food than some tatted'd up snotty crew who can't be bothered to have the lunch rush trash taken out at three in the afternoon.
So. Buy the chain not for its restaurants but for their location. Raze the buildings. In their place, a sandwich making vending machine. One side is pre-order pickup via web, phone, whatever, sign in when entering, pick up sandwich at window via teller box, off you go. Other side is drive up ordering. ChatBox takes your order, its made and ready at the window.
Now here's the hook. Get the rights to Buck Rogers or something, have a little kabuki theater for the drive up customers while waiting on their sandwich, like Twiki is back there making sandwiches. "Give me a Kane, swiss, extra smoked turkey, and easy on the hot sauce." "Be de be de beep, pull on up!"
All systems monitored remotely. At one end is a garage large enough for a service vehicle to pull into and close behind so employee is not exposed, and can be ported so a refer penske or whatever can back up to the entrance and delivery larger resupplies or equipment without outside exposure. Put a turn table in the garage so employee doesn't have to back out, maybe even South Africa Courier the vehicle a bit, and its good until the neighborhood requires a gun truck escort or worse, government has another tax revenue idea.
#10
The franchisee has been running on a razor thin margin, had to close 1/3 of it's shops during covid, and got this judgement, and threw in the towel.
Personally, I think it's a bull$hit judgement.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
06/26/2024 12:58 Comments ||
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#11
Yes. Why knock yourself out just to be identified as the "deep pocket?"
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/26/2024 13:06 Comments ||
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#12
Which might explain the new encloses popping up in the shops. Which have stainless steel covers now. Thus, hiding the customer view of the ingredients.
Can't argue that.
Also for consideration with today's culture trend, of the "Impulse Control Retarded" of losing their shit and breaking the glass, which would require dumping all the ingredients on account of display glass/plexi/whatever shards. I'm just saying I haven't seen that around -where I live-.
Now I was told, assured, that a business would not suffer because Covid Protocols. No sir re bob.
Sorry- didn't notice the paywall, rest posted below [Hot Air] The leftist group started off in the 1960s as the Baader-Meinhof Gang but later became known as the Red Army Faction. Under both names, their members became known for a string of bombings, murders and band robberies that peaked in the 1970s but continued through the 1980s.
The founders of the group were Marxists who were fond of quoting Mao. They were imprisoned for a time but during an amnesty they were released and went underground, eventually receiving weapons training from the PLO. They then returned to Germany as the Red Army Faction and began a campaign of murders of prominent figures.
Eventually the founders of the group were tried and convicted. In October of 1977, terrorists hijacked a German plane and demanded the release from prison of 11 RAF members. Authorities refused and special forces retook the plane, killing three of the four hijackers. When the RAF members learned the hijacking had failed, they made a suicide pact and killed themselves.
But the RAF continued for another two decades and one of the people who joined in the 1980s was Daniela Klette. Klette and her comrades were implicated in several bank robberies and one attempted murder but they were never caught. For 30 years here whereabouts were a mystery until very recently when a popular crime show in Germany put out a call for tips about Klette. She was arrested two weeks later.
The arrest comes after a police appeal for information about three Red Army Faction (RAF) fugitives on a popular TV crime show two weeks ago that yielded 250 tip-offs...
The charges facing Klette, along with Garweg and Staub, relate to millions of euros' worth of armed robberies and at least one attempted murder committed between 1999 and 2016.
But these crimes were not committed in RAF's name: the group wound itself up in 1998, sending an anonymous letter to Reuters' office in Cologne in which the remaining members declared that "the urban guerrilla group in the form of the RAF is now history".
Police claim their arrest of Klette came as a result of the TV show tips, but there was also podcast which had set out weeks earlier to identify her and it turns out they succeeded.
Not long before she was arrested, a podcast company in Berlin, Undone, set out to find her. They had been contacted by a listener who said he’d been at a party where a woman had claimed to be Klette.
“It was a crazy story,” says Patrick Stegemann, who worked on the series.
Undone brought in an AI expert who deployed facial recognition software to search the internet for pictures that matched one of Klette on an old “Wanted” poster. It came up with a match for a woman living as “Claudia” not far from where the podcasters operate out of an old industrial premises in Berlin. But when they went to look for her, she was nowhere to be found.
Two months later, when Daniela Klette, was arrested, it became clear that they had identified the right woman.
The facial recognition seems to have worked because Klette posted photos of herself with a dance group.
For several years she was deeply involved in a Brazilian culture centre in the district, where she practised capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines dance and fighting. There is photographic evidence she travelled to Brazil with her dance troupe; she held a falsified Italian passport. Members of the group recall a friendly, gentle but taciturn character.
It is thought that the discovery of photographs of her with her capoeira group at Berlin’s annual carnival of cultures – smiling, tossing petal confetti, a white bandana on her head – led to her identification and arrest.
Police have yet to confirm the link between the arrest and a podcast from 2023 for which an investigative journalist from the website Bellingcat put the police wanted notice of Klette from the 1990s through the AI image search tool PimEyes, which detected images of the older version of her, AKA Claudia Ivone the capoeira enthusiast, online.
Police are not allowed to use facial recognition to track people but in this case it was a concerned citizen who did the work and possibly gave the police a tip. Klette was living quietly but police found lots of money and guns in her apartment. There's no doubt they have the right person.
when she was arrested in late February, the police found tens of thousands of euros in cash in her Berlin flat and five weapons, among them a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a replica rocket launcher.
So after 30 years on the run, Klette is in prison now and will probably never get out given the number of crimes she's accused of committing.
Shortly after Klette was arrested, her comrade Burkhard Garweg (left photo above) was allegedly spotted begging in a train station in Berlin.
A member of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, who has been on the run for decades, has been spotted begging at a train station in Berlin.
Burkhard Garweg, a senior member of the extremist group, also known as the RAF or Red Army Faction, was seen begging at the Oberbaum Bridge, German media reported on Thursday.
Homeless Germans based in the same area told Bild, a German tabloid, that they instantly recognised Garweg and had last seen him there about a week and a half ago.
I guess bank robbery isn't a steady career. The third and last member of the group still on the run is Ernst-Volker Staub (center photo above). His whereabouts are unknown.
Police were quick to take credit for the arrest but it sounds like they didn't do much in this case. Here's an interview with the Bellingcat journalist who identified her using publicly available tools and an old photo.
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/26/2024 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Commies
#1
They were never known as that, they were always known as RAF from day one.
The "gang" was hung on them by the media, and you know what we think about them.
They were no gang, they were an active communist insurgent group that had the goal of the overthrow of the West German government. A very famous poll indicated that something shockingly high, like 4 out of 5 West Germans supported them. At this point I'm wondering why we didn't just let the commies have them. Jerks.
#8
Nah. There was a very famous poll in Der Spiegel or similar, and a stupidly high number of West Germans supported these communist insurgents. You can deny all you like but we know the truth.
Tons and sons and tons of West Germans, and Europeans in general would have loved to evict the evil capitalist Americans and welcome in the good guys - the Soviets.
hell, even today, Europeans still resent us. it's nonsense to say that capitalism were the good guys and socialism were the bad guys.
[Gateway] Late in the evening on Tuesday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that the House would file an amicus brief in support of Steve Bannon’s appeal against his contempt of Congress conviction related to the J6 investigation by the illegitimate January 6th Committee.
The Citizen Press tweeted about the "Big news" for Steve Bannon Tuesday night:
1) The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) voted tonight 3-2, confirming the official legal position of the House is that the J6 committee was illegitimate, and all subpoenas issued by the committee were also illegitimate.
2) BLAG has now directed the House Office of General Counsel to file an Amicus Brief in support of Steve Bannon with Justice Roberts.
3) Matt Gaetz explains how the BLAG process works in the video.
4) I spoke with Bannon in the last hour and he is optimistic.
[DefenseNews] PARIS — The advantage now enjoyed by small aerial drones on battlefields including in Ukraine is but “a moment in history,” French Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pierre Schill said at the Eurosatory defense show in Paris.
While anti-drone systems are lagging and “leave the sky open to things that are cobbled together but which are extremely fragile,” countermeasures are being developed, Schill told reporters during a tour of the French Army stand at the show June 19. Already today, 75% of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine are lost to electronic warfare, the general said.
”The life of impunity of small, very simple drones over the battlefield is a snapshot in time,” Schill said. “Right now it’s being exploited, that’s clear, and we have to protect ourselves. Today, the sword, in the sense of the aerial drone, is powerful, more powerful than the shield. The shield is going to grow.”
This year’s edition of Eurosatory featured dozens of anti-drone systems, including shotguns, cannons and missiles, while companies including Safran, Thales and Hensoldt presented soft-kill solutions to eliminate drones by electronic means. Schill said vehicles in France’s Scorpion collaborative combat program will all be anti-drone systems in two years time, linking their detection capability with turrets that can fire a missile or a 40mm airburst grenade.
First-person view drones currently carry out about 80% of the destruction on the front line in Ukraine, when eight months ago those systems weren’t present, according to Schill. The general said that situation won’t exist 10 years from now, and the question could be asked whether that might already end in one or two years. Schill cited the example of the Bayraktar drone, “the king of the war” at the start of the conflict in Ukraine but no longer being used because it’s too easy to scramble.
The general said he doesn’t consider that the war in Ukraine calls into question the French choice of a maneuvering army built around medium armor, with a focus on speed and mobility. The vehicles that the Army is introducing as part of the Scorpion program -- the Griffon, Serval and Jaguar – can be equipped with either active or passive protection, even if a strong emphasis of mine protection means they’re “quite massive.”
"a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
