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In his newly-released book, Catch and Kill, former NBC reporter Ronan Farrow recounts previously-unreleased details surrounding rape accusations against Matt Lauer, the former host of NBC’s “Today” show. Farrow provides a revealing, comprehensive account of accusations made by Brooke Nevils, a former NBC employee who maintained that Lauer sexually assaulted her in 2014. Lauer has…

When a storage freezer at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) malfunctioned last month, 56 pediatric patients, many undergoing cancer treatment, lost their stem cells. The cells were collected before patients began cancer treatments, like chemotherapy and radiation, and stored for potential future use. Following the incident, CHLA sent notification letters to the affected families, unfortunately…

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM), a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) to disseminate cybersecurity facts, best practices, and promote free resources to make organizations and individuals safer and more secure. Recent cybersecurity threat data is staggering. Symantec’s…

At 2 a.m. on September 8, the U.S. Coast Guard stationed near St. Simons, Georgia, was alerted that the Golden Ray, a South Korean cargo vessel carrying over 4,000 new automobiles, had begun dangerously inclining to one side, shortly after departing the Port of Brunswick. By late morning response teams had rescued 20 of the…

Dr. Joseph DeCorso entered a guilty plea in New Jersey federal court on September 12, on charges he allegedly conspired to commit $13 million in Medicare fraud by prescribing medically unnecessary orthotic braces while working for two telemedicine firms between July 2017 and March 2019. He also agreed to pay $7 million in restitution to…

On August 30, Restoration Hardware issued a product safety recall for about 5,700 cotton Turkish bathrobes following reports that the robes had ignited when being worn during gas stove use. Made in Turkey, the bathrobes sold from August 2018 to March in the both the U.S. and Canada. That same day Restoration Hardware also recalled…

Late on September 2 a 117-acre mountainside wildfire, dubbed Snoqualmie Fire, ignited less than a mile from a residential neighborhood in Layton, Utah, prompting mandatory evacuations of 125 homes. The fire, which reportedly came within 100 to 200 yards of homes, began just one day after officials announced 100 percent containment of the Gun Range…

On August 16, a coordinated ransomware attack was launched on 22 city, county and police department offices in Texas, seizing and disabling systems and encrypting data. The collective ransom demanded by what state authorities have described as a “single threat actor” is $2.5 million. While larger municipalities, like Lubbock County, were able to quickly identify…

On August 19, CannTrust Holdings Inc. announced that the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) was returning its entire $2.2 million inventory of CannTrust products. The return is in response to the suspension of CannTrust’s sales and shipments last month, after a Health Canada inspection revealed the company had grown plants in several unlicensed greenhouses. Prior to…

On August 1, TechCrunch reported that online retailer StockX did not reveal that it had suffered a data breach in May that exposed 6.8 million user records. Within days of discovering the breach, StockX emailed users and instructed them to change their passwords following what the company referred to as system updates on its platform,…

On July 2, lightning struck and ignited a fire at two Jim Beam distillery warehouses in Versailles, Kentucky. The fire, fueled by the 45,000 barrels—over 2 million gallons—of bourbon, burned for several days and reduced one warehouse and its contents to rubble. Bourbon from barrels destroyed in the fire flowed from the site into nearby…

July 25 proved to be a harrowing day for pedestrians in Boston, Massachusetts. That morning a metal railing fell from the roof of a building in Boston’s North End, striking and seriously injuring a woman walking nearby. Hours later, a crane on a construction site at the TD Garden arena dropped several steel beams weighing…

Temperatures near and in the triple digits have scorched the U.S. Midwest, Northeast and parts of Canada this month, accompanied by blackouts, extreme weather and other heat-related headaches. On July 19, violent thunderstorms in Michigan cut power to a half million people in the Greater Detroit area. Earlier that day an unexplained explosion and fire…

Barry touched down on the Louisiana coast as a Category 1 hurricane on July 13, shutting down businesses, tearing roofs from homes, flooding streets and halting oil production across the Gulf of Mexico. Even as the country’s first hurricane of the year diminished in power and was downgraded to a tropical storm, it continued to…

On July 5, approximately 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles in Ridgecrest, California residents experienced a 7.1-magnitude earthquake, only 34 hours after a 6.4-magnitude earthquake shook the same location. Fortunately, there were no deaths. As homeowners and businesses evaluate damage, early estimates predict at least $100 million in losses. California is the site of more…

Shortly before 9 p.m. on June 23, a tornado with wind speeds up to 125 miles per hour cut a two-mile path of destruction through South Bend, Indiana. A potentially treacherous stovepipe tornado was reported in northern Indiana’s St. Joseph County a few minutes later, at 9:15 p.m. A day earlier, tornadoes touched down in…