Month: July 2022

On Tuesday, social media platform Twitter said it has sued Elon Musk to force him to complete the $44 billion acquisition of the social media company. Musk and Twitter had been prepared for a legal fight after the billionaire said on Friday he was backing out of his April agreement to buy the company.

According to the buyout agreement, Musk must pay a $1 billion fee if the deal collapses, but a court also has the power to force him to go through with the purchase. Twitter’s complaint says that Musk has been “a model of bad faith” since he first proposed to take the company private in April, and accuses him of abruptly changing his mind as the stock market declined.  The complaint said: “Rather than bear the cost of the market downturn, as the merger agreement requires, Musk wants to shift it to Twitter’s stockholders.”

The lawsuit also stated that Musk knew about bots on Twitter well before his purchase (having tweeted about the issue frequently), but only decided to make it an issue in the acquisition once the stock market dropped. According to the complaint, “Musk has been working furiously — albeit fruitlessly — to try to show that the company he promised to buy and not disparage has made material misrepresentations about its business to regulators and investors.” 

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Two people – including a 7-year-old child – were killed, and more than a dozen suffered injuries after the private boat they were on capsized in the Hudson River.

First responders received calls reporting people in the water shortly before 3 p.m. on Tuesday. According to police, a 7-year-old child and a 48-year-old woman were trapped under the 18-foot vessel after the boat capsized near Pier 79; they were taken to local hospitals in critical condition, but ultimately succumbed to their injuries and died.  Eleven others passengers were also injured, including the captain of the boat, who is reportedly in critical condition. The extent of the other passengers’ injuries was not immediately known.

The incident took place near a NY Waterway terminal and two ferries came to the aid of the people who were in the water, rescuing nine people.

The circumstances leading up to the tragedy is currently being investigated. Authorities say they are looking to see if the boat was overloaded with too many passengers, or if the weather played a role.

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On Monday, the value of public Twitter stock sank at the start of trading, due to billionaire Elon Musk announcing he’s backing out of an agreement to buy the social platform. Shares peaked at $51.70 in April after Twitter’s board agreed to Musk’s buyout offer of $44 million. But by early Monday afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Twitter had fallen by about 9.5%, after they declined by about 5% in premarket trading.

Musk announced on Friday that he wanted out of the Twitter deal, which was agreed to in April. However in May, Musk said the deal was on hold while the company determined how many of its daily monetizable users were phony or spam accounts. Musk said that same issue is the reason he’s abandoning the deal. In a letter to Twitter’s top legal officer, Musk said that Twitter officials have “not complied with contractual obligations” to assess the number of phony accounts. An attorney for Musk wrote in the letter: “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”  Twitter has rejected Musk’s claim that it has refused to provide information about the phony accounts — and says it will attempt to force Musk to abide by the agreement in court.

On Monday, Musk mocked Twitter in two tweets. The first was a meme showing various facial expressions by Musk laughing at Twitter’s failing to disclose the number of “bot” accounts. The second was a photo of meme-popular actor and martial arts expert Chuck Norris sitting at a chess board with the caption: “Chuckmate.”

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The Biden administration said Monday that hospitals must ensure patients can receive abortions when deemed medically necessary in emergency situations, despite bans in many states on the procedure.  The Department of Health and Human Services said a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, stipulates that physicians must perform an abortion in an emergency regardless of state law.

In a news release Monday, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said: “Under the law, no matter where you live, women have the right to emergency care — including abortion care. Today, in no uncertain terms, we are reinforcing that we expect providers to continue offering these services, and that federal law preempts state abortion bans when needed for emergency care.”  In a letter to the nation’s health care providers on Monday, Becerra said a federal statute called the ‘Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act’ —  also known as EMTALA — protects providers’ clinical judgment and the actions they take to provide stabilizing treatment to pregnant patients who are under emergency medical conditions, regardless of restrictions in any given state. It specifically requires all patients get appropriate medical screening, examination, stabilizing treatment and facility transfer.  The statute applies to emergency departments and other specific clinical settings. Providers also will not have to wait for a patient’s condition to worsen to be protected.

The Biden administration said examples of emergency medical conditions include, but are not limited to, ectopic pregnancy, and complications of miscarriages. Stabilizing treatment could include abortion. Becerra said that if a state law bans abortion and does not include an exception for the life or health of the pregnant person, that law is preempted by the federal statute. A senior adviser with HHS said in a briefing: “We heard a lot from physicians that we needed to be clearer on these points because people were still too scared to treat people,” and the new guidance is “meant to try to provide that reassurance here on the clinical judgment of these physicians and hospitals.” HHS said it will do everything within its authority to ensure that patients get the care they need.

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