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An accomplished and prominent transplant surgeon in Texas allegedly falsified patient data in a government transplant waiting list, which may have prevented his own patients from receiving lifesaving liver transplants, according to media reports and hospital statements.

Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center halted its liver transplant program on April 3 after finding "irregularities" with donor acceptance criteria, the Houston Chronicle reported based on a statement from the hospital. At the time there were 38 patients on the hospital's wait list for a liver. Earlier this week, the hospital also halted its kidney transplant program, telling the Chronicle that it was pausing operations to "evaluate a new physician leadership structure."

Memorial Hermann has not named the surgeon behind the "inappropriate changes," but The New York Times identified him as Dr. Steve Bynon, a surgeon who has received numerous accolades and, at one point, appears to have been featured on a billboard. Bynon oversaw both the liver and kidney transplant programs at Memorial Hermann.

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Drug shortages in the US have reached an all-time high, with 323 active and ongoing shortages already tallied this year, according to data collected by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP).

The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001.

"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortages," ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz said in a statement Thursday. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications stored in hospital crash carts and procedural areas. Ongoing national shortages of therapies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] also remain a serious challenge for clinicians and patients."

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For months, Change Healthcare has faced an immensely messy ransomware debacle that has left hundreds of pharmacies and medical practices across the United States unable to process claims. Now, thanks to an apparent dispute within the ransomware criminal ecosystem, it may have just become far messier still.

In March, the ransomware group AlphV, which had claimed credit for encrypting Change Healthcare’s network and threatened to leak reams of the company’s sensitive health care data, received a $22 million payment—evidence, publicly captured on bitcoin’s blockchain, that Change Healthcare had very likely caved to its tormentors’ ransom demand, though the company has yet to confirm that it paid. But in a new definition of a worst-case ransomware, a different ransomware group claims to be holding Change Healthcare’s stolen data and is demanding a payment of its own.

Enlarge / Tesla's Shanghai factory in 2023. (credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.

Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

"As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity," Tesla CEO Elon Musk told employees in the memo.

Enlarge / Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting on February 23, 2024. (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Contributor | AFP)

A judge has preliminarily blocked what Media Matters for America (MMFA) described as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's attempt to "rifle through" confidential documents to prove that MMFA fraudulently manipulated X (formerly Twitter) data to ruin X's advertising business, as Elon Musk has alleged.

After Musk accused MMFA of publishing reports that Musk claimed were designed to scare advertisers off X, Paxton promptly launched his own investigation into MMFA last November.

Suing MMFA over alleged violations of Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act—which prohibits "disparaging the goods, services, or business of another by false or misleading representation of facts"—Paxton sought a wide range of MMFA documents through a civil investigative demand (CID). Filing a motion to block the CID, MMFA told the court that the CID had violated the media organization's First Amendment rights, providing evidence that Paxton's investigation and CID had chilled MMFA speech.

Enlarge / Pebblebee's Android trackers. (credit: Pebblebee)

Will Google ever launch its "Find My" network? The Android ecosystem was supposed to have its own version of Apple's AirTags by now. Google has had a crowd-sourced device-tracking network sitting dormant on 3 billion Android phones since December 2022. Partners have been ready to go with Bluetooth tag hardware since May 2023! This was all supposed to launch a year ago, but Google has been in a holding pattern. The good news is we're finally seeing some progress after a year of silence.

The reason for Google's lengthy delay is actually Apple. A week before Google's partners announced their Android network Bluetooth tags, Google and Apple jointly announced a standard to detect "unknown" Bluetooth trackers and show users alerts if their phone thinks they're being stalked. Since you can constantly see an AirTag's location, they can be used for stalking by just covertly slipping one into a bag or car; nobody wants that, so everyone's favorite mobile duopoly is teaming up.

Google did its half of this partnership and rolled out AirTag detection in July 2023. At the same time, Google also announced: "We’ve made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS." Surely Apple would be burning the midnight oil to launch iOS Android tag detection as soon as possible so that Google could start competing with AirTags.