Author: ALJAZEERA

Nearly 200 people have been charged in a sweeping nationwide crackdown on healthcare fraud schemes with false claims topping $2.7bn, the United States Department of Justice has said. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday charges against doctors, nurse practitioners and others across the US accused of a variety of scams, including a $900m scheme in Arizona targeting dying patients. “It does not matter if you are a trafficker in a drug cartel or a corporate executive or medical professional employed by a healthcare company. If you profit from the unlawful distribution of controlled substances, you will be held accountable,”…

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I met my maternal uncle, Burhan, for the first time in 2018. At the time, I was living in Istanbul, and he had taken refuge with his family in another Turkish city. After we helped him obtain the permissions he needed to make the journey to Istanbul as a refugee, my parents also travelled there to meet him. My mother had not seen her brother since 1980 – since before she left Syria for good, got married, and raised me and my siblings away from her family, in a foreign country. So when she finally embraced him for the first…

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Decision reverses a lower court’s ruling that had upheld plan to give Purdue Pharma’s owners immunity in exchange for paying up to $6bn to settle thousands of lawsuits.The US Supreme Court has blocked OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement, which would have shielded its wealthy Sackler family owners from lawsuits over their role in the deadly opioid epidemic in the United States. The 5-4 decision reversed a lower court’s ruling that had upheld the plan to give Purdue Pharma’s owners immunity in exchange for paying up to $6bn to settle thousands of lawsuits accusing the company of unlawful misleading marketing…

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Iranians are choosing a successor to the late Ebrahim Raisi.Following the sudden death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month, voters in Iran are choosing his successor. The Guardian Council initially approved six male candidates from a pool of 80, including one reformist and five hardline conservatives. But some dropped out. With the nation facing deep political unrest, economic challenges and tensions with the West over its nuclear programme, stakes are high in this election. And potential conflict between Israel and Lebanon is further increasing its significance. So what path might the country take after this vote?…

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Boeing had ‘blatantly violated’ federal rules by providing ‘non-public investigative information’, investigators said.United States investigators have sanctioned Boeing for revealing details of a probe into a 737 MAX mid-air blowout and said they would refer its conduct to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), prompting the embattled planemaker to issue an apology. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Thursday that Boeing had “blatantly violated” its rules by providing “non-public investigative information” and speculating about possible causes of the January 5 Alaska Airlines door-plug emergency during a factory tour attended by dozens of journalists. The decision sheds new…

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Several killed as Israel storms Shujayea in eastern Gaza City, according to the Gaza civil defence and a doctor.Palestinians have fled Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood after Israeli forces carried out air raids and sent ground vehicles into the ravaged area, according to Gaza’s civil defence. Muhammad Ghurab, a doctor at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Hospital, said on Thursday the facility had received seven “martyrs including four children” and more than 40 others who were wounded “as the Israeli forces advanced to the east of Shujayea neighbourhood”. Civil defence teams pulled out several bodies from the rubble following the attacks, the civil…

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Prisoners’ rights group says troops doled out ‘severe beatings’; one Israeli soldier killed in Jenin explosion.The Israeli military has arrested 28 Palestinians in a series of raids across the occupied West Bank, according to a Palestinian rights group. The overnight raids, part of Israel’s increasingly violent assault on the occupied territories, targeted the governorates of Jenin, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah and el-Bireh, Nablus and Jerusalem, said the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society on Thursday. Israeli forces had doled out “severe beatings” and made threats against detainees’ families, said the group, which keeps a daily tally of arrests. Violence in the West Bank, already…

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