Gazette Daily News Briefing, February 17
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Friday, February 17.
Friday will be cold, but still not too bad for February-- and then it will warm up again over the weekend. According to the National Weather Service it will be sunny, with a high near 21 degrees. The wind chill values will be as low as -5 degrees. On Friday night it will be clear, with the temperature rising to 1 degree below the high at 20 degrees.
Nearly five years after the “newbo evolve” festival featuring national recording stars and reality TV personalities turned into a financial debacle instead of a signature event, two of its key organizers were ordered Thursday to report to prison and pay over $1 million to a bank they defrauded to help bankroll it.
Doug S. Hargrave, 56, now of Puyallup, Wash., and Aaron McCreight, 47, now of Dothan, Ala., each pleaded guilty last year in U.S. District Court to one felony count each of bank fraud.
Hargrave was sentenced to 15 months and McCreight was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The two also are jointly liable for $1.4 million in restitution to be paid to Bankers Trust.
The 2018 three-day festival featured headliners Kelly Clarkson and Maroon 5, and speakers including fashion designers Carson Kressley and Christian Siriano, filmmaker John Waters, woodworker Clint Harp and U.S. Olympian Adam Rippon, among others.
During Hargrave’s plea hearing last year, he admitted that before the festival he sent a fraudulent budget, under McCreight’s direction, to Bankers Trust in support of a request for an increased loan. The budget misrepresented how many tickets already had been sold and how many more ticket sales were anticipated.
Cash awards for pain, suffering and other non-economic complications from medical malpractice lawsuits will be capped under a new provision signed into law Thursday by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
Those non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases are now capped at $2 million for cases in which a hospital is found to be at fault, and $1 million when the doctor is at fault.
The new law, which becomes effective immediately, does not cap jury awards for economic or punitive damages.
Proponents of the legislation said it’s needed to help contain insurance costs for hospitals, and to help recruit and retain doctors, especially in rural areas of the state. While opponents pointed out that most malpractice cases do not go to trial, and states without caps are having trouble recruiting doctors as well.
While efforts stalled last year, U.S. Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., say they have new confidence a pair of bills they are pushing forward can pass this Congress and help Americans save millions each month on prescription drug costs.
The bills — the Preserve Access to Affordable Generics and Biosimilars Act and the Stop STALLING Act — recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee with strong bipartisan support.
The bills would limit larger pharmaceutical companies from trying to keep generic forms of certain prescription drugs from going to market. In some cases, Klobuchar and Grassley say, the bigger companies pay the generic drugmakers to keep the cheaper products off store shelves or even try to stop the approval process.
