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Members of the Sackler family who own OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma must pay billions of dollars to settle a flood of lawsuits over the harms of opioids, under a new deal that was formally approved by a federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday. The Sackler family must contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years. Most of the money is to go to government entities to fight the opioid crisis, which has been linked to 900,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999. Thousands of victims of the opioid epidemic could be paid thousands of dollars each, with a portion of the money distributed next year to some people who had OxyContin prescriptions and their survivors. This plan is not perfect, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane said as he laid out his reasoning for approving the settlements. The court wishes it could do more to ease the suffering of the opioid crisis. But he said it is fair, equitable, and in the best interest of the parties involved, and had the overwhelming support of most of the groups that had claims against Purdue. The new agreement replaces one that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. Under the current agreement, entities that do not opt into the payments can still sue members of the family. The deal, which the judge said he would accept last week, is among the largest in a series of opioid settlements brought by state and local governments against drugmakers, wholesalers, and pharmacies that totaled about $50 billion. Why the judge said he approved the deal Lane said the deal maximizes the settlement’s value and came from years of investigations, mediation and negotiations. He also said that an alternative to the settlement suing Sackler family members instead of accepting the deal would take years and success is not ensured,” in part because the family has consistently said they would fight claims against them. He also noted it could be hard to collect if the family lost lawsuits. Much of their assets are in off-shore trusts. Lane said that the states and individuals can get more than they would have if Purdue had been liquidated instead. In that case, he said, there would have been only $3.4 billion available and $2 billion of that would have gone to the federal government as part of a criminal plea deal the company entered. Under that agreement, most of the federal penalties were to be waived if a broader settlement could be reached. Money will go to governments and some individuals Sackler family members were collectively paid more than $10 billion by Purdue in the decade before they stopped involvement with the company in 2018 and used about half of that for taxes. They’ve agreed to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years, providing most of the cash involved in the settlement. The funds distributed to state, local and Native Americans is to be used mostly to address the opioid crisis, as has been the case with other opioid settlements. About $850 million of that is to go to individual victims, including children born with opioid withdrawal. People with addiction and survivors of those who died must prove they were prescribed OxyContin to participate. They could provide medical records or photos of prescription bottle labels although many people don’t have such things dating back decades. Those who do prove it could get payments of around $8,000 or around $16,000, depending on how long they received the drug and how many other people qualify. The money for individual victims is to be distributed next year. Not only money is at stake Members of the Sackler family are agreeing to give up ownership of Purdue. For them, that won’t be a major change since no family member has served on Purdue’s board or received money from the company since 2018. The plan calls for Purdue to be replaced with a new company, Knoa Pharma, to be controlled by a board appointed by states and with a mission of benefiting the public. Sackler family members are also agreeing not to have their name put on institutions in exchange for contributions something they’ve done often in the past, although many institutions have cut ties with them. The company has also agreed to make public a trove of internal documents that could shed additional light into how the company promoted and monitored opioids. One feature that won’t be repeated under this new deal that was in a previous one: forcing members of the Sackler family to hear directly from people harmed by OxyContin. A long legal saga could be wrapping up Purdue filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019 when it was facing thousands of opioid-related lawsuits from state and local governments and others. A judge approved a settlement two years later. But the U.S. Supreme Court later rejected that plan because it gave members of the Sackler family protection from lawsuits over opioids even though they were not personally declaring bankruptcy. The latest plan allows lawsuits against Sackler family members by those who don’t opt into the deal. That change was a key to getting the new version approved in the aftermath of the high court’s ruling. This time, few parties objected to the settlement, although some people who represented themselves and who were addicted to opioids or had loved ones who were raised concerns during the three-day confirmation hearing last week. One of those self-represented people told Lane during the virtual hearing Tuesday that she planned to appeal. By Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press
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Like clockwork, 5 p.m. on a Sunday, flashes of unread emails and notifications for tomorrows upcoming meetings start. Your shoulders tense, your stomach knots. You have a case of the Sunday scaries. This unsettling feeling is a form of anticipatory anxiety that creeps in as the weekend draws to a close and Monday looms with the responsibilities of the week ahead. If you can relate, youre not alone: New data suggests the vast majority of workers experience this anxiety, and it also suggests some workers feel it worse than others. Adobe Acrobat surveyed over 1,000 full-time employees and found 82% experience this sense of anxiety before the workweek even begins. For Gen Z respondents, that number creeps up to 94%. It also affects women more often than men. For 31%, the Sunday scaries start before 5 p.m. even hits. Thats despite the fact that those affected spend 72 hours annually working on weekends to get ahead on the demands of the workweek. The scaries are set off by all types of reasons. Looming layoffs or signs of economic uncertainty can lead workers to feel anxious about the near future. Burnout is the main culprit for 55% of respondents, followed by high workloads (50%), project deadlines (33%) and toxic work environments (31%). Even admin-related tasks can add to the sense of dread, with organizing digital files or chasing down signatures mentioned by one in 15 respondents as triggers. The Sunday scaries can affect anyone, but some suffer worse than others, Adobe says: Remote workers, for example, report getting the scaries just a few times per year. Those back in the office report getting them once or twice a month. More than half of Fortune 100 companies now have a full-time office requirement, and research shows nearly 3 in 10 companies will demand five days a week in the office by the end of 2025. While 27% of those surveyed say their Sunday scaries have grown more intense over the past year, onsite workers are 47% more likely than remote workers to say their prework anxiety worsened over that time period. Given the gap, its unsurprising workers are willing to quit their jobs for more flexible work, with 17% quitting in the past year because of changes to their working arrangements. Its not just a feeling. For 35% of those surveyed it manifests physically in headaches, tension, and fatigue, and 42% even lose sleep. It also impacts employers with nearly half respondents (46%) reporting that their Sunday scaries lead to a lack of motivation at a time where employees are already disengaged at work. Anxiety is a normal human emotion. A big week at work or an upcoming important presentation is likely to trigger some feelings of anxiety. But if you spend every Sunday dreading the week ahead, it might require investigating further.
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E-Commerce
AI can do your taxes nowsort of. The tax software giant Intuit just struck a new deal with OpenAI that will weave AI deeply into its portfolio of financial apps, including the ones many Americans use to file their taxes. In the multiyear deal, Intuit will pay ChatGPT maker OpenAI more than $100 million annually to implement its artificial intelligence models across products like TurboTax, personal finance manager Credit Karma, email marketing platform Mailchimp, and the accounting tool QuickBooks. Through the partnership, Intuits products will also become accessible directly through ChatGPTthe latest lucrative business integration for OpenAI. We are taking a massive step forward to fuel financial success for consumers and businesses, unlocking growth for both companies, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said. Our partnership combines the power of Intuits proprietary financial data, credit models, and AI platform capabilities with OpenAIs scale and frontier models to give users the financial advantage they need to prosper.” Intuit owns a big swath of the financial software market, and all of those apps will be popping up in ChatGPT soon to steer users toward personalized recommendations for credit cards and loans and to answer their tax and personal finance questions. Intuit has been gravitating toward AI for a while now. Late last year, the company introduced AI-powered features into QuickBooks, inviting its users to automate rote, time-consuming tasks like sending invoices. Intuit insisted that it was being intentional about its implementation of AI, particularly given the rush for every business to boast about its AI capabilities. The idea is not to just have random sprinkles of AI across the product, Dave Talach, Intuit senior vice president of the QuickBooks platform, told Fast Company at the time. Weve been thoughtful about approaching AI, not just for the sake of AI, but we want it to show up in a cohesive way in the product that is coherent to the customer. In June, QuickBooks released a set of AI agents for QuickBooks designed to get familiar with a companys business and operations, taking over tasks to speed up bookkeeping and accounting. At the time, Intuit CEO Goodarzi emphasized that the company moved deliberately in building out its AI because it knows that missteps and inaccuracies are high stakes for the financial tools its customers rely on. If it screws up, its a big problem, he told Fast Company. ChatGPT is a platform now OpenAIs new partnership with Intuit is just the latest third-party integration for ChatGPT. In late September, OpenAI took what it called first steps toward agentic commerce with integrations for Shopify and Etsy, and went on to ink a deal with PayPal last month. OpenAI also recently introduced a developer kit that would open its hit chatbot platform to third-party appsa major shift for the chatbot that stands to remake the way that its 700 million-plus weekly users find and do things online. ChatGPTs first wave of apps included Zillow, Spotify, Canva, and Expedia, with apps from DoorDash, Peloton, Uber, and Target in the works. OpenAIs recent moves point to the companys vision of ChatGPT as an all-encompassing hub of utility that gives internet users little reason to go elsewhere. Those decisions coincide with OpenAIs seismic shift away from its complex nonprofit roots into a more traditional for-profit company, although it technically will remain under the wing of a nonprofit. We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity, which currently requires hundreds of billions of dollars and may eventually require trillions of dollars, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a letter about the decision to change the companys structure. We believe this is the best way for us to fulfill our mission and to get people to create massive benefits for each other with these new tools.
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