The 5-4 decision had sweeping implications for states, which intend to use settlement money for drug treatment programs, and for the Sackler family, which made its fortune selling a drug that fueled the nation's opioid epidemic. The ruling may also make it more difficult to resolve other high-profile bankruptcies.

“No one has directed us to a statute or case suggesting American courts in the past enjoyed the power in bankruptcy to discharge claims brought by nondebtors against other nondebtors, all without the consent of those affected,” Gorsuch wrote for an opinion that included Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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Taking a daily multivitamin does not help people to live any longer and may actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.

Researchers in the US analysed health records from nearly 400,000 adults with no major long-term diseases to see whether daily multivitamins reduced their risk of death over the next two decades.

Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period, prompting the government researchers to comment that “multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported”.

Nearly half of UK adults take multivitamins or dietary supplements once a week or more, part of a domestic market worth more than half a billion pounds annually. The global market for the supplements is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars each year. In the US, a third of adults use multivitamins in the hope of preventing disease.

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The U.S. state of Kansas on Monday sued Pfizer, accusing the company of misleading the public about its COVID-19 vaccine by hiding risks while making false claims about its effectiveness.

In a lawuit, filed in the District Court of Thomas Country, the state said the New Yourk-based drugmaker's alleged false statements violated the Kansas Consumer Pretection Act. It is seeking unspecified money damagees.

"Pfizer made multiple misleading statements to deceive the public about its vaccine at a time when Americans needed the truth," Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, said in a statement.

Texas lawmakers touted their heartbeat law as an effort to save lives, but the state's near-total ban on abortion appears to have triggered an increase in infant deaths, according to a new study published Monday.

The findings in JAMA Pediatrics show that infant deaths rose after Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which banned all abortion after about six weeks from conception. S.B. 8 became Texas law in September 2021 and U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion just over nine months later, on June 24, 2022. The high court ruling in the Dobbs case prompted more than a dozen states to issue near-total bans on abortion. Observers speculate that evidence will also show increases in infant deaths in those states, akin to what Texas has seen, the study said.

“It just points to some of the devastating consequences of abortion bans that maybe people weren't thinking about when they passed these laws,” Alison Gemmill, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health who authored the study, told USA TODAY. She called the deaths following the Texas heartbeat law its “spillover effects on moms and babies.”

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The court agreed Monday to hear the Biden administration's challenge to a Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, an increasingly potent political issue that has divided lower courts and emerged as a leading front in the battle over LGBTQ issues.

The case will be argued in the next term, which begins in October.

It's the first time the justices will weigh in on the matter, which is being fought by transgender teens and their families.

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Now here we are in the summer of 2024. There’s a new, more transmissible variant of COVID-19 circulating and CDC is predicting a summer surge.

This new variant is not considered as likely as past variants to bring on severe disease. But there are people who face a greater risk of serious COVID because of age or infirmities. And no one wants to get sick right before or during a trip.

So the frequently asked question is: Does distancing yourself from others who could be contagious with COVID-19 help in any way? Or has the idea of distance been debunked?

To answer those questions, let’s start by digging into distance.

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