Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has agreed to pay a record $2.3 billion settlement to resolve criminal and civil liability for illegally promoting certain pharmaceuticals, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. Officials from the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services said the world's largest drug company promoted four drugs for use on certain ailments or at dosages that were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. One of those drugs was the anti-inflammatory medication Bextra, which Pfizer pulled ...

Police say the foster parents of a missing 5-year-old California boy with cerebral palsy are suspects in what is now being called a homicide investigation. Jennifer Campbell and Louis Ross, who are engaged, told police in Oakland, California, that Hasanni Campbell disappeared on August 10 while Ross was dropping him off at the shoe store where his fiance worked. Police arrested the two as suspects, but released them this week pending further investigation, Lt. Jeff Thomason said. "We had nothing ...

The father of a detainee beaten to death in an Iranian prison says he's satisfied with the way the Islamic government has handled the case -- even as it serves as proof imprisoned protesters were abused. A coroner's report showed Mohsen Rouhol-Amini, arrested for protesting the June 12 election, died of "repeated blows and severe physical injuries" at Tehran's Kahrizak prison, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported Monday, citing an informed source. Officials initially had said Rouhol-Amini had died from ...

Families and friends of the more than 300 people killed in Russia's worst school massacre marked the fifth anniversary of the tragedy Tuesday. At exactly 9:15 a.m., a bell rang out over the city of Beslan and the remnants of School Number 1, where 32 heavily armed militants took more than 1,200 people -- children, parents and teachers -- hostage on the first day of school in 2004. Russian television showed hundreds of people lined up at the school's gymnasium, ...

Sen. Ted Kennedy would have had a "very, very difficult" time politically surviving the drowning death of a young woman if it happened in the era of blogs, talk radio and 24-hour news cycles, experts said. Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, drowned after Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge following a regatta party in July 1969. The incident on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, helped dash the youngest Kennedy brother's chances at the Oval Office in 1972 and 1980. ...

Four people were killed and five were seriously injured in a train crash in Turkey, Turkish State Railways announced Thursday. Twelve people were lightly injured, it said. A substance initially suspected to be tar heroin proved not to be a narcotic, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. An affidavit, written by Los Angeles Detective Orlando Martinez, was used to outline probable cause for a warrant to search Jackson's Holmby Hills, California, home on June 26. Martinez filed ...

Facebook has announced it is to overhaul its privacy settings to make it clearer for users to know who has access to their personal data. The news follows an investigation into the privacy policy of the social networking site by Canada's Privacy Commissioner. The social networking site has agreed to make changes that it believes will provide its users with greater transparency and control over their personal information and how it is used. "These changes mean that ...

Canadian authorities are searching for a woman in their investigation into the death of a reality TV contestant, who is suspected of killing his wife in Southern California. Authorities have "identified the woman who is now a person of interest in this investigation, but she is not considered a risk to public safety," Sgt. Duncan Pound, spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said Monday. The woman helped rent a room for Ryan Alexander Jenkins, who was found dead at ...

The skeletal remains of two infants were found underneath a rural Texas trailer, police said Monday, in the same area where another set of infant remains was found last year. Authorities were called about 3:30 p.m. Sunday to the trailer south of Kennedale, about 15 miles southeast of Fort Worth, Texas, in rural Tarrant County, said Terry Grisham, spokesman for the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office. There is a group of about five mobile homes there, he said, that are leased ...

Three independent United Nations human rights experts have accused Iran of torturing confessions from detainees charged with fomenting political unrest, the international organization said Thursday. "No judicial system can consider as valid a confession obtained as a result of harsh interrogations or under torture," said Manfred Nowak, who is the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. The treatment of detainees at Iran's prisons has increasingly become a divisive issue within Iran's Islamic leadership, as reformists continue to accuse the hardline government ...