WASHINGTON (AP) _ Actor Dennis Quaid told Congress on Wednesday that taking away the right to sue pharmaceutical companies would turn consumers into ”uninformed and uncompensated lab rats.”

Quaid’s comments came as he described a harrowing, near-fatal drug mix-up in which his newborn twins received 1,000 times the correct dose of the blood thinner heparin.

The actor said his family’s brush with tragedy underscores the need to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable through lawsuits. That remedy is becoming increasingly problematic for injured consumers.

The drug maker, Baxter Healthcare Corp., said it regrets that a product intended to save and sustain life was at the center of a medication error.

Beginning with the Bush administration, the Food and Drug Administration has stepped into suits on the side of defendant pharmaceutical companies, arguing that federal regulation of drugs pre-empts state suits.

”The regulatory cop is off the beat,” Georgetown University law professor David Vladeck told the House Reform and Government Oversight Committee.

The issue of federal pre-emption of suits against the drug industry will come before the SupremeCourt this year in a case from Vermont.

Some 7,000 people in the United States die every year from medication errors.

The Quaid family is suing Baxter Healthcare, which is seeking dismissal of the case on grounds that the FDA approved the labeling.

”Like many Americans, I believed that a big problem in our country was frivolous lawsuits,” Quaid testified. ”But now I know that the courts are often the only path to justice.”

The committee’s top Republican, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, sympathized with Quaid, saying that if this had happened to the Davis family, ”I’d be suing everybody in sight.” Apart from Quaid’s case, Davis urged a middle ground between total pre-emption and unrestrained litigation.

The committee chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said that if manufacturers face no liability, all the financial incentives will point them in the wrong direction and that abusive practices will multiply.

Quaid told the committee his family’s life-altering story began in November 2007 when twins Thomas and Zoe, at the time 12 days old, developed a staph infection and had to be hospitalized.

Quaid’s children were mistakenly administered the wrong version of the blood thinner; two concentrations of the drug were bottled with similar labels and size. When rotated slightly as they often are when stored, the light blue 10-unit bottle and the 10,000-unit dark blue bottle are virtually indistinguishable, Quaid said.

The children recovered, though ”we don’t know what the longer-term effects will be,” he said.

Fourteen months earlier, a similar mix-up occurred at an Indianapolis hospital; three infants died. That event was brought up at the hearing by Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.

Baxter did not take the similarly appearing packages off the market.

”Why did the company wait … I can’t understand,” Burton told Quaid.

In its statement, the company said that after learning of the deaths involving heparin in Indianapolis in late 2006, Baxter consulted with the FDA. The company broadly distributed a medication safety alert to clinicians across the U.S. to notify them that its heparin vials had been involved in a medication error.

Baxter says that before the Indianapolis case, it had never received a single customer report about a perceived similarity between the two versions of the heparin packaging.

More recently, Baxter recalled the blood thinner, which was made from ingredients from China, after the drug was connected to 81 deaths and 785 severe allergic reactions.

The FDA found the drug was contaminated with oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, which mimics heparin and thus was not detected in routine testing.

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Securities regulators on Wednesday charged Broadcom Corp. co-founders Henry T. Nicholas III and Henry Samueli with falsifying the company’s reported income, leading to what is believed to be the largest accounting restatement yet because of backdating stock options.

Samueli stepped down as chairman of the company’s board of directors and will take a leave of absence as chief technology officer, according to a statement from the Irvine, Calif., chip maker.

A civil complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission also charges former chief financial officer William J. Ruehle and general counsel David Dull. It seeks injunctions, unspecified monetary penalties as well as removing Samueli and Dull from their positions. Dull also took a leave of absence Wednesday.

The four men are accused of violating federal securities laws by misrepresenting the dates on which stock options were granted to its executives and employees.

The SEC said that as a result of the scheme, Broadcom restated its financial results in January 2007 and reported more than $2 billion in additional compensation expenses.

”This egregious misconduct resulted in the largest accounting restatement to date arising from stock option backdating and warrants the significant sanctions sought from these individuals,” said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.

The SEC has reached civil settlements with eight companies, including Broadcom, and at least 30 former executives over improper options backdating since late 2006. At one point, the SEC was investigating more than 100 companies.

In addition, federal prosecutors have investigated scores of companies for options backdating, and at least 18 executives have been hit with criminal charges. Nine have pleaded guilty.

The company declined to comment on the allegations and emphasized that the government’s charges pertain to events that happened five to 10 years ago.

Samueli’s attorney Gordon Greenberg said in a statement that a 2006 audit exonerated his client from any wrongdoing in the options backdating.

The SEC also ”failed to acknowledge that Dr. Samueli has no accounting training and was never responsible for the processing or accounting of stock options,” Greenberg said.

Ruehle’s attorney, Richard Marmaro, also denied his client did anything illegal.

”Bill Ruehle denies the allegations in the SEC’s complaint that he retroactively determined the grant dates for Broadcom’s stock options or that he, or any of Broadcom’s other senior executives, engaged in a scheme to defraud investors or misstate the company’s financial statements,” Marmaro said. ”When the full truth comes out, we are confident that he will be fully vindicated.”

Dull’s attorney, Seth Aronson, declined to comment, citing Broadcom’s settlement with the SEC that precludes the company’s management from speaking about the case.

Phone messages left for an attorney and a spokesman representing Nicholas were not immediately returned.

Samueli and his wife, Susan, own the Anaheim Ducks.

”There will be no changes in the management or operation of the club or Honda Center,” Ducks CEO Michael Schulman said in a statement.

The SEC complaint filed in U.S. District Court claims the backdating scheme occurred between 1998 and 2003 in which the four men misrepresented the dates stock options were granted in the company.

The complaint also said Nicholas and Samueli served on a two-member option committee that approved up to 88 grants during that period, but didn’t hold meetings on the dates the grants were supposedly approved.

Backdating stock options involves retroactively setting the exercise price to a low point in the stock’s value to increase profits for an executive or employee when shares are sold.

If companies backdate options without properly disclosing and accounting for the move, it can cause profits to be overstated and taxes to be underpaid.

Samueli, 53, co-founded the semiconductor-maker with Nicholas in 1991. The two first met while working for defense contractor TRW Inc. Samueli is chairman and chief technical officer and owns nearly 7 percent of the company’s stock, according to the SEC.

Nicholas, 48, served as CEO and president since Broadcom’s inception until he resigned in 2003. Last month, his attorney Bill Hake said Nicholas had entered an alcohol rehabilitation program.

Ruehle, 65, joined the company in 1997 as vice president and chief financial officer and retired in 2006. Dull, 59, serves as Broadcom’s general counsel, secretary and senior vice president of business affairs.

The U.S. attorney’s office also has launched an investigation into stock-option backdating at Broadcom. In a court hearing in January, federal prosecutors told a judge that Nicholas and Samueli were ”unindicted potential co-conspirators” in the probe.

A former human resources executive, Nancy Tullos, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice earlier this year and settled with the SEC for $1.4 million without admitting wrongdoing. She is cooperating in the ongoing U.S. attorney’s investigation.

The Irvine-based company also agreed last month to pay $12 million to settle similar charges without admitting or denying the allegations.

Broadcom’s shares slid 1.8 percent, or 51 cents, to $26.96 Wednesday.

Let’s face it: coworkers don’t always get along. There have been times in all of our lives when toes get stepped on at work, feelings get hurt or enraged, and we have felt the need to verbally thrash a coworker to another. Talking smack about your office mates is all too common—but when gossip crosses the line, it may be considered defamation, and is against the law. Legally speaking, defamation is false information which injures another person. The false statement can be spoken, written or even communicated through email. Defamation exposes the victim to ridicule and shame, and can cause damage to that person’s reputation or occupation—even causing that person to lose their job.

Proving defamation can be tricky, however, as not all statements are defamatory. For instance, an opinion made about someone, even if it’s negative, does not constitute defamation. In order to prove defamation, it must be shown that the defamer knew the information they were spreading was false, but still claimed it as fact. For example, if you tell a coworker that another coworker is lazy, that statement is opinion-based and doesn’t hold much weight. On the other hand, if you claim that a coworker has been stealing from the company, that is a statement that sounds like a fact and could get you, and that coworker, into a heap of trouble. Therefore, this can be considered defamation (only, of course, if it’s not true.)

So the general rule of thumb for workplace gossip goes back to the old adage, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Not only can you cause irreparable damage to another, which is simply immature and uncool, you could get hit with some hefty legal penalties of your own—including fines and your own loss of employment. And no matter how you feel about your job or the coworker you are bashing, that is an awfully high price to pay.

For more information about defamation, contact a Lead Counsel Labor and Employment attorney in your area today.

NEW YORK (AP) _ A notorious ”Spam King” and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 million in damages after a federal judge awarded the popular online hangout what is believed to be the largest anti-spam judgment ever.

The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards. But even if the News Corp.-owned site never collects, it hopes the judgment deters other spammers.

”Anybody who’s been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say, ‘Wow, I better not go there,”’ MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. ”Spammers don’t want to be prosecuted. They are there to make money. It’s our job to send a message to stop them.”

U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins in Los Angeles ruled in MySpace’s favor Monday after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines failed to show up for a court hearing.

Wallace earned the monikers ”Spam King” and ”Spamford” as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.

”MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site,” Nigam said in a statement. ”We remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.”

Nigam told the AP that Wallace and Rines created their own MySpace accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords through ”phishing” scams.

They then e-mailed other MySpace members, he said, ”asking them to check out a cool video or another cool site. When you (got) there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ring tones.”

MySpace said the pair sent more than 730,000 messages to MySpace members, many made to look like they were coming from trusted friends, giving them an air of legitimacy. Under the 2003 federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 in damages, tripled when conducted ”willfully and knowingly.”

In court papers, MySpace said the activities resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs, along with complaints from hundreds of users. The company also said some of the outside Web sites contained adult material, potentially harming teens who use MySpace.

The Los Angeles-based company described the amount of the award as a ”landmark.”

John Levine, a board member for the anti-spam advocacy group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, said that past spam judgments he knows of have been in the tens of millions of dollars.

There was no telephone listing for Wallace in the Las Vegas area, to which he moved in 2004 to pursue night club promotion work. Service was disconnected for two listed numbers for Rines in Stratham, N.H., his last known address; a third number in Stratham was unlisted.

Collins awarded the amounts sought by MySpace: $157.4 million jointly against Rines and Wallace and an additional $63.4 million against Rines under CAN-SPAM _ plus $1.5 million more against the pair under California’s anti-phishing law and $4.7 million in attorneys fees. MySpace said it was entitled to another $3 million from Rines and Wallace under a different section of CAN-SPAM.

Collins also issued injunctions barring similar activities in the future.

MySpace has another anti-spam case pending against a high-profile defendant, Scott Richter, who it claims gained access to MySpace profiles using stolen passwords and then sent spam bulletins from those accounts.

MySpace said the junk messages from Wallace and Rines came after Richter’s.

Bonds originally was charged with four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice last Nov. 15, but U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered prosecutors on Feb. 29 to rework the indictment so that each charge alleged only one lie rather than lumping several alleged falsehoods into single counts.

The new indictment doesn’t add any new alleged falsehoods.

The case against Bonds is still built on whether he lied when he told the grand jury that his personal trainer Greg Anderson never supplied him with steroids and human growth hormone.

NEW YORK (AP) _ A woman accused of booking clients for a high-priced call girl ring pleaded guilty Wednesday in the federal probe that brought down ”Client No. 9,” former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Temeka Rachelle Lewis, 32, entered the pleas to federal charges of promoting prostitution and money laundering. She’s among four defendants in the case involving the Emperor’s Club VIP.

The FBI secretly recorded conversations between Lewis and Spitzer about a Feb. 13 tryst with a prostitute named ”Kristen” in Washington, according to court papers.

Spitzer announced his resignation March 12. He has not been charged.

Lewis, who lives in Brooklyn, faces up to 25 years in prison when sentenced Aug. 10 but her term could be much lower under federal sentencing guidelines.

The other defendants in the case are Mark Brener, 62, of Cliffside Park, N.J., who is accused of running the ring; Tanya Hollander, 36, of Rhinebeck, N.Y.; and Cecil Suwal, 23, who lives with Brener.

The investigation into the high-end ring apparently began last year as a routine financial probe by the Internal Revenue Service. The investigation was referred to the U.S. attorney’s office last fall.

Investigators say the ring made more than $1 million. A three-diamond prostitute cost $1,000 per hour; a seven-diamond prostitute could fetch $3,100 and the highest paid, $5,500 an hour, authorities said.

The bookers arranged meetings between clients and more than 50 prostitutes in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, London and Paris, prosecutors said.

Conversations were recorded about ”Client 9,” including one saying Kristen should take a train from New York to Washington for a tryst the night before Valentine’s Day, according to an affidavit. Spitzer, who is married, allegedly paid $4,300 for her services.

Investigators called Spitzer a repeat customer who spent tens of thousands of dollars on trysts with prostitutes. The scion of a Manhattan real estate developer, Spitzer reported $1.9 million in income to the IRS in 2006.

Spitzer, who was New York’s attorney general before he became governor, built a reputation on Wall Street as a crusader against shady practices and overly generous compensation.

Spitzer and his wife, Silda, have three teenage daughters.

The former Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals player was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday.

Hambrick pleaded guilty on Feb. 26 to one count of distributing 50 grams or more of crack cocaine.

Court documents show Hambrick sold the drugs in 2007 to a confidential informants near his home in Lacoochee, about 40 miles north of Tampa.

Hambrick’s NFL career spanned five seasons. His best year was 2003 when he rushed for 972 yards and five touchdowns for Dallas.

The court didn’t consider arguments on behalf of 31-year-old Mark Downs Jr. of Dunbar, saying his attorney missed a filing deadline by two weeks.

Downs has been sentenced to one-to-six years in prison, but has remained free on bond pending appeal.

Downs was convicted of corruption of minors and simple assault for offering an 8-year-old player money to hit a mildly autistic teammate with a ball during warmups before a June 2005 playoff game.

Prosecutors say Downs wanted the autistic boy to be hurt and unable to play in the game.

It’s not clear if Downs will file further appeals.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) _ A mother taken from a polygamist sect and being held as a minor in state custody gave birth Monday to a baby boy who was immediately taken into child-protective custody.

State officials acknowledged the mother may be an adult, and said they were trying to determine her true age. Since state officials raided the sect’s West Texas ranch on April 3, child welfare officials have taken custody of all its children on the grounds that they were endangered by the sect’s underage and polygamous spiritual marriages.

A state district judge issued an injuction Monday preventing CPS from moving the newborn and mother from Travis County until a hearing Thursday, in which father Dan Jessop will request his wife and three children be released from state custody.

Patricia Matassarin, Jessop’s attorney, said the mother is 22 and should not be in state care as a minor.

Matassarin said CPS was struggling to place the mother and newborn late Monday because of possible exposure to chicken pox at an Austin shelter where other sect children are living.

She said Jessop told her the mother and newborn had been poised to spend the night in a CPS office, but were now set to sleep on air mattress in another home. Child Protective Services spokesman Patrick Crimmins did not immediately return a phone call for comment late Monday.

”She is 22,” Matassarin said. ”She could be in a nice motel room with her husband.”

The boy is the second baby born in state custody since the raid.

Crimmins acknowledged Monday that the mother is among 27 girls whose ages are in dispute.

He said officials were reviewing documentation for those who claim they are of legal age, and will release them from state custody if they are adults. He added that he didn’t know how long it will take to investigate their claims.

Rod Parker, an attorney and spokesman for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, accused state officials of deliberately holding a pregnant mother they to knew to be of legal age so they could take her baby into custody upon birth.

”They just wanted to keep the mother in custody until they could get the baby,” Parker said.

Crimmins said sect members whose ages were in dispute were being kept in custody because sect members have given conflicting information about their names and ages.

”We didn’t have documentation. The other thing, too, frankly, is the information we got … changed over time,” he said.

The new mother has filed a writ of habeas corpus to be freed from state custody.

The newborn’s placement in state custody brought the total number of children taken from members of the renegade Mormon sect to 465.

He’ll likely stay in state custody even if his mother is an adult. Like other mothers of children under 1 year, she would be allowed to stay with him in a foster-care facility, Crimmins said.

Child welfare officials and state troopers raided the FLDS’s Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado after a domestic violence shelter received calls from someone claiming to be an abused 16-year-old girl. The girl has never been found and authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax.

Under Texas law, children under the age of 17 generally cannot consent to sex with an adult.

Church officials deny any children were abused and say the state’s actions are a form of religious persecution.

FLDS broke away from the mainline Mormon church, which officially renounced polygamy more than a century ago.

CINCINNATI (AP) _ A man ordered by a judge to make sure his daughter hit the books has found himself in jail because she failed to earn a high school equivalency diploma.

Brian Gegner, of Fairfield, was sentenced last week to 180 days in jail for contributing to the unruliness or delinquency of a minor.

He was ordered months ago to make sure his 18-year-old daughter Brittany Gegner, who has a history of truancy, received her GED _ something that hasn’t happened yet.

Brittany Gegner, who said Monday that she plans to take a required GED test this month, said her father shouldn’t be blamed for her failure because she has been living with her mother.

”It was my wrongdoing, not his,” said Brittany Gegner, whose fiance and 18-month-old daughter also live at her mother’s home in nearby Hamilton. ”He shouldn’t have to go to jail for something I did.”

Her mother agrees.

”Brittany is almost 19 years old now and I think it’s unfair to put her father in jail,” said Shana Roach. ”She’s an adult now, and it’s not right to rip an innocent man from his home.”

Butler County Juvenile Court administrator Rob Clevenger Jr. said Monday that the court still has jurisdiction in the case because Brittany Gegner was a juvenile when the truancy problems began and when the charge against Brian Gegner was filed in 2007.

A hearing on a motion filed by Brian Gegner’s attorney to reconsider the sentence is scheduled for Friday. Messages seeking comment were not returned Monday at the offices of defense attorney Tamara Sack and the Butler County prosecutor.

Brian Gegner’s wife, Stephanie Gegner, said she and her husband are afraid he will lose his job if he remains in jail. She said they tried to keep his daughter in school.

”You’d take her to school and she’d go out the other door,” Stephanie Gegner said.