Tue:"grabbing the hog during a live musical"

Today's Senseless Shooting

A woman who was turned away from a Denver bar pulled out a gun and shot five people outside the establishment, The Denver Post reported.

None of the victims received life-threatening injuries, according to police.

It's unknown why the woman – who has not been caught or identified – was barred from entering the venue Saturday night. Police said she started to walk away, returned to talk more with security, then pulled out the gun as she left a second time.

This Sounds a Lot Like 2008, On a Smaller Scale

Wall Street could always bank on used cars. In fact, for years, investors bought bonds backed by auto loans because they reliably produced handsome returns, even amid rocky markets and downturns in the economy.

But now, for the first time in decades, that winning streak appears to be coming to an end, with a half dozen prominent used-auto lenders facing either an avalanche of failed loans — or growing regulatory scrutiny. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently suing two of those lenders over potentially predatory practices.

Together, experts say, the woes could signal a significant blow to a key pillar of the U.S. economy.

The first warning sign came in late February, when a company called American Car Center, which offered loans to customers with troubled credit histories, abruptly closed its 40 dealerships across the South and filed for bankruptcy protection. Then in April, another lender called U.S. Auto Sales also collapsed, shuttering dozens of dealerships in several states.

Before long, S&P Global Ratings put American Car Center and two other major subprime auto lenders — Exeter Finance and United Auto Credit — on watch for potential ratings downgrades.

Driving much of the concern are delinquencies. Today, the number of subprime borrowers who are behind on their auto-loan payments by 60 days or more is the highest it’s been since at least 2017, according to reports from multiple ratings agencies. Defaults are climbing too.

Could You Lose a Lot More Than a Few Pounds?   Your Life?

Ashley Dunham lost 100 pounds over the past year, but she didn’t take Ozempic. Instead, she favors a cheaper, off-brand concoction made with Ozempic’s active ingredient.

“This medication is life-changing,” said Dunham, 32, who has attracted nearly 60,000 TikTok followers by chronicling her weight-loss journey. Her transformation inspired her stepfather, a nurse practitioner, to start a family practice where he offers the off-brand drugs for about $300 a month — less than a third of the list price for Ozempic.

The Jacksonville, Fla., clinic — called Slym Wellness — is part of a flourishing industry around the new generation of weight-loss drugs, which have proved so effective that patients are clamoring for more than drugmakers can churn out. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared Ozempic and Wegovy in shortage, a designation that allows specialized pharmacies to mix up their own, cheaper versions of the blockbuster drugs.

Since then, a parallel marketplace with no modern precedent has sprung up, attracting both licensed medical professionals and entrepreneurs with histories ranging from regulatory violations to armed robbery. While clinics like Slym Wellness prescribe off-brand weight-loss medication following FDA policy, others are riding the boom in a legally gray area.

The Washington Post found more than two dozen websites that bypass doctors and pharmacies completely to sell semaglutide — the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy — directly to consumers, usually with disclaimers that it’s not for human use. One group, Doctor’s Medical Weight Loss Partnership, charges would-be clinic owners $100,000 to get a piece of the action and has wrongly advertised the off-brand medications as FDA-approved.

“This method of providing access scares me,” David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, said of the gold rush, which is putting weight-loss medications into the hands of patients who often don’t know their original source and pedigree. “Problems are going to happen.”

So far, many patients seem unconcerned. FDA data does not suggest that pharmacy-made semaglutide is causing widespread harm. But in May, the FDA warned consumers that they can’t know for sure what they’re getting when they buy off-brand semaglutide even from a licensed compounding pharmacy. And “purchasing medicine online from unregulated, unlicensed sources,” the agency said, “can expose patients to potentially unsafe products.”

Inside the gold rush to sell cheaper imitations of Ozempic