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Optum business helps push UnitedHealth past 1Q expectations

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

UnitedHealth beat first-quarter forecasts and hiked its 2023 guidance for the first time, pushed in part by more growth from its Optum care segment.The health care giant said Friday that revenue jumped 25% from its Optum segment, which provides care and manages prescription drug benefits. Operating earnings from that part of the business also grew 19% to $3.7 billion. The Optum business runs a growing number of clinics and urgent care and surgery centers. UnitedHealth says it served 103 million people in the first quarter. Revenue per customer from that business jumped 34% compared to last year’s quarter. The insurer attributed that to its emphasis on value-based care. That involves basing doctor pay more on how a patient population does instead of delivering a fee for each service. Health care bill payers like the federal government have grown more interested in these arrangements as they try to keep people healthy and out of hospitals. CEO Andrew Witty told analysts on Frida...

Celtics hope for deep playoff run, but first face the Hawks

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

BOSTON (AP) — Joe Mazzulla has been navigating an opportunity he’s always wanted, but never expected to have this soon. Along the way, the Celtics coach hasn’t strayed too far from what put him in this position in the first place. “As big as this is, I still think it comes down to the most simple of the details,” Mazzulla said this week. “Just having a plan. Executing that plan.”It’s been the north star for him as he’s guided Boston this season back from the disorienting preseason jolt of seeing former coach Ime Udoka suspended. The Celtics are a 57-win team, finished second in the Eastern Conference and are again positioned to make another deep playoff run. A core led by All-Stars Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown views Saturday’s tip-off of their first-round playoff series with the Atlanta Hawks as the first step toward another shot at an NBA title.“We’ve essentially been waiting for this moment,” Tatum said. “The group is locked in. The group is focused.”Having to constantly he...

Court documents: FBI used Discord billing information to identify Mass. Air National Guardsman as suspect in leak case

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

BOSTON (AP) — Court documents: FBI used Discord billing information to identify Mass. Air National Guardsman as suspect in leak case.Source

Man sentenced to life without parole for murdering girlfriend

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

ADAMS COUNTY, Colo. (KDVR) -- The 17th Judicial District Attorney's Office announced that a man who murdered his girlfriend in 2021 has been sentenced.Jeffrey Aschenbrenner, 34, was sentenced to life in prison without parole on Thursday. Employees forced to evacuate Coors canning facility after acid spill Aschenbrenner murdered his girlfriend, 43-year-old Monica Medina, on Nov. 27, 2021.What happened on the day of the murder?The district attorney's office said that Medina was in the process of moving out of the home that she shared with Aschenbrenner. Medina's father helped her pack her belongings into his truck.After that, Medina and her father drove separately in her Audi and Mercedes to a gas station near her house.Medina's father left her Mercedes at the gas station and rode back to her home in her Audi.When they got back to the home, Aschenbrenner was waiting for them across the street from where Medina's father's truck was parked. Aschenbrenner then fired three shots, the d...

FLL airport reopens as South Florida floods slowly recede

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — One of Florida’s busiest airports reopened Friday morning, two days after an unprecedented deluge left planes and travelers stranded and turned Fort Lauderdale’s streets into rivers.Officials at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport completed final inspections after sunrise Friday and resumed operations at 9 a.m.In a tweet Friday morning, airport officials advised travelers to check with their airlines on updated flight schedules before going to the airport.The airport shut down Wednesday evening as a storm dumped more than 2 feet (60 centimeters) of rain.“Nature has been unkind to us,” Broward County Mayor Lamar Fisher said during a news conference Thursday afternoon at the airport.A flood warning was expiring, but the National Weather Service warned motorists that water-covered roads could still be a hazard.All across Fort Lauderdale, residents and business owners cleaned up. While it started raining on Monday in South Florida, mu...

US charges 28 members of Sinaloa cartel, sons of El Chapo

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Friday charged 28 members of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, including sons of notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, in a sprawling fentanyl-trafficking investigation.Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the charges Friday alongside Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram and other top federal prosecutors. The charges were filed against cartel leaders, as well alleged chemical suppliers, lab managers, fentanyl traffickers, security leaders, financiers and weapons traffickers.The indictments announced Friday charge three of Guzman’s sons — Ovidio Guzmán López, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Sálazar — who are known as the Chapitos, or little Chapos, and who have earned a reputation as the more violent and aggressive faction of the cartel.Only Guzmán López is in custody, in Mexico.The indictments also charge Chinese and Guatemalan citizens accused of supplying precursor chemicals required t...

Venezuela arrests U.S. fugitive as part of oil graft purge

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

MIAMI (AP) — Authorities in Venezuela have brought corruption charges against a businessman who is a fugitive in a separate U.S. money laundering case targeting a top ally of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.Alvaro Pulido, wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffed, was among a group of seven Venezuelan officials and businessmen escorted by a masked security agent on their way to an initial judicial hearing in Caracas in images shared Friday by Venezuela’s government.The men were taken into custody as part of a sprawling investigation into corruption in the state-run oil company PDVSA focused on the payment of massive bribes in exchange for lucrative contracts to move tankers of Venezuelan crude sanctioned by the U.S.Pulido stands out among the more than 50 alleged schemers already arrested because of his relationship to Alex Saab.The two Colombians were long-time business partners who made a fortune selling food and other items to Venezuela’s socialist gover...

Juice mission launches to explore Jupiter’s icy ocean worlds

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

(CNN) — The European Space Agency has sent a spacecraft to explore Jupiter and three of its largest and most intriguing moons.The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, or Juice, launched Friday at 8:14 a.m. ET aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.The spacecraft separated from the Ariane 5 rocket 28 minutes after launch, and ESA received a signal from Juice about an hour after liftoff, confirming that Earth-based mission control is able to “talk” to the vehicle.“We have #AcquisitionOfSignal from #ESAJuice! The spacecraft has said its first words from its new home in space, captured by our New Norcia ground station in Western Australia. @ESA_Juice, we hear you loud and clear,” read a post from ESA operations‘ Twitter account.Over the course of the next 17 days, Juice will deploy its solar arrays, antennas and other instruments, followed by three months of testing and preparing the instruments.Juice will take...

In ‘Florida Man,’ Edgar Ramirez ‘has fun with’ popular meme

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

Edgar Ramirez says his new series “Florida Man,” now on Netflix, may share a name with the popular meme of the same name, but it is not making fun of the state or its residents.“It does not make fun of that, it has fun with it, which is completely different,” said Ramirez in an interview.In “ Florida Man ” — the TV show — Ramirez plays Mike Valentine, an ex-cop in Philadelphia who falls from grace because of a gambling addiction. He also still owes a big debt to a local mob boss (Emory Cohen) so he often has to do his dirty work. On his orders, Ramirez’s character begrudgingly returns to his home state of Florida to track down his boss’ runaway girlfriend (Abbey Lee). What he intends to be a quick trip turns into a wild treasure hunt that opens up a Pandora’s box about his past.“It is funny, but it’s dark. It’s offbeat, it’s strange, it’s weird,” Ramirez said. “The absurdity of the situations is where the comedy lies.”He says Valentine is one ...

Federal judge orders Massachusetts Air National Guardsman to remain jailed in classified documents leak case

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:53:25 GMT

BOSTON (AP) — Billing records of an Internet social media platform and interviews with another user helped the FBI identify a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman as a suspect in the leak of highly classified military documents, according to court records unsealed Friday.The new details came as Jack Teixeira, 21, appeared in court to face charges under the Espionage Act of unauthorized removal and retention of classified and national defense information.A federal magistrate judge ordered him held until a detention hearing next week.Teixeira was arrested by heavily armed tactical agents on Thursday following a weeklong criminal investigation into the disclosure of the government records, a breach that exposed to the world unvarnished secret assessments on the war in Ukraine, the capabilities and geopolitical interests of other nations and other national security issues.He appeared in court Friday in tan jail clothes for a brief proceeding at which U.S. Magistrate Judge Davi...