Three dead, two hospitalized, following collision in Fredericton: police
Three people have died and two have been hospitalized after a speeding car struck a tree and landed on another vehicle in Fredericton Sunday morning.
The NFL and lawyers for thousands of retired NFL players have reached an agreement to end race-based adjustments in dementia testing in the US$1 billion settlement of concussion claims, according to a proposed deal filed Wednesday in federal court.
The revised testing plan follows public outrage over the use of "race-norming," a practice that came to light only after two former NFL players filed a civil rights lawsuit over it last year. The adjustments, critics say, may have prevented hundreds of Black players suffering from dementia to win awards that average $500,000 or more.
The Black retirees will now have the chance to have their tests rescored or, in some cases, seek a new round of cognitive testing, according to the settlement, details of which were first reported in The New York Times on Wednesday.
"We look forward to the court's prompt approval of the agreement, which provides for a race-neutral evaluation process that will ensure diagnostic accuracy and fairness in the concussion settlement," NFL lawyer Brad Karp said in a statement.
The proposal, which must still be approved by a judge, follows months of closed-door negotiations between the NFL, class counsel for the retired players, and lawyers for the Black players who filed suit, Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry.
The vast majority of the league's players -- 70% of active players and more than 60% of living retirees -- are Black. So the changes are expected to be significant, and potentially costly for the NFL.
"No race norms or race demographic estimates -- whether Black or white -- shall be used in the settlement program going forward," the proposal said.
To date, the concussion fund has paid out $821 million for five types of brain injuries, including early and advanced dementia, Parkinson's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS.
Lawyers for the Black players suspect that white men were qualifying for awards at two or three times the rate of Blacks since the payouts began in 2017. It's unclear whether a racial breakdown of payouts will ever be done or made public.
Black NFL retiree Ken Jenkins and others have asked the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to investigate.
The binary scoring system used in dementia testing -- one for Black people, one for everyone else -- was developed by neurologists in the 1990s as a crude way to factor in a patient's socioeconomic background. Experts say it was never meant to be used to determine payouts in a court settlement.
However, it was adopted by both sides in the court-approved, $765 million settlement in 2013 that resolved lawsuits accusing the NFL of hiding what it knew about the risk of repeated concussions. The fund was later uncapped amid concerns the money would run out.
This year, amid the national reckoning on race in America, both sides agreed to work to halt the use of race-norming, which assumes Black players start with lower cognitive function. That makes it harder to show they suffer from a mental deficit linked to their playing days.
The NFL would admit no wrongdoing under terms of the agreement. The league said it hoped the new testing formula, developed with input from a panel of experts, would be widely adopted in medicine.
To date, about 2,000 men have applied for dementia awards, but only 30% have been approved. In some cases, the NFL appealed payouts awarded to Black men if doctors did not apply the racial adjustment. The new plan would forbid any challenges based on race.
The awards average $715,000 for those with advanced dementia and $523,000 for those with early dementia. The settlement is intended to run for 65 years, to cover anyone retired at the time it was first approved.
"The NFL should be really enraged about the race norming. …. That should be unacceptable to them and all of their sponsors," Roxanne "Roxy" Gordon of San Diego, the wife of an impaired former player, said earlier this week.
Amon Gordon, a Stanford University graduate, finds himself at 40 unable to work. He has twice qualified for an advanced dementia award only to have the decision overturned for reasons that aren't yet clear to them. His case remains on review before the federal appeals court in Philadelphia.
Nearly 20,000 NFL retirees have registered for the settlement program, which offers monitoring, testing and, for some, compensation.
"If the new process eliminates race-norming and more people qualify, that's great," said Jenkins, who does not have an impairment but advocates for those who do.
"(But) we're not going to get everything we wanted," Jenkins, an insurance executive, said Tuesday. "We want full transparency of all the demographic information from the NFL -- who's applied, who's been paid."
Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody, who has overseen the settlement for a decade, dismissed the suit filed by Davenport and Henry this year on procedural grounds. But she later ordered the lawyers who negotiated the 2013 settlement -- New York plaintiffs lawyer Christopher Seeger for the players and Karp for the NFL -- to work with a mediator to address it.
In the meantime, the Gordons and other NFL families wait.
"His life is ruined," Roxy Gordon said of her husband, who spent nearly a decade in the league as a defensive tackle or defensive end. "He's a 40-year-old educated male who can't even use his skills. It's been horrible."
This story has been corrected to say Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry filed their civil rights complaint last year, not in 2019.
Three people have died and two have been hospitalized after a speeding car struck a tree and landed on another vehicle in Fredericton Sunday morning.
The Maple Leafs battled back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Boston Bruins with consecutive 2-1 victories - including one that required extra time - in their first-round playoff series to push the club's Original Six rival to the limit before suffering a devastating Game 7 overtime loss.
Amid scientists' warnings that nations need to transition away from fossil fuels to limit climate change, Canadians are still lukewarm on electric vehicles, according to a study conducted by Nanos Research for CTV News.
A Montreal man is warning Tesla drivers about using the Smart Summon feature after his vehicle hit another in a parking lot.
Madonna put on a free concert on Copacabana beach Saturday night, turning Rio de Janeiro's vast stretch of sand into an enormous dance floor teeming with a multitude of her fans.
Thieves killed two Australians and an American on a surfing trip to Mexico in order to steal their truck, particularly because they wanted the tires, authorities said Sunday.
One person was killed and 23 others were injured when a bus crashed early Sunday on Interstate 95 in northern Maryland, police said.
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.