Fentanyl use is on the rise in the United States, and William Lisman, the longtime coroner in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, is seeing the effects of the deadly drug first-hand, NBC News reported. Last year there were 137 fatal drug overdoses — more than half of them the result of heroin laced with fentanyl — in the county of just 318,000 people, a death rate four times higher than New York City. “Twenty years ago, we might have 12 deaths we determined to be drug deaths,” Lisman said. “This year we are on track for 150 deaths…By our standards, it’s off the charts.” Lisman lives in Wilkes-Barre, the county seat that researchers in 2014 deemed part of the most unhappy metro area in United States. When he realized fentanyl was quietly killing residents, he sounded the alarm.
A former district attorney who declined to press sexual-assault charges against Bill Cosby in 2005 has filed the beginnings of a lawsuit against Cosby's accuser in Philadelphia.
An attorney for Bruce L. Castor says the personal-injury complaint will claim Andrea Constand sued Castor for defamation in 2015 so he would lose the prosecutor's race. The winner, Kevin Steele, had criticized Castor's handling of the Cosby case.
Castor's lawyer James Beasley Jr. tells The Philadelphia Inquirer paperwork filed earlier this month will lead to a lawsuit seeking more than $50,000 in damages.
A lawyer representing Constand's attorneys says the potential lawsuit sounds "legally deficient."
Cosby is charged with knocking out Constand with pills and sexually assaulting her at his home near Philadelphia in 2004. He says the encounter was consensual.
