A $40,000 check for a new vehicle was delivered Monday to an attorney representing the women whose truck was riddled with bullets by LAPD officers during last month's manhunt for fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner, city officials said.

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich said in a statement the tax-free payment would cover the cost of the pickup and other property. The deal was announced Thursday — several weeks after the women were promised a new truck, and two days after they publicly complained through Jonas that they had not received a new vehicle.

"I am thankful that this matter could be resolved in a quick and efficient manner," Trutanich said in a statement Monday. “The settlement negotiated by my office for the damage done to the truck was the legal and morally right thing to do both for the individuals involved and the taxpayers of this city."

When visiting the doctor, there may be strength in numbers.

In recent years, a growing number of doctors have begun holding group appointments -- seeing up to a dozen patients with similar medical concerns all at once. Advocates of the approach say such visits allow doctors to treat more patients, spend more time with them (even if not one-on-one), increase appointment availability and improve health outcomes.

Some see group appointments as a way to ease looming physician shortages. According to a study published in December, meeting the country's health-care needs will require nearly 52,000 additional primary-care physicians by 2025. More than 8,000 of that total will be needed for the more than 27 million people newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.

"With Obamacare, we're going to get a lot of previously uninsured people coming into the system, and the question will be 'How are we going to service these people well?' " says Edward Noffsinger, who has developed group-visit models and consults with providers on their implementation. With that approach, "doctors can be more efficient and patients can have more time with their doctors."

Some of the most successful shared appointments bring together patients with the same chronic condition, such as diabetes or heart disease. For example, in a diabetes group visit, a doctor might ask everyone to remove their shoes so he can examine their feet for sores or signs of infection, among other things. A typical session lasts up to two hours. In addition to answering questions and examining patients, the doctor often leads a discussion, often assisted by a nurse.

Insurance typically covers a group appointment just as it would an individual appointment; there is no change in the co-pay amount. Insurers generally focus on the level of care provided rather than where it's provided or how many people are in the room, Noffsinger says.

Cathy Hutchinson has been unable to move her own arms or legs for 15 years. But using the most advanced brain-machine interface ever developed, she can steer a robotic arm towards a bottle, pick it up, and drink her morning coffee. The interface includes a sensor implanted in Cathy's brain, which 'reads' her thoughts, and a decoder, which turns her thoughts into instructions for the robotic arm. In this video, watch Cathy control the arm and hear from the team behind the pioneering study.

A former Arkansas man who claimed to be a member of a hacktivist group called Goatse Security was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in a data security breach at AT&T (NYSE:T) in 2010 in which email addresses and other data were stolen from approximately 120,000 iPad 3G owners.

Andrew Auernheimer, 27, was sentenced Monday in Newark, N.J., federal court. He also was ordered by U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton to pay restitution of $73,162 in damages to AT&T, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey. Auernheimer was convicted in November of conspiracy to access computers without authorization and identity theft.

Auernheimer and other members of the hacktivist group used an automated script, conducting a brute force attack on AT&T servers in June 2010. Called an "Account Slurper," the tool attempted to guess Integrated Circuit Card Identifiers, the unique 19- to 20-digit number associated with every iPad and its SIM card. Each correct guess was rewarded with an ICC-ID/email pairing for a specific identifiable iPad 3G user, investigators said.

it’s not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime. As Jeff Blagdon at The Verge put it, Auernheimer “cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way ‘broke into’ AT&T’s customer database—something company representatives confirmed during testimony.” The defense argued that AT&T’s database security was flawed, and Auernheimer’s actions were tantamount to walking through an open door.

You could certainly argue that Auernheimer’s actions “exceeded authorized access”—an open door isn’t always an invitation to come inside. But the term “authorized access” is very, very vague, and it gives prosecutors far too much latitude to bring charges and threaten outlandishly long sentences for relatively minor violations. Congress ought to clarify the statute and better define its terms, before more people get caught up in it. If the CFAA is a bad law, then it’s a bad law, regardless of whether it’s being used against a malicious troll like Andrew Auernheimer or a secular saint-in-the-making like Aaron Swartz.

Chinese doctors have performed more than 330 million abortions since the government implemented a controversial one-child policy 40 years ago, according to official data from the health ministry.

Data posted on the health ministry website shows that since 1971 - shortly before China started encouraging people to have fewer children - doctors have performed 336 million abortions.

The Chinese government has previously estimated that without the family planning policy restrictions, the country's 1.3 billion population would be 30 percent larger.

Official statistics showed that in addition to the abortions, Chinese doctors have sterilised 196 million men and women since 1971.

The incoming Chinese leadership has already moved to dismantle the Family Planning Commission.

"After the reform, China will adhere to and improve the family planning policy," Ma Kai, secretary-general of the State Council, China's cabinet, said when the move was announced, according to the official Xinhua news agency on Saturday.

The Germans rejected a loan which they were certain Cyprus would invariably default on. So the sum was cut to €10bn. A depositor haircut was the only way to co-finance this. When they did the maths, they found the big deposits would not have sufficed.

So they opted for a wealth tax with hardly any progression. There is not even an exemption for people with only very small savings. If one wanted to feed the political mood of insurrection in southern Europe, this was the way to do it. The long-term political damage of this agreement is going to be huge. In the short term, the danger consists of a generalised bank run, not just in Cyprus.

As in the case of Greece, the finance ministers said: “Don’t worry, this is a unique situation”. This is true only in a very narrow legal sense. The bond haircut in Greece is indeed different to the depositor haircut in Cyprus. And when they repeat this elsewhere, it will be unique once more.

Unless there is a last-minute reprieve for small savers, most Cypriot savers would act rationally if they withdrew the rest of their money simply to protect them from further haircuts or taxes. It would be equally rational for savers elsewhere in southern Europe to join them. The experience of Cyprus tells them that the solvency of a deposit insurance scheme is only as good as that of the state. In view of Italy’s public sector debt ratio, or the combined public and private sector indebtedness of Spain and Portugal, there is no way that these governments can insure all banks’ deposits on their own.

The Cyprus rescue has shown that the creditor nations will insist from now that any bank rescue must be co-funded by depositors.