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"Defendants are liable for damages based on the payment of claims submitted to Medicare and Medicaid for 
medical services and procedures involving Life Spine Products that were tainted by illegal kickbacks," the suit 
reads. 
About half of Life Spine's total domestic sales of spinal products between January 2012 and at least December 
2018, were attributable to surgeries performed by these paid surgeons, according to the suit. 
In addition to the consulting fees and royalties being paid, surgeons also were treated to dinners at high-end 
restaurants, Chicago Cubs games and other perks. 
"As alleged, Life Spine and its senior management flagrantly ignored the law by paying surgeons millions of 
dollars in fees and royalties to get them to use Life Spine products during spinal surgeries," Manhattan U.S. 
Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a release. "Kickbacks to doctors can alter or compromise their judgment 
about the medical care and services to provide to patients, and can increase healthcare costs." 
For the first two counts of violating the False Claims Act — which are against Life Spine, Butler and Greiber —
the plaintiff is seeking treble damages and civil penalties to the maximum amount allowed by state law. 
For the third count of unjust enrichment — which is only against Life Spine — the plaintiff is seeking damages to 
the extent allowed by law. 
The plaintiff also is seeking pre- and post-judgment interest, costs and any other relief the court deems 
appropriate. 
A statement from Life Spine said that both parties are engaged in discussions and look forward to resolving the 
matter. 
Matters of Interest 
The U.S. said a California cherry-picker went to Pakistan for terrorist training. Now the case has 
collapsed. 
Washington Post 
By Meagan Flynn 
7/31/19 
It was a month after 9/11, and Osama bin Laden's face flashed across the news on Naseem Khan's TV screen. 
The FBI was sitting in his living room in Bend, Ore., and Khan sensed an opportunity. The agents had come for 
an entirely different purpose and were ready to leave — until Khan pointed at the screen and said he thought he 
could help with something else. A few years ago, he said, he saw bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-
Zawahiri, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, at a mosque in the wine-country town of Lodi, Calif. 
The agents perked up, intrigued by the possibility. Had they really just stumbled into a hot tip on al-Qaeda while 
speaking to a 28-year-old McDonald's worker and convenience store clerk? The FBI thought Khan was onto 
something — a possible "sleeper cell" of terrorism hidden in Lodi — and decided to dispatch him there as a 
confidential informant. 
Khan wouldn't find any associates of Zawahiri at the mosque in Lodi, and U.S. officials and terrorism experts 
now doubt his initial claim about Zawahiri was ever true. But Khan would find 19-year-old Hamid Hayat — who 
would soon become the face of homegrown terrorism in post-9/11 America. 
They met at the mosque, and Khan learned Hayat was taking a trip to Pakistan with family. Over and over, in 
recorded conversations, he returned to the same question: Would Hayat commit to attending a terrorist training 
camp, as he had promised? 
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Now, a judge's order on Tuesday casts doubt on whether Hayat ever actually did. 
Hayat, a cherry-picker and son of an ice cream truck driver, was convicted of attending the alleged terrorist 
training camp and sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2006. Prosecutors, relying on Khan and Hayat's own 
statements, alleged that he attended the camp for three to six months sometime in 2003. The case would become 
one of the most high-profile examples of the government's fight against terrorism in the immediate aftermath of 
9/11, especially because Hayat, after hours of interrogation by FBI agents, confessed to attending the camp. 
But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. vacated his conviction and sentence, finding that 
Hayat had inadequate defense during the 2006 trial while casting doubt on the facts of the case. Burrell 
questioned whether jurors would have convicted him had they heard evidence from witnesses in Pakistan, which 
the judge said likely would have "undermined" jurors' confidence in Hayat's confession alone. His attorneys 
have maintained the confession was coerced during an exhausting interrogation. 
Had the defense attorney actually interviewed any witnesses in Pakistan who spent significant time with Hayat 
during his trip, she would have discovered that they recalled Hayat spent most of his time playing video games 
and cricket and that the purpose of his visit was for his family to find him a wife, according to Burrell's order. 
No one identified any prolonged disappearance that would have allowed him to visit a terrorist training camp for 
three to six months as prosecutors alleged and Hayat said in the confession, Burrell noted. Burrell, who oversaw 
Hayat's original trial, found the witnesses gave consistent statements and could have provided Hayat a credible 
alibi. 
"Showing that Hayat could not have been at a jihadi training camp for the `period of months' specified in the 
indictment would have been completely consistent with the defense that Hayat's confession should not be 
credited and the government lacked other supporting evidence," a U.S. magistrate wrote in making the 
recommendation that Hayat's conviction be vacated. Burrell adopted most of the magistrate's findings of fact. 
The government has not decided yet whether to appeal the decision, a spokeswoman in the U.S. attorney's office 
in the Eastern District of California said in a statement, the Sacramento Bee reported. "We are in the process of 
reviewing the district court decision and assessing what steps, if any, should be taken and considering all our 
options," the statement said. 
Hayat, now 36, is currently being held in a federal prison in Phoenix. His attorneys are seeking his immediate 
release. 
The case against Hayat and his father, Umer, who was accused of lying to the FBI, heaped international attention 
on the Northern California town of Lodi. Seemingly overnight, the town went from the zinfandel capital of the 
world to an alleged terrorism "sleeper cell" — a claim authorities would later walk back. 
At the time he met Khan in August 2002, Hayat lived in his parents' garage and didn't have many friends, as the 
Intercept recounted in a 2016 investigation. Posing as a radical Islamist, Khan nudged Hayat into conversations 
that were anti-American and supportive of Islamic fundamentalist groups, and to his delight Hayat went along 
with it, according to recorded conversations cited in federal court documents. Hayat approved of the beheading 
of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl by Pakistani militants. He told Khan he believed jihadists had 
attended his grandfather's religious school in Pakistan and claimed his grandfather was so politically well 
connected that the Pakistani president enlisted him in efforts to persuade the Taliban to turn over bin Laden after 
9/11. 
Then came the terrorist camps. Hayat said he had seen one in an online video — and expressed interest in going 
himself. Khan, feeding the intel to the FBI, egged him on. 
But once in Pakistan, Hayat kept making excuses, according to the judge's order. When Khan told him he was 
being "lazy," Hayat claimed the climate had changed and it got too hot outside — the terrorist camp was 
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canceled, he said. Khan was starting to get mad. His nudges turned to threats. 
"God willing, when I come to Pakistan and I see you, I'm going to ... force you to, get you from your throat and 
... throw you in the madrassa," Khan said in one expletive-laden recorded conversation, as the Intercept reported. 
"I'm not going to go with that," Hayat said. 
"Oh yeah, you will go," Khan told him. "Yeah, you will go. You know what? Maybe I can't fight with you in 
America, but I can beat your a-- in Pakistan, so nobody's going to come to your rescue." 
In their last conversation, according to the Intercept, which obtained all the recordings, Hayat said he "never 
intended on going to a camp." 
Hayat denied attending a camp in his first interview with the FBI in Japan, before flying to San Francisco. He 
confessed during his second interview in California upon his return in June 2005. 
"FBI: Al Qaeda plot possibly uncovered," rang a CNN headline in June 2005, saying those involved "Trained on 
how to kill Americans." 
Months after Hayat's arrest, then-director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, testified in a 
congressional hearing that a "network of Islamic extremists in Lodi, Calif., for example, maintained connections 
with Pakistani militant groups, recruited United States citizens." 
But ultimately, no other terrorism cases arose from the investigation except for the one against Hayat. Two 
imams were investigated but were never criminally charged with anything. They had overstayed religious worker 
visas, authorities discovered. 
A retired FBI agent who watched Hayat's interrogation and the resulting confession told the Los Angeles Times 
it was "the sorriest interrogation, the sorriest confession, I've ever seen," believing the agents fed Hayat the 
details they wanted to hear and that Hayat repeated them so he could leave. He was barred from offering his 
testimony at trial. Burrell found that the failure to challenge the validity of the confession by presenting a false 
confession expert also contributed to his finding that Hayat had ineffective counsel. 
Khan was ultimately paid nearly $230,000 for assisting the FBI over three years. During Hayat's trial, his 
defense attorney questioned how one fast-food worker's implausible claim that he saw the world's most wanted 
terrorist in a small-town mosque could have "sparked this whole investigation with this ridiculous claim," the 
Times reported in 2006. 
Hayat's attorneys filed an appeal in 2014 and ultimately sought to interview numerous witnesses in Pakistan who 
could account for his whereabouts during the trip from 2003 to 2005. They appeared for sworn depositions on 
video in 2018. When Hayat's attorney, Dennis Riordan, asked his uncle whether he "would have known" if 
Hayat disappeared from their rural hamlet, Muhammad Anas said, "Naturally, I would have noticed," the 
Marshall Project reported then. 
The judge found that the witnesses "corroborated each other on some important points," regarding trips the 
family took throughout Pakistan and who they visited. Once or twice a month, they traveled to a hospital for his 
mother's medical treatment. 
On Tuesday, Hayat's family issued a statement applauding the judge's decision to throw out Hayat's conviction, 
the Sacramento Bee reported. 
"We have been waiting 14 long years for Hamid to be freed," the statement read. "Hamid cannot get those 14 
years of his life back, but we are relieved to see the case take such a big step forward. We miss him and hope to 
be reunited with him soon." 
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Fed Cuts Interest Rates for First Time Since 2008 Crisis 
New York Times 
By Jeanna Smialek 
7/31/19 
The Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time in more than a decade on Wednesday as it attempted to 
guard the record-long economic expansion against mounting global risks. 
The widely expected quarter-point move, the Fed's first since it cut rates to near zero in 2008, is meant to protect 
the economy against the potentially harmful effects of a growth slowdown in China and Europe and uncertainty 
from President Trump's trade war. 
"In light of the implications of global developments for the economic outlook as well as muted inflation 
pressures, the committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate," according to the Federal 
Open Market Committee's policy statement. 
But the Fed did not indicate that this was the beginning of a rate-cutting campaign, suggesting instead that the 
cut was a minor adjustment intended to help the economy weather any challenges from slowing global growth 
and Mr. Trump's trade fights. 
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Sundays. 
While Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, left the door open to additional rate moves if the economy showed signs 
of sputtering, he did not indicate the central bank was poised to engage in the sort of deep cutting cycle that the 
Fed has done in the past to avert or offset recessions. 
"It's not the beginning of a long series of rate cuts - I didn't say it's just one," Mr. Powell said at a news 
conference following the Fed's two-day policy meeting. "What we're seeing is that it's appropriate to adjust 
policy to a somewhat more accommodative stance over time, and that's how we're looking at it." 
The widely expected move from the central bank was initially greeted with a shrug in financial markets, where 
investors have been factoring in a rate cut for months. But the stock market turned lower after Mr. Powell began 
his news conference at 2:30 p.m., as investors absorbed the chair's comments as indicating the Fed was unlikely 
to make additional cuts anytime soon, as investors had hoped. 
By the end of the day, the S&P 500 was down 1.1 percent. It was the benchmark index's worst decline since May 
31. 
The Fed dropped its target rate to a range between 2 percent to 2.25 percent. Officials also announced an early 
end to its efforts to shrink the Fed's balance sheet, another attempt to keep the economy moving. The central 
bank's holdings of government-backed bonds swelled during the financial crisis as it bought assets to try to 
reinvigorate growth. Policymakers have been slowly siphoning off securities to return their balance sheet to a 
more normal size, and that process was slated to end in September. It will now conclude Aug. 1. 
Why the Federal Reserve Cut Interest Rates 
The move is what's called an "insurance cut" — one that central bankers are making to keep growth chugging 
along. 
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Both Eric Rosengren, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Esther George, the president of 
the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, voted against Wednesday's decision, preferring instead to leave rates 
unchanged. Those dissents marked the second and third of Jerome H. Powell's term as chair. 
While Fed officials said they expect economic expansion to continue and the labor market to remain strong 
"uncertainties about this outlook remain." 
Mr. Powell said the Fed's move was "intended to insure against downside risks from weak global growth and 
trade tensions." 
He said that manufacturing around the world was weakening and that Mr. Trump's trade dispute was continuing 
to spook American businesses. "The ongoing uncertainty is making some companies more cautious about their 
capital spending," he said. 
Officials did not indicate in their statement whether this cut would be followed by additional moves. The Fed's 
June economic projections suggest policymakers envision cutting rates slightly to shore up the economy, rather 
than beginning an easing cycle that will return rates to zero. 
"As the committee contemplates the future path of the target range for the federal funds rate, it will continue to 
monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook and will act as appropriate to sustain 
the expansion," the Fed said in its statement, seemingly leaving its options open. 
Mr. Powell said the committee viewed the move as a "mid-cycle adjustment to policy," suggesting that the Fed 
sees this cut as more similar to two instances in the 1990s, during which the Fed moved rates down slightly to 
get the economy through periods of uncertainty, rather than the beginning of a rate-cutting campaign. 
The Fed's rate cut carries political risks, given Mr. Trump's attacks on the central bank. Mr. Trump has been 
denouncing the Fed in speeches and on Twitter for the past year, criticizing its four 2018 rate increases and 
blaming its policies for slowing the American economy. Some onlookers may see Wednesday's move as caving 
to the president. 
The Fed operates independently of the White House. It attributed the change, which officials have been signaling 
for months and which investors fully expected, to growing economic concerns. 
"We also don't conduct monetary policy to prove our independence," Mr. Powell said. 
The central bank is trying to extend a record-long economic expansion, because officials believe that doing so 
will allow the Fed to achieve its goals of maximum employment and slow but steady inflation. The 
unemployment rate is hovering around its lowest level in 50 years, but that has yet to push wages dramatically 
higher in a way that forces companies to lift prices more quickly. 
Inflation has run shy of the Fed's 2 percent goal since the central bank formally adopted it in 2012. A little 
inflation helps to grease the wheels of a healthy economy, allowing businesses to raise wages faster and lifting 
interest rates, giving the central bank more room to cut in the event of a downturn. 
Prices picked up just 1.6 percent in the year through June, not counting volatile food and fuel costs. 
Wages are growing only moderately. An index of employment costs climbed by 2.7 percent in the second quarter 
from a year earlier, less than expected and a slowdown from earlier in 2019, according to data released on 
Wednesday. 
Global policy uncertainty has also increased, and manufacturing is slumping the world over. Growth is slowing 
in China and Europe, and Mr. Trump's trade war with China and threats of further tariffs on United States trading 
partners are stoking uncertainty and causing businesses to hold off on investment. 
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Those developments threaten the economic outlook, even as growth remains solid, consumer spending is robust 
and the job market holds up for now. 
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