Dancer dies after eating cookie with peanuts not listed on label

A New York City woman died after eating a mislabeled cookie containing peanuts, part of a batch that since has been recalled.

Stew Leonard’s announced Tuesday that Vanilla Florentine Cookies sold in its grocery stores in Danbury and Newington in Connecticut from Nov. 6 to Dec. 31 were being recalled in partnership with the Food and Drug Administration. The retailer said about 500 packages of the holiday cookies were sold.

The cookies contained peanuts as an unlisted ingredient and a New York resident died after eating them at a social gathering in Connecticut, state health and consumer protection officials said.

That person was identified Thursday as Órla Baxendale by a law firm representing her interests. Baxendale died Jan. 11 after suffering anaphylactic shock resulting from a severe allergic reaction, according to a post on the firm’s website.

HARTFORD, CONN. >>

Transgender veterans file suit for VA coverage of surgeries

A group of transgender veterans filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to begin providing and paying for gender-affirming surgeries.

The lawsuit from the Transgender American Veterans Association seeks to compel the VA to codify in its regulations verbal assurances the department has made that it would begin providing those services, said Rebekka Eshler, the president of the association.

She said the surgeries are needed to reduce the risk of suicides, depression and psychological distress for transgender people who live with gender dysphoria.

“It would also mean that those veterans do not have to seek this care through private doctors, which is often prohibitively expensive,” the transgender veterans association said in its lawsuit, which it said was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

Rhino became pregnant after embryo transfer in Kenya

Researchers say a rhinoceros was impregnated through embryo transfer in the first successful use of a method that they say might later make it possible to save the nearly extinct northern white rhino subspecies.

The experiment was conducted with the less endangered southern white rhino subspecies. Researchers created an embryo in a lab from an egg and sperm collected from rhinos and transferred into a southern white rhino surrogate mother at the Ol-pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

“The successful embryo transfer and pregnancy are a proof of concept and allow (researchers) to now safely move to the transfer of northern white rhino embryos — a cornerstone in the mission to save the northern white rhino from extinction,” the group said in a statement Wednesday.

However, the team learned of the pregnancy only after the surrogate mother died of a bacterial infection in November 2023.

NAIROBI, KENYA >>