7/9/2015 After a raucous 13-hour debate Wednesday bleeding into Thursday morning, South Carolina’s House of Representatives voted to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds by a 94-20 margin in the bill’s required third reading, passing despite a last-minute attempt to delay the measure by proposing a barrage of amendments. The quick action in
7/9/2015 On Wednesday, Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia has affirmed the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s 2-1 decision last year that the Washington Redskins’ nickname and logo are offensive to Native Americans. Last year, the board voted that the trademark violated terms of the Lanham Act, which
7/8/2015 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released the results of a 1093-patient study on Tuesday of drugmaker, Eli Lilly’s experimental drug necitumumab, aimed at treating a certain form of lung cancer. The information comes as the FDA will be conducting a panel of outside experts on Thursday, July 9th that will review the
7/8/2015 Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced in a Tuesday press release that his office will be joining 26 other states who have filed four separate lawsuits since last month over rule changes regarding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement of the Clean Water Act. The legal fight is essentially a territorial battle over which
Generally, we expect manufacturers to create products in a way that makes them safe to use. But there are some products consumers buy that will be dangerous no matter how they are created. Washington has adopted comment k to the Restatement (second) of Torts Section 402A, which precludes liability for certain “unavoidably unsafe products.” As
7/8/2015 The senseless killing of 32 year-old Kathryn Steinle, who was shot in the upper torso by a complete stranger, 45 year old undocumented immigrant Francisco Sanchez on July 1st on San-Francisco’s popular Pier 14, has re-inflamed the immigration debate. Sanchez, a seven-time felon, had been deported back to Mexico on five separate occasions, yet
7/7/2015 The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled against Amazon on Monday by allowing a lawsuit over misleading search results to proceed in Los Angeles federal court. By a split 2-1 decision, the judicial panel ruled that specialty watchmaker Multi Time Machine (MTM) can pursue its trademark infringement suit against the
7/7/2015 New York City has agreed to pay six Occupy Wall Street protestors between $52,500 and $60,000 each, totaling $332,500 in a settlement over being illegally pepper sprayed by police in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The incident happened in the early days of the original September, 2011 anti-inequality protest, when police Deputy Inspector, Anthony Bologna, was
7/6/2015 In an amazing shift of perspective, South Carolina may finally be willing to abandon its most prominent symbol of Confederate heritage after a three-week public shaming by the majority of the Union. After a 150-year effort to keep alive the spirit of the rebellion that almost destroyed the United States of America, the South
7/6/2015 In a move that many consider to be long overdue, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that three federal agencies will be coordinating to revamp the decades-old policy towards genetically modified agriculture (GMO) in order to restore public confidence. The current system, called the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of