Tag Archives: Lawsuit

Mother sues Pennsylvania school district over lead-tainted water

water fountain representing lead story

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A mother has sued a Pennsylvania school district for a delay in telling parents that the water at her daughter’s school was contaminated with toxic levels of lead, according to a complaint filed in U.S. federal court on Wednesday.

The Butler Area School District told parents in a letter on Jan. 20 that test results, which they acknowledged receiving five months earlier, had found leads levels at Summit Elementary School “exceeding acceptable water standards.”

Jennifer Tait, whose daughter attends the school, says officials should have said something as soon as the test results came through last August, according to her lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh.

Despite lead abatement efforts beginning in the 20th century, when lead was once commonly used in pipes and paint, communities across the United States continue to be exposed to dangerous levels of the metal. Lead poisoning can permanently stunt a child’s intelligence and development.

The issue came to the fore again in 2015 after state officials in Michigan acknowledged that the water supply in the city of Flint had been contaminated by lead.

In her lawsuit, Tait accuses school district officials in Butler of a “gross delay” in notifying parents, saying her daughter and other students routinely drank water tainted with toxic levels of lead for the five months between when the school district’s received the test results and when it sent out the letter.

The district officials’ actions in effect created “a school full of poisonous drinking water,” the lawsuit said. Tait is seeking damages for negligence, among other charges, and is asking the court to allow others at the school to join in the lawsuit.

William Pettigrew, the school district’s acting superintendent, referred questions about the lawsuit to the district’s lawyer, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Pettigrew said he took over after Dale Lumley, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, resigned and retired on Sunday. Lumley could not immediately be reached for comment.

In an earlier statement, Lumley said a school maintenance official failed to share the worrying test results with him or the district’s board until Jan. 19, the day before he sent out the letter to parents and sought out a supply of bottled water for students.

The district’s director of maintenance also resigned this week, Pettigrew said.

“The school is closed under my recommendation,” Pettigrew said. The children are now being taught in a vacant school building nearby, he said.

The school’s water was found to contain lead at levels nearly four times higher than federal limits, with one sample measured at 55 parts per billion, according to the Jan. 20 letter, which is posted on the district’s website.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Bill Rigby and Leslie Adler)

Rights groups challenge Israel’s new settlements law in court

view of houses in Israeli settlement in West Bank

By Maayan Lubell

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Rights groups petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court on Wednesday to annul a heavily criticized law that retroactively legalized some 4,000 settler homes built on privately owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.

The law, approved by parliament on Monday, has drawn condemnation from Europe and the United Nations and has been described by Israel’s attorney general as unconstitutional.

Acting on behalf of 17 Palestinian villages and towns, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah), and the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center also asked the court for an injunction in order to stop any registration of the plots as under settler ownership.

The Supreme Court has in the past supported Palestinian property rights and annulled laws it deemed unconstitutional.

The legal process in some of those cases took months, though the court usually rules on injunction requests within days.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the law an aggression against the Palestinian people and threatened to suspend security cooperation with Israel if its ramp-up of Israeli settlements continued.

On Tuesday Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said that if implemented, the measure would cross a new and dangerous threshold.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the action went against international law, while French President Francois Hollande said it paved the way for the annexation of territory Palestinians want as part of a future state.

The administration of new U.S. President Donald Trump has so far signaled a softer approach toward Israeli settlement policy. Trump will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington on Feb 15.

Most countries consider Israeli settlements built on land captured in the 1967 Middle East War as illegal and obstacles to peace.

Some 550,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, which was also seized by Israel in 1967, among 2.6 million Palestinians who want those territories for a future state.

In January, Israel announced it would build about 6,000 new homes in the two areas, to which it cites biblical, historical and political connections.

(Additional reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and John Stonestreet)

Appeals court to hear arguments on Trump’s travel ban

Donald Trump speaking to U.S. Central Command

By Dan Levine and Timothy Gardner

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department will face off with opponents in a federal appeals court on Tuesday over the fate of President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, his most controversial act since taking office last month.

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge James Robart suspended Trump’s ban, opening a window for people from the seven affected countries to enter the country.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will hear arguments over whether to restore the ban from Justice Department lawyers and opposing attorneys for the states of Minnesota and Washington at 3 p.m. PST (6.00 p.m. ET).

In a tweet on Monday night, Trump said: “The threat from radical Islamic terrorism is very real, just look at what is happening in Europe and the Middle-East. Courts must act fast!”

Trump has said the travel measures are designed to protect the country against the threat of terrorism. He has derided Robart, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, as a “so-called judge.”

In a brief filed on Monday, the Justice Department said the suspension of Trump’s order was too broad and “at most” should be limited to people who were already granted entry to the country and were temporarily abroad, or to those who want to leave and return to the United States.

Opponents say the 90-day ban barring entry for citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and imposing a 120-day halt to all refugees, is illegal. The state of Washington argues it has suffered harm, saying some students and faculty at state universities had been stranded overseas because of the ban.

The Republican president’s Jan. 27 executive order sparked protests and chaos at U.S. and overseas airports in the weekend that followed.

All the people who had carried out fatal attacks inspired by Islamist militancy in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had been U.S. citizens or legal residents, the New America think tank said. None came to the United States or were from a family that emigrated from one of the countries listed in the travel ban, it said. (http://bit.ly/2keSmUO)

UPHILL FIGHT?

Trump faces an uphill battle in the liberal-leaning San Francisco court. Two members of three-judge panel that will hear the arguments were appointed by former Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and one was appointed by Bush.

Appeals courts are generally leery of upending the status quo, which in this case is the lower court’s suspension of the ban.

Opponents of the ban received far more filings in support of their position than the Department of Justice. Washington state’s challenge was backed by about a dozen friends-of-the- court briefs submitted by at least 17 state attorneys general, more than 100 companies, and about a dozen labor and civil rights groups. About a dozen conservative groups supported the government in three such briefs.

The appeals court was focusing on the narrow question of whether the district court had grounds to put the order on hold. The bigger legal fight over whether Trump had authority to issue the order will be addressed later in the litigation.

(Additional reporting by Peter Henderson in San Francisco)

Lawsuit claims Trump travel ban discriminates against Muslims

Protest of Donald Trump's travel ban

(Reuters) – The American Civil Liberties Union accused the Trump administration in a lawsuit filed on Thursday of violating the religious freedom of some nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries who have been barred from entering the United States.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in federal court in the Northern District of California on behalf of three student visa holders, including one Yemeni who left the United States and is unable to come back, according to court documents.

The lawsuit is a proposed class-action brought on behalf of nationals who are living or have lived in the United States and are originally from the Muslim-majority nations whose citizens President Donald Trump has temporarily banned from entering the United States, with some exceptions.

The suit is the latest in a series of legal actions challenging the executive order that was issued last Friday. Federal judges in several states have placed limits on the order.

The order set off protests over the weekend at several major airports as immigration and customs officials struggled to interpret the new rules.

The plaintiffs and the members of the class “fear that, in the event they attempt to enter or re-enter the United States, they will be denied permission to do so,” the lawsuit said.

It accuses Trump and his administration of violating the free speech, religious freedom and due process rights of those affected by the order, and says it is an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise made by Trump to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

“Senior advisers to defendant Trump have engaged in anti-Muslim rhetoric that provides additional support for the notion that the executive order was prompted by animus toward Islam and Muslims,” the suit said.

Department of Justice officials could not be reached for comment late on Thursday.

The ACLU asked the court to rule that the executive order violates the rights of the students and class members and to order the administration not to enforce the travel ban, according to the suit.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis and Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Sandra Maler, Robert Birsel and Kevin Liffey)

ACLU and Kentucky’s only abortion clinic sue over ultrasound law

By Steve Bittenbender

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Reuters) – The American Civil Liberties Union sued Kentucky state officials on Monday to block a new law that requires women seeking an abortion to first undergo an ultrasound and hear a description of the embryo or fetus.

ACLU lawyers filed the lawsuit in federal court in Louisville on behalf of EMW Women’s Surgical Center, which the lawsuit said is the sole licensed abortion facility in Kentucky.

The requirement violates the speech rights of doctors and patients by forcing them to deliver and listen to a government-mandated message, the lawsuit argues. The surgical center is asking for a temporary restraining order and a permanent declaration that the law is unconstitutional.

The law is part of a renewed effort by abortion opponents nationwide to restrict the procedure. It was passed on Saturday by the Kentucky General Assembly, where Republicans swept to power after taking the state House for the first time in nearly a century, and signed on Monday by Governor Matt Bevin, also a Republican.

Bevin, in a statement on Monday, defended the law and several other recently passed measures as representing a new day for Kentucky. He said the measures would “protect our most vulnerable.”

The law requires a physician or qualified technician to perform the ultrasound and position the screen so the woman may view the images. The medical staff will also be required to describe what the images show, including the size of the fetus and any organs or appendages visible.

It does not contain exceptions for women who are facing medical complications or are victims of rape or incest. Lawmakers inserted an emergency clause allowing it to take effect immediately upon Bevin’s signature.

The lawsuit accuses lawmakers of “forcibly co-opting and perverting the informed consent process.”

While the bill received overwhelming support in both chambers of Kentucky’s legislature, even some of its supporters questioned whether the state risked a lawsuit.

Some 25 states have laws regarding ultrasounds and abortions, but only three states require medical staff to display and describe the images, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit group focusing on health issues.

Republicans have acted swiftly in their first week with majorities in the Kentucky legislature. Other measures they passed include prohibiting abortions after a pregnancy has reached 20 weeks, making Kentucky the 27th “right-to-work” state and allowing the governor to overhaul the University of Louisville’s board of trustees.

(Reporting by Steve Bittenbender; Editing by David Ingram and Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. states sue Mylan, Teva, others for fixing drug prices

A person holds pharmaceutical tablets and capsules in this picture illustration taken in Ljubljana

y Diane Bartz and Sarah N. Lynch

(Reuters) – Twenty states filed a lawsuit Thursday against Mylan, Teva Pharmaceuticals and four other generic drug makers, saying they conspired on pricing of two common generic drugs, according to a copy of the complaint.

The civil lawsuit is one piece of a broader generic drug pricing probe that remains under way at the state and federal level, as well as in the U.S. Congress. The inquiries have grown over the past two years to include multiple drugs and companies, some of which have disclosed they are being investigated by the Justice Department.

The drugs involved in Thursday’s lawsuit include the delayed release version of a common antibiotic, doxycycline hyclate; and glyburide, an older drug used to treat diabetes.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, names Heritage Pharmaceuticals Inc as a “ring leader” of the price manipulation, and also lists Mayne Pharma, Aurobindo Pharma and Citron Pharma LLC as participants.

Asked for comment on Thursday, a spokesman for Heritage referred to their comment from the previous day, which blamed the former executives for the price-fixing and said that they had been terminated. Heritage is part of Indian company Emcure Pharmaceuticals.

Mylan denied the charge. “To date, we know of no evidence that Mylan participated in price fixing,” Mylan spokeswoman Nina Devlin said by email.

Teva spokeswoman Denise Bradley said by email that the company had just received the complaint and was reviewing it.

The other three companies had no immediate comment.

Teva shares were off 0.4 percent at $36.84 in New York trading. Mylan’s rose 0.9 percent at $38.01. Mylan has also come under fire for hiking the price of the Epipen to $600 for a two-pack, from $100.

The lawsuit alleges that top executives of the drug companies and their sales executives propped up the prices of the two drugs either by setting the prices or allocating markets, the New York attorney general’s office said in the statement.

The states also say in their lawsuit that executives knew that the conduct was illegal and either deleted emails or made efforts to avoid communicating in writing.

“Companies that collude and fix prices for generic drugs in order to pad their profits must be held accountable for the very real harm they inflict on New Yorkers’ ability to pay for life-saving medications,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.

The state attorneys’ investigation into drug price fixing found evidence of broad, well-coordinated schemes on a number of generic drugs and is ongoing, according to the complaint.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit this week against two former Heritage executives alleging that they colluded to fix the prices of doxycycline hyclate, and to split up the market for glyburide.

Generic drug pricing became an issue in 2014, driven in large part by media reports of sharply rising drug prices, and Congress opened an investigation.

The lead state in the probe was Connecticut and the other states involved are Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington.

MH370 report says plane in ‘increasing rate of descent’ when it vanished

Family members of passengers onboard the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 comfort a crying woman as they gather to pray at Yonghegong Lama Temple in Beijing September 8, 2014, on the six-month anniversary of the disappearance of the plane.

SYDNEY, Nov 2 (Reuters) – A new report into missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 says that additional analysis of satellite communications from the aircraft was consistent with it being in a “high and increasing rate of descent” when it vanished.

The report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for MH370, said additional analysis of wing flap debris found the aircraft was not configured for a landing.

Both pieces of information support the agency’s long-held view that an unpiloted MH370 descended rapidly after running out of fuel with no human intervention.

The 28-page report released on Wednesday, containing new end-of-flight and drift simulations, coincides with the start of a three-day meeting of international experts to develop potential plans to continue the search for MH370.

The Boeing 777 disappeared on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board, sparking a two-and-a-half year search that has focused on the Indian Ocean.

Authorities from Malaysia, Australia and China initially expected to finish searching a 120,000 sq km (46,000 sq mile) target area by the end of 2016, but bad weather has delayed the probe by another two months.

Australian Transport Minister Darren Chester, who is chairing the Canberra meeting of experts, said the group would review all available data and analysis associated with the search.

“The experts will also inform the remainder of the search effort and develop guidance for any future search operations,” Chester said in a statement.

The ATSB report suggests that experts believe the current search area is the most likely to contain the crash site.

In a separate development, a lawyer for the families of four Australian victims told Reuters that Malaysia Airlines has
agreed to release information about the missing plane as part of a compensation case.

John Dawson, a partner at Carneys Lawyers, said he had been advised he would receive the information by the end of the month. The information is to include medical certificates held by the flight crew.

(Reporting by Colin Packham and Jane Wardell; Editing by
Michael Perry)

U.S. House votes to allow Sept. 11 families to sue Saudi Arabia

Firefighter walks amid the 9/11 rubble

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on Friday that would allow the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia’s government for damages, despite the White House’s threat to veto the measure.

The U.S. Senate in May unanimously passed the “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act,” known as JASTA. The bill’s passage in the House by voice vote, two days before the 15th anniversary of the attacks that killed about 3,000 people, was greeted with cheers and applause in the chamber.

“We can no longer allow those who injure and kill Americans to hide behind legal loopholes, denying justice to the victims of terrorism,” said Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers who crashed airliners in New York, outside Washington and in Pennsylvania were Saudi nationals. The Saudi government, which strongly denies responsibility, has lobbied against the bill.

Opponents of the measure said it could strain relations with Saudi Arabia and lead to retaliatory laws that would allow foreign nationals to sue Americans for alleged involvement in terrorist attacks.

The White House on Friday reiterated that President Barack Obama would veto the bill. [nW1N12802E]

If Obama carries out that threat and the required two-thirds of both the Republican-majority House and Senate still support the bill, it would be the first time since Obama’s presidency began in 2009 that Congress had overridden a veto.

The House passed the measure by voice vote, without objections or recorded individual votes. That could make it easier for Obama’s fellow Democrats to uphold his veto later without officially changing their positions.

JASTA would remove sovereign immunity, preventing lawsuits against governments, for countries found to be involved in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. It also would allow survivors, and relatives of those killed in them to seek damages from other countries.

In this case, it would allow suits to proceed in federal court in New York as lawyers try to prove that the Saudis were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Backers say passage is long overdue. They argue that if Saudi Arabia, or any other government, is innocent of involvement in attacks, they have nothing to fear from the legislation.

A member of the French parliament, Pierre Lellouche, said he would consider such legislation in France, and would anticipate it elsewhere, if the final version of JASTA does not include waivers for countries that are U.S. allies and actively involved in fighting terrorism.

“It may trigger similar acts all over the place, and then you enter into a ‘state of jungle’ where everybody sues everybody,” Lellouche, who runs a parliamentary committee on international law, told reporters on a conference call on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner and Ayesha Rascoe; Editing by Grant McCool and Will Dunham)

Mastercard sued for $19 billion in Britain’s biggest damages claim

Shoppers carrying bags

By Andrew MacAskill

LONDON (Reuters) – Some 46 million people in Britain could potentially benefit from a legal case brought against Mastercard <MA.N> demanding 14 billion pounds ($19 billion) in damages for allegedly charging excessive fees, according to court documents filed in London.

The case brought by a former chief financial services ombudsman alleges the payments company charged unlawfully high fees to stores when shoppers swiped their debit or credit cards and these were passed on to consumers in higher prices.

Mastercard is alleged to have done this for 16 years between 1992 and 2008, in more than 600 pages of documents filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on Thursday.”This was almost an invisible tax,” Walter Merricks, who is bringing the case, told the BBC. “Mastercard has behaved disgracefully in this. They have not had the reasonableness to accept that what this was doing was damaging UK consumers.”

Mastercard said in a statement it denied any wrongdoing.”We continue to firmly disagree with the basis of this claim and we intend to oppose it vigorously,” the world’s second-largest payments network said.

The lawsuit comes after the European Union’s antitrust regulator found in 2014 Mastercard’s fees to store owners to process international payments within the EU were excessive.Law firm Quinn Emanuel said the lawsuit was the largest damages claim in British history and would be brought under a law meaning consumers would automatically be claimants unless they opt out. Any person living in Britain who used a credit card, cash or cheques and was over 16 years old in the period covered by the lawsuit will automatically be part of the claim.If the 14 billion pound claim was shared equally between the number of eligible claimants, each person could receive more than 300 pounds each, according to a Reuters’ calculation.A lawyer working on the case said Mastercard charged shops fees in excess of 1 percent for card use on international transactions between 1992 and 2008.Although the EU’s anti-trust regulator only ruled Mastercard’s international fees were illegal, this impacted British consumers as it was the default fee used in Britain.

Two years ago, the European Union capped the fees retailers pay at 0.2 percent for debit cards and 0.3 percent for credit cards. Merricks in a statement said the case is a watershed moment for consumer compensation in Britain.Merricks was head of Britain’s financial services ombudsmen for ten years until 2009, helping to settle disputes between consumers and financial services companies. Britain’s banks have been caught in a range of misspelling cases in the last five years. They have paid 24 billion pounds in compensation for mis-selling loan payment insurance, making it Britain’s costliest scandal in financial services.Consumers no longer living in Britain, but who lived in the country between 1992 and 2008, can opt in to the collective claim against Mastercard.Any hearing on the case is not expected until early 2018, unless MasterCard settle it out of court.

($1 = 0.7523 pounds)

(Editing by Mark Potter and Alexander Smith)

Black Lives Matter activist sues Baton Rouge police over arrest

Black Lives Matter Protest

(Reuters) – A prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, DeRay McKesson, on Thursday sued the chief of the Baton Rouge police department and other officials over the arrests of nearly 200 demonstrators during peaceful protests about police killings.

In the federal civil rights lawsuit, which seeks class action status, McKesson and fellow protesters Kira Marrero and Gloria La Riva complained that police were unnecessarily aggressive in arresting them on July 9. The lawsuit covers arrests in the Louisiana capital between July 6 and July 11.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Attorney’s Office said they had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.

The activists were protesting the July 5 shooting of a black man, Alton Sterling, outside a convenience store, one of a string of high-profile police killings of black people by white officers over the past two years that were caught on video and reopened debate about race and discrimination in the United States.

McKesson, known for his activism on social media and who ran in the 2016 Democratic Party primary for mayor of his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, said in the lawsuit that demonstrators sought to have all arrest records expunged as well as unspecified damages.

The allegations in the lawsuit include 16 violations of law by Baton Rouge police, excessive use of force, conspiracy to deprive protesters of their civil rights, negligence and arrests without probable cause.

The 23-page complaint said charges of simple obstruction of a highway against nearly 200 protesters who were arrested were ultimately dropped by the local prosecutors office, though they still had to pay administrative and court fees.

“Throughout the protests, the Defendants responded in a militarized and aggressive manner,” the complaint said. “All class members now have criminal arrest records, which in this digital age could adversely affect their future employment, education, reputations, and professional licensing.”

A day after Sterling’s death, another black man, Philando Castile, was shot to death by a policeman during a traffic stop near St. Paul, Minnesota.

The back-to-back killings brought out protesters nationwide but after a rally in Dallas, Texas, a gunman shot dead five police officers in an ambush. Days later, three Baton Rouge police officers were also killed in an ambush.

Authorities said the shootings of officers by black gunmen were apparently in anger over the deaths of black people at the hands of police, but they were not connected to the peaceful protest movement.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; editing by Grant McCool)