Free Republic

The viciousness of the crime rocked my small community to its core. It was a heinous, random attack that "couldn't happen here." But it did...

A federal appeals court in Washington today ruled in favor of a Canadian man and a gun advocacy organization in reviving a suit that challenges the constitutionality of firearm regulations that ban non-residents from purchasing guns in the United States. The plaintiffs, Stephen Dearth of Canada and the Second Amendment Foundation, in March 2009 sued the Justice Department in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge James Robertson in January 2010 dismissed (PDF) the suit, saying none of the plaintiffs have standing to sue. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today unanimously reversed Robertson’s decision...

A sharply divided federal appeals court on Monday exposed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to billions of dollars in legal damages when it ruled a massive class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination over pay for female workers can go to trial. In its 6-5 ruling, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the world's largest private employer will have to face charges that it pays women less than men for the same jobs and that female employees receive fewer promotions and have to wait longer for those promotions than male counterparts. The retailer has fiercely fought the lawsuit since it was...

Dan Edward, director of Radiation Shield Technologies, was on Fox News wearing the suit. It looks a lot like scuba diving gear. The suit is the only one in the world that is NBC, meaning it protects against nuclear, biological and chemical threats. After 9/11, many agencies in the United States asked for suits, but oddly enough when asked by the Fox News interviewer how many nuclear plants in the United States have them, the answer was none.

Insurance giant Allstate is suing JPMorgan Chase (JPM: 47.72 -0.21%) and subsidiaries Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual for fraudulently selling the insurer more than $750 million in residential mortgage-backed securities backed by toxic loans. In its complaint, Allstate alleges the defendants "made numerous misrepresentations and omissions regarding the riskiness and credit quality" of the loans backing the securities sold as part of the transaction. JPMorgan Chase acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual — along with the banks' assets — back in 2008 when the housing meltdown hit. While both firms are technically defunct, each still has structured finance trading platforms...

Shirley Sherrod, ousted from her position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture after an internet video produced by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart surfaced, has filed suit in District of Columbia Superior Court alleging defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress. Breitbart confirmed that his company, breitbart.com, LLC,had been served with a copy of the suit over the weekend. In addition to Breitbart, producer Larry O’Conner and an unknown ‘John Doe’ are also named in the suit. Sherrod resigned as Georgia’s Director of Rural Development after the video clip appeared last July. The edited clip showed a speech she gave...

The Department of Justice has filed a whistleblower complaint against Mayo Clinic . "Dr. David Ketroser, the lead whistleblower in this case, is a physician and an attorney," says a Department of Justice statement provided by Mayo. According to the justice department, "Mayo billed Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs for surgical pathology services it never provided; specifically, the preparation and examination of human tissue slides." Mayo spokesman Bryan Anderson said that "upon discovering a billing error in 2007, Mayo corrected it and voluntarily refunded $242,711 to the government. We worked with outside accounting experts to ensure this...

Madoff trustee sues JPMorgan for $6.4 billion By Jonathan Stempel Thu Dec 2, 3:23 pm ET NEW YORK (Reuters) – The trustee seeking money for defrauded former clients of Bernard Madoff said he filed a $6.4 billion lawsuit accusing JPMorgan Chase & Co of aiding the imprisoned Ponzi schemer's fraud as his main banker. The lawsuit is the second largest that trustee Irving Picard has filed against former Madoff clients or others he believes assisted in the estimated $65 billion Ponzi scheme. JPMorgan, the No. 2 U.S. bank, was for more than 20 years the main banker for Bernard L....

Righthaven, a company which has purchased and owns the copyrights to various news and media articles, has filed multiple lawsuits against various individuals who have reposted, excerpted or quoted one of Righthaven's copyrighted articles..... ...In one of these cases, a court recently held that the defendant's use of a news article was fair use where the defendant used excerpts of the article on his blog and then linked back to the original article....

PHOENIX — Saying its officials have an ulterior motive, Gov. Jan Brewer asked a federal appeals court to ignore the pleas of the Mexican government to keep the state’s immigration law from being enforced. In legal papers filed Wednesday, Brewer said through her attorney that Mexico seeks a voice in the legal dispute over Senate Bill 1070 based on its contention that keeping Arizona out of the immigration business protects “consistent sovereign-to-sovereign relations” between itself and the United States. The legal brief filed by Mexico also says the country has an interest in protecting the estimated 11 million of its...

Foreclosure Fraud: It's Worse Than You Think Posted By: Diana Olick | CNBC Real Estate Reporter CNBC.com | 12 Oct 2010 | 01:14 PM ET There has been plenty of pontificating over the ramifications of foreclosure freezes on troubled borrowers, foreclosure buyers and the larger housing market, not to mention lawsuits, investor losses and bank write downs. There has been precious little talk of what the real legal issues are behind the robosigning scandal. Yes, you can't/shouldn't sign documents you never read, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real issue is ownership of these loans and who...

Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. units were sued by homeowners in Kentucky for allegedly conspiring with Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. to falsely foreclose on loans. The lawsuit, filed as a civil-racketeering class action on behalf all Kentucky homeowners facing foreclosure, also names as a defendant Reston, Virginia-based MERS, the company that handles mortgage transfers among member banks. The suit claims that through MERS the banks are foreclosing on homes even when they don’t hold titles to the properties.

Apple has lost a patent case against its Cover Flow and Time Machine interfaces, despite some of the infringement charges from claimant Mirror Worlds being ruled invalid. Mirror Worlds LLC filed the lawsuit in 2008, alleging that Apple had infringed on patents for creating "streams" of documents sorted by time. According to Bloomberg, a federal jury sided with Mirror Worlds on Friday, although specific details of the ruling were unavailable. The judgment wasn't completely one-sided, though. Legal news site Law360 noted (registration required) in August that some of Mirror Worlds' claims again Apple had been ruled invalid for "indefiniteness." Mirror...

Chrysler bosses sue over lost pensions (AFP) – 11 hours ago DETROIT, Michigan — More than 450 Chrysler bosses including ex-chairman Lee Iacocca sued Daimler AG and Cerberus Friday claiming they lost 100 million dollars in pensions in the automaker's bankruptcy. One of the lawyers, Sheldon Miller, said supplemental pensions were not transferred to the new Chrysler during its restructuring in 2009 and "as a result, each of the plaintiffs lost large percentages of their earned retirement pensions." The class action lawsuit launched on Friday claims Daimler failed to protect the supplemental pensions properly. Daimler could have converted pensions into...

After Ted White Jr. was wrongfully convicted of molesting his 12-year-old stepdaughter, his parents poured everything they had into clearing their son's name. When he won his freedom after finding out that the detective who led the sex-abuse investigation was his estranged wife's secret lover, White wanted someone to pay — to pay the legal bills and to pay for what he went through during his nearly six years behind bars. Now, more than five years after his release, he's still waiting for the Kansas City suburb of Lee's Summit to do what it once promised — pay the multimillion-dollar...

The Justice Department is defending penalties in the new health care reform legislation for those who fail to buy or acquire insurance as taxes even though President Barack Obama has adamantly denied they're anything of the sort

Democratic governors expressed "grave" concerns to White House officials this weekend about the Obama administration's suit against Arizona's new immigration law, warning it could cost the party in crucial elections this fall, The New York Times reported late Sunday. The closed-door meeting took place at the National Governors Association in Boston on Saturday, according to two unnamed governors who spoke to the Times. "Universally the governors are saying, 'We've got to talk about jobs, and all of a sudden we have immigration going on,'" Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, was quoted as saying. "It is such a toxic...

56% Oppose Justice Department Challenge of Arizona Law; 61% Favor Similar Law In Their State Voters by a two-to-one margin oppose the U.S. Justice Department’s decision to challenge the legality of Arizona’s new immigration law in federal court. Sixty-one percent (61%), in fact, favor passage of a law like Arizona’s in their own state, up six points from two months ago. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 28% of voters agree that the Justice Department should challenge the state law. Fifty-six percent (56%) disagree and another 16% are not sure. These findings are unchanged from late...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday reinstated a lawsuit that challenges an Obama administration policy for federal funding of some human embryonic stem cell research. The unusual suit against the National Institutes of Health, backed by some Christian groups opposed to embryo research, argued that the NIH policy takes funds from researchers seeking to work with adult stem cells. It also argues that new Obama administration guidelines on stem cell research are illegal. The three-judge federal appeals panel did not rule on the merits of the lawsuit itself, but said two of the doctors involved had legal...

The Obama administration has decided to file suit to block a new Arizona law aimed at deporting illegal immigrants, thrusting itself into the fierce national debate over how the United States enforces immigration policies. The move is a rare instance of the federal government forcefully intervening in a state’s affairs, and it carries significant political risks. With immigration continuing to be a hot-button issue in political campaigns across the country, the Arizona law, which gives local police greater power to check the legal status of people they stop, has become a rallying point for the Tea Party and other conservative...