President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, walked back a legal fight to clean up rivers polluted by chicken manure after accepting tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions linked to the poultry industry, campaign and court records show. A report by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group …
The term “Big Soda” gets thrown around a lot to describe how soda companies have a tendency to act like the big, bad oil and tobacco companies who wield immense lobbying power and advertising budgets to match. It might sound like an exaggeration to compare the big three soda companies (The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group) to corporations like Philip Morris, but a …
Two of the world’s biggest supporters of lawsuits are combining their businesses to create what one analyst described as a “gorilla” of the burgeoning industry. Shares in London-listed Burford Capital spiked 15pc after it unveiled its plan to spend up to $175m (£138m) to buy Gerchen Keller, a Chicago-based competitor in litigation funding. The two firms provide financing for claimants in …
Perhaps there’s nowhere else as deeply associated with the oil industry as Cushing, Oklahoma, but now, many residents there are suing several oil companies, claiming they are responsible for that recent 5.0 earthquake. One month later, the evidence of that 5.0-magnitude earthquake is still everywhere you look in downtown Cushing, including David Reid’s home and business below. “This building …
Recent findings reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine show that the sugar-sweetened beverage industry has financially backed scientific researchers to discard a link between sugary beverage consumption and metabolic outcomes such as obesity and diabetes. It is the latest in a series of related scandals to rock the public health world. This news, coupled with the revelation that two of …
A new class-action lawsuit has unveiled an eight-year-long antitrust, price-fixing scheme brought by major food conglomerates, including Tyson and Perdue Farms, alleging they killed hens, flocks and destroyed eggs to limit production and raise the price of 98 percent of the chicken sold in the U.S. by nearly 50 percent, according to Hagens Berman. The suit calls the …
“Cooperatives Working Together actually had information about its so-called ‘dairy herd retirement,’ program on its own website, along with economic analysis … showing how much the industry profited from the program,” Leahy said. “We took that information and analyzed the applicable law.” At least some of that data is still online. A 2009 analysis by Scott Brown of the University of Missouri- …
The good news for Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke is that their 2013 track, “Blurred Lines,” is still being talked about all these years and pop songs later. The bad news is that most of the chatter has been about the copyright lawsuit brought by Marvin Gaye’s family, who claimed that Williams had infringed on the late singer’s “Got To Give It Up.” Last year, a jury found in favor of the …
A class-action lawsuit accusing Valve of “affirmatively supporting” skin-betting sites and participating in an “illegal scheme designed to bypass state-by-state gambling laws” is causing concern from esports-industry analysts—but most of them think it’s going to be dismissed. The lawsuit, filed on June 23 in Connecticut District Court, names Michael John McLeod as the plaintiff and Valve as the …
On May 4, several environmental organizations filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), calling for an end to the regulatory exemption it carved out in the late 1980s for the oil and gas industry with regards to how it handles industrial waste. That exemption to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, a recent DeSmog investigation showed, was …