Category: reason

From Beres v. Daily Journal Corp., decided Monday by Judge William Dimitrouleas (S.D. Fla.):

Plaintiff Christopher T. Beres, a Florida lawyer, and Plaintiff Andrew Delaney, one of Beres’ clients, bring one count for defamation against Defendant Daily Journal Corporation based on the Daily Journal’s publication of a two-part article….

The Amended Complaint alleges that on April 28 and April 29, 2020, the Daily Journal published a two-part article entitled Does Covid-19 Threaten Your Trade Secrets? Yes, It Does. (Part I), and Does Covid-19 Threaten Your Trade Secrets? Yes, It Does. (Part II). Plaintiffs allege that these articles defamed them. In addition to alleging that the headlines themselves are defamatory because “the articles ‘conclude’ that [P]laintiffs were guilty six days after the case was filed: ‘Yes, it does,'” Plaintiffs allege that the following statements contained within Part I are false and defamatory:

Any time there is a termination of an employee, there is potential for misappropriation or loss of trade secrets. Consider the following potential scenarios: …

• A terminated employee cannot find new employment and decides to use the former employer’s trade secrets as a source of income. See, e.g., HC2 Inc. v. Delaney, Case No. 1:20-cv-03178 (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York) (complaint alleges that a former employee of a legal staffing company tried to extort clients for $450,000 by threatening to release confidential information after they suspended a document review project due to the COVID- 19 pandemic).

Plaintiffs allege that “[e]very part of the first sentence” of the bulleted paragraph is false and defamatory because Delaney was not “a terminated employee [who] cannot find new employment,” Delaney did not “decide to use the former employer’s trade secrets as a source of income,” and because there were no “trade secrets” in the SDNY Action. Plaintiffs also allege that “‘threat to disclose confidential information’ and ‘extortion’ in [t]he Daily Journal is a clear reference to Beres’s April 7, 2020 employment demand letter to Toyota …, thereby imputing these crimes to him.” According to Plaintiffs, the content of the articles “spread like a disease including on social media” and caused substantial damage. Plaintiffs seek twenty million dollars ($20,000,000.00) in compensatory damages and one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000.00) in punitive damages….

No, says the district court:

[1.] Beres, the lawyer, loses “because nothing contained within the article—including the statement, citation, and parenthetical—are ‘of and concerning’ Beres.”

[2.] As to Delaney, “the only portion of the article concerning Delaney, a parenthetical and accompanying citation, contain no material falsities.” “The introductory phrase ‘complaint alleges’ makes clear that the parenthetical merely describes the complaint’s allegations, not that it vouches for their veracity.” And the parenthetical describes those allegations substantially accurately: “A comparison of the allegations in the SDNY complaint with the parenthetical reveal that the parenthetical is not substantially and materially false.”

[3.] Nor can Delaney prevail on the theory that the sentences preceding the citation and parenthetical defame him: That material “presents only a hypothetical ‘terminated employee’ in a ‘potential scenario,'” and the “‘see, e.g., denotes that numerous sources indirectly support the proposition,’ not that the case is a literal example of what preceded it.” (The court cites as authority the Bluebook—likely the most broadly used legal citation manual—and a source related to it; that likely makes sense, I think, given that the article is aimed at a lawyer audience.)

Seems right to me.

The post Court Dismisses Lawyer's and Client's $120M Libel Lawsuit Against Legal Newspaper appeared first on Reason.com.

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3/9/1937: President Roosevelt delivers a fireside chat on his Court-packing plan.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: March 9, 1937 appeared first on Reason.com.

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Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, food prices were spiking around the world because of supply chain disruptions. A combination of always unpredictable nature, bad policy, and busted supply chains (also largely from policy decisions) hiked the cost of fertilizer for farmers. That threatened agricultural output even as pandemic-era economic disruptions impoverished many people. Now, war further threatens the cultivation of grain and the ability to put affordable meals on many tables. A year that already looked hungry may prove grimmer than expected.

“In a year when the world is already facing an unprecedented level of hunger, it’s just tragic to see hunger raising its head in what has long been the breadbasket of Europe,” David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, commented last week. “The bullets and bombs in Ukraine could take the global hunger crisis to levels beyond anything we’ve seen before.”

The immediate crisis is for the residents of Ukraine, whose lives have been disrupted or destroyed by the invasion of their country. As of March 8, an estimated 2 million refugees had sought refuge in neighboring nations. The millions remaining face combat, privation, and the suspension of normal life. For the world beyond, one important concern is that normal life in Ukraine includes growing massive quantities of grain eaten or fed to livestock elsewhere.

Ukraine exports roughly 7 percent of the world’s wheat, according to MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity (other sources have slightly different percentages). The country’s farmers also produce 13 percent of all exported corn. Neighboring Russia, which invaded Ukraine and is now subject to economic sanctions as a result, exports 18 percent of the world’s wheat and about 2 percent of corn. Some grain might make it to the global marketplace despite the war, but sanctions, ruined crops, and threats to shipping will dramatically reduce the supply. 

Months before the war began, prices for chemicals needed for producing fertilizer had already soared, increasing the cost of raising crops. That was, in part, a result of international demand for natural gas, from which ammonia is sourced to produce nitrogen-rich urea. Disputes over trade policy helped create shortages of other fertilizer inputs.

“In addition to being one of the largest producers of wheat, Russia has enormous resources in terms of nutrients,” warns Svein Tore Holsether, president and CEO of fertilizer giant Yara International. “Plants need nitrogen, phosphate, and potash to grow.…In total, 25% of European supply of these three nutrients come from Russia.”

Russia recently cut the export of those nutrients to guarantee domestic supply and, probably, to retaliate against nations imposing economic sanctions. That means more trouble for fertilizer production and higher costs for farmers as well as the people they feed. Holsether had predicted a looming “food crisis” long before Russian tanks crossed Ukraine’s borders as result of fertilizer costs. Now, he adds that “a world with unstable food supply is a world with famine in parts of the world, increased mortality, armed conflict, migration, riots, and destabilized societies which can further accelerate geopolitical tensions.”

Once again, the world was already in bad shape when it came to affordable meals. The food price index, calculated from a basket of commodities by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, was up in February by “24.1 points (20.7 percent) above its level a year ago. This represents a new all-time high.” Continued conflict can only hike prices further for fuel, grain, and the overall cost of keeping people fed. That’s certainly reflected in the commodities markets. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, wheat was priced between $8 and $9 per bushel; it’s currently close to $13 per bushel. Corn has seen a similar price jump.

This is all without even getting into the rising cost of energy as a result of the war and international sanctions on Russia, a major exporter of oil and natural gas. The Biden administration has now banned the import of Russian petroleum, though shippers and refiners were already shunning the stuff for fear of reputational risk and restrictions to come. Now we’re in for higher prices at the pump, but also for increases in the cost of food production and transport.

“Crude prices shot close to $140 a barrel, grain prices leapt and industrial metals rallied Monday as war in Ukraine and the West’s response threatened to hit supplies of commodities that underpin much of the world economy,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “The surge builds on weeks of gains for raw materials and stands to add to inflationary pressures ripping through the world economy.”

Unfortunately, this all comes after restrictive economic interventions intended to fight the pandemic reversed decades of declining poverty that resulted from free markets and open societies. “In 2021, the average incomes of people in the bottom 40 percent of the global income distribution are 6.7 percent lower than pre-pandemic projections, while those of people in the top 40 percent are down 2.8 percent,” the World Bank noted in October 2021. “Globally, three to four years of progress toward ending extreme poverty are estimated to have been lost” and lower-income people are especially vulnerable to rising food costs. Government actions are making the world poorer and hungrier, and there is no more destructive policy than war.

For prosperous countries, expensive food is worrisome and painful. But for developing countries, it can be absolutely catastrophic. “Concerns are growing across the Middle East and north Africa that the war in Ukraine will send prices of staple foods soaring as wheat supplies are hit, potentially fuelling unrest,” reports The Guardian. Many countries in that region rely heavily on supplies from Russia and Ukraine. They’ll turn to sellers in other agricultural countries, including the United States. But that means more buyers chasing reduced supply.

And, as the war drags on, Ukrainians may not even be able to plant the next year’s crop, extending disruptions into the future. Eventually, farmers elsewhere will adjust to meet demand, but that takes time since plants need to grow before they can be harvested.

There’s no easy solution to rising food prices and the hunger that will result, because there’s no easy solution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin found a very effective way of increasing the suffering of an already-troubled world, and seems to have left himself little in the way of an off-ramp (at least, one that he would consider acceptable). The world will eventually recover from this moment and, hopefully, return to its old path of growing prosperity. But the hunger and pain people endure between now and then will have been worsened by the ambitions of a brutal autocrat.

The post Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Threatens Further Hikes in Food Prices appeared first on Reason.com.

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Officials in Louisville, Kentucky, have agreed to pay $460,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a family that had the door to their home knocked down by police who then held them at gunpoint. In an affidavit for a search warrant, Det. Joseph Tapp claimed a black man named Anthony McClain “is growing marijuana and has multiple bags of marijuana packaged for sale in the front bedroom” and that “a white female named Holly was his girlfriend and owned the house” where the raid took place. Ashlea Burr and Mario Daugherty, who are both black, and their teenage children rent the house. They said nobody named Anthony McClain or Holly lived in the home. The search uncovered no drugs, and Burr and Daugherty were not charged with any crime.

The post Brickbat: The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared first on Reason.com.

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When Texas imposed strict limits on abortion last fall, the number of abortions performed by clinics in that state fell by half. But the actual decline in abortions was much smaller, because many women traveled to clinics in other states or used readily available drugs to end their pregnancies at home.

Those workarounds, recent research suggests, drastically limited the law’s impact. That finding underlines the daunting challenges that opponents of abortion will face even if the Supreme Court gives states wide leeway to restrict the practice, as it seems inclined to do.

The Texas law prohibits abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which typically happens about six weeks into a pregnancy. During the first month after the law took effect at the beginning of September, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project reported, Texas clinics performed 50 percent fewer abortions than they did during the same month in 2020.

At the same time, however, the number of Texas women seeking abortions in nearby states rose dramatically. The same research group counted 5,574 out-of-state abortions obtained by Texas residents from September through December, more than 10 times the number during the same period in 2019.

That’s an average of about 1,400 out-of-state abortions per month, which represents nearly two-thirds of the drop in reported Texas abortions. And that cross-border tally is surely an undercount, because it is limited to 34 clinics in seven states.

Meanwhile, Aid Access, which allows women to obtain mifepristone and misoprostol abortion pills from abroad based on prescriptions written by a doctor in Austria, saw a huge increase in requests from Texas. According to a February 25 report in JAMA Network Open, the daily average rose to 138 in the first week of September, up from 11 in late 2020 and early 2021.

That number fell sharply after the first week but remained far above the baseline, averaging 37 for the rest of September and 30 in October, November, and December. Overall, Aid Access received more than 4,500 requests from Texas between September 1 and the end of the year, or about 1,100 a month.

It’s not clear how many of the women who obtained abortion pills via Aid Access actually used them, and there may be some overlap with the women who ultimately obtained surgical abortions in other states. But Aid Access is by no means the only source of abortion pills, which can be obtained through various websites, purchased over the counter in Mexico, or received in states that (unlike Texas) allow delivery by mail after an online consultation.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of mifepristone and misoprostol up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy. The method has potentially broad appeal in the United States, where four-fifths of abortions are performed at nine weeks or earlier.

Last December, the FDA permanently lifted a longstanding requirement that abortion pills be dispensed in person, opening the door to prescriptions via telemedicine and home delivery. That decision is apt to accelerate a preexisting trend: Based on preliminary data, the Guttmacher Institute (which supports abortion rights) reports that “medication abortions” accounted for 54 percent of the U.S. total in 2020, up from 39 percent in 2017.

The FDA still views abortion pills shipped from other countries as “misbranded and unapproved new drugs.” In 2019, the agency sent Aid Access a warning letter to that effect. The organization was undeterred.

Even when drug-induced abortions have FDA approval, they may run afoul of state law. Texas, one of 19 states that restrict such abortions to medical facilities, recently acknowledged the failure of that rule by making it a felony to supply the requisite drugs for unsupervised use.

The fact that self-managed abortions are often illegal does not mean they can be stopped. Since the pills are legal in most jurisdictions, the challenge is even more formidable than the difficulties encountered by the war on drugs, which has a track record that no one should be keen to copy.

© Copyright 2022 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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