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PITTSBURGH — The owner and operator of a Pennsylvania expandable polystyrene manufacturing facility will pay more than $5 million in civil penalties and other payments and implement a series of measures to curtail the discharge of millions of tiny pellets known as “nurdles” into the Ohio River to settle a Clean Water Act (CWA) citizen suit filed by two environmental nonprofits in federal district court.
SPOKANE, Wash.— The operator of a lead-zinc smelter in British Columbia allegedly responsible for disposing millions of tons of toxic slag and liquid effluent into the Columbia River says the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals should reconsider a ruling that revived claims made by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation “for over a half billion dollars” for cultural resource damages under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.
LAKE CHARLES, La. — A Louisiana appellate court on Nov. 5 reversed a lower court’s summary judgment ruling dismissing a bank’s claims against GEICO and granted GEICO’s peremptory exception of no right of action, dismissing the bank’s claims against GEICO with prejudice in the bank’s suit against GEICO seeking to recover damages related to property being stolen from an insured boat, finding that the bank as loss payee lacks a right of action against GEICO.
CINCINNATI — A Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Nov. 5 dismissed the appeal of a group of individuals who objected to the $600 million class action settlement in the Ohio train derailment lawsuit, ruling that the objectors failed to pay the $850,000 appeal bond in a timely manner and holding that they offered no valid justification for failing to pay the appeal bond.
NEW YORK — The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Nov. 5 entered the satisfaction of a judgment worth more than $59 million reflecting a federal judge’s confirmation of a London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) award against the guarantor of a Ghanian high-speed internet network company for defaulting on a loan issued to it by a South African partnership.
MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota federal judge entered judgment after granting final approval to a $1.9 million settlement resolving class claims including for violation of California’s unfair competition law (UCL) against a data hosting vendor on behalf of individuals whose personal data was hacked during a ransomware attack on the vendor’s accounting and health care customers, with the plaintiffs’ counsel awarded more than $633,000 in attorney fees.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — An insured is not entitled to coverage for the settlement of an underlying class action stemming from the insured’s failure to warn the underlying class plaintiffs about contamination discovered at the insured’s site because the underlying suit does not allege claims that occurred during the applicable policies’ periods, a Missouri appeals court said Nov. 4 in affirming a trial court’s ruling.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) Appeals Review Panel (ARP) vacated a U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) panel’s new ground of rejection for claims of an artificial intelligence inventor’s patent application regarding a machine learning patent as directed at an abstract idea in a Nov. 4 precedential decision; the APR left in place, however, the PTAB panel’s affirmation of a PTO examiner’s rejection of the application’s claims as obvious.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Following a string of at least seven rulings in which similar putative class challenges to health plan tobacco surcharges survived wholly or in part, a Rhode Island federal judge on Nov. 4 granted full dismissal of a case that is part of a recent wave of Employee Retirement Income Security Act lawsuits.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a nonprecedential Nov. 4 opinion, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held that the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) properly construed the disputed claim term “background noise level,” affirming the board’s finding that most claims in a technology company’s patent describing an earpiece device were unpatentable as obvious or anticipated by prior art.
PITTSBURGH — A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Nov. 4 granted final approval to a $167.5 million class action settlement in a long-running securities fraud case brought by investors who contended that a hydraulic fracturing operator had made false statements about its potential capacity for oil and gas production.