The Associated Press reports on a new lawsuit in Texas federal court challenging that state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. They want a court-ordered injunction against the enforcement of state law. The plaintiffs argue that the ban on same-sex marriage cannot even survive the lowest level of constitutional scrutiny: whether the government has a rational basis for the ban.
While the American economy has been officially out of recession for four years, social service providers told me for a piece I did for the Stamford Advocate that the need for assistance for the least well-off has not slackened. On this day of Thanksgiving, the need for social services is a reminder to give if you have the means to do so and to be grateful for the means that you do have.
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An excerpt of the story:
Robert M. Arnold, president and CEO of Greenwich-based Family Centers, which provides education, health and human services to children, adults and families in Fairfield County, said the economic recovery has been uneven, and people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder have had the lowest level of recovery.
"Things have to get really better up in the middle and the top to lift up the bottom level," Arnold said. "Things haven't gotten that good in the middle and the top to really lift up the bottom level."
Many people are working jobs on which they can barely subsist, Arnold said.
Jason T. Shaplen, chief executive officer of Stamford-based Inspirica, Inc., one of the largest providers of services to the homeless in Connecticut, said that the demand for his organization's services is at a record level. The number of people living in the street in Connecticut has increased 82 percent in the past three years and the number of homeless people in Greenwich and Stamford increased 45 percent in the past year, according to Shaplen.
Nationally, 100 million Americans live in poverty or live within 50 percent of the poverty line, Shaplen added.
Historically, homelessness was connected to people having mental health problems, substance abuse problems or lack of education, Shaplen said. While all those things still cause people to become homeless, the new driver for homelessness is people being unable to find work or make enough money from their work to meet all of their needs, especially in a housing market as expensive as lower Fairfield County's, Shaplen said.
The winter is an especially hard time for people in poverty in Fairfield County because they have the additional seasonal expenses of heating, warm winter clothing and maintaining vehicles that are not in great repair to survive winter weather, Arnold said.
The New York Times reports on plaintiffs who are frustrated with a proposed $2.5 billion settlement for an estimated 8,000 lawsuits involving the all-metal hip device known as the Articular Surface Replacement or A.S.R., including that lawyers are set to receive one-third of the settlement, or $800 million.
Reuters reports on a trial that ended this week in which Chevron is seeking injunctive relief against a plaintiff's lawyer and some of his clients. Chevron accuses "U.S. lawyer Steven Donziger of orchestrating an international criminal conspiracy by using bribery and fraud in Ecuador to secure a multibillion-dollar pollution judgment against the oil company," according to Reuters. The case resulted in a $18 billion judgment.
But one of Donziger's lawyers, Zoe Littlepage, said "'raw accusations and allegations are not proof. Steven Donziger may be a jerk. That's not a crime,"' according to Reuters.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan is presiding over the equity case. Post-trial briefs will be submitted before the judge issues a ruling.
A legislative task force "created under a hastily-passed law intended to prevent the disclosure of crime scene photographs and certain audio recordings collected by police following the Sandy Hook shooting and other homicides" has agreed to a compromise in which there would be limited access to crime scene photos and videos involving child crime victims, CT News Junkie reports. A central location would be created where the records could be viewed, but not copied. The proposal also would create a release valve for members of the public to make the case for releasing protected records to serve the public interest.
The Connecticut Mirror reports that Superior Court Judge Eliot D. Prescott ordered the release of 911 calls made after Adam Lanza opened fire at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., unless he is overturned on appeal.
'"Delaying the release of the audio recordings, particularly where the legal justification to keep them confidential is lacking, only serves to fuel speculation about and undermines confidence in our law enforcement officials,'" The Connecticut Mirror reported the judge opining.
The judge rejected all of the prosecution's argument to keep the 911 calls out of the public, including that releasing the calls would "have a chilling effect on those who might need to call 911," The Connecticut Mirror further reported.
The Associated Press is seeking the 911 calls.
FilmOn X was not able to use a Boston-area federal judge's ruling that FilmOn X's competitor, Aereo, is not violating copyright law by streaming broadcast TV programming on its on-line service to get relief from a nationwide temporary restraining order blocking FilmOn X's similar streaming service everywhere in the United States except in the Second Circuit, TheWrap reported. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer Collyer "on Monday several times called FilmOn and FilmOn X founder Alki David, 'uncouth' during the hearing, but elected to fine FilmOn X only if the company tries to offer additional local stations," TheWrap also reported.
The Atlantic reports on the release of the new version of the Creative Commons copyright license yesterday. The new license addresses how the Creative Commons license interacts with database rights. In the European Union and other jurisdictions, compilers of databases have rights over who copies and uses their databases for 15 years, but those database rights aren't protected by copyright in the United States, The Atlantic also reports. "That’s because facts can’t be copyrighted in the U.S., and databases—especially non-creative ones—are just collections of facts," according to The Atlantic.
A United Nations committee has advanced a resolution sponsored by Brazil and Germany to make the right to privacy against unlawful surveillance applicable to anyone in the world, The Washington Post reported. The two countries sponsored the measure after revelations of monitoring by the United States of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The resolution is expected to pass the United Nations General Assembly too, The Post further reported. While the resolution is not binding law, General Assembly resolutions " reflect world opinion and carry political weight," The Post also reported.
The largely symbolic resolution was watered down though. The Post reported: "The key compromise dropped the contention that the domestic and international interception and collection of communications and personal data, 'in particular massive surveillance,' may constitute a human rights violation."
Reuters' Alison Frankel reports on a D.C. Circuit ruling that a spoof blog posting by Esquire about a birther book questioning President Barack Obama's American birthright was not defamatory.
“Where’s the Birth Certificate: The Case that Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to be President” was published three weeks after President Obama released the long-form version of his American birth certificate, according to Reuters. The satirical post said the book was pulled from the shelves and fake-quoted an anonymous source saying, '“We don’t want to look like fucking idiots, you know?”' Reuters also reported.
Judge Judith Rogers, writing the court’s opinion, said the test for whether speech was satire was "'not whether some actual readers were misled, but whether the hypothetical reasonable reader could be (after time for reflection),'" Frankel reported.
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