Cultivated Compendium

Two same-sex couples who wedded in other states have filed a lawsuit to challenge both Tennessee's constitutional provision and statute banning same-sex marriage, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Journal also reports that Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said "the lawsuit is the 19th filed since the [U.S. Supreme Court] Windsor ruling [striking the federal Defense of Marriage Act ] came down, and one of only a handful filed in the south."

The Associated Press has this primer on everything you need to know about elder abuse, including that the abuse rarely results in criminal proseuctions because of the stereotype that their abuse is tough to prove and that older people make poor witnesses.

A couple highlights:

* By 2050, there will be more old people on earth than children for the first time in history;

* the most common abusers of the elderly are family members or friends;

* and "even in the few countries where elder abuse is a crime, cases are seldom prosecuted. One reason is that stereotypes cast elders as lousy witnesses and their abuse as tough to prove."

Drug and Device Blog reports on a California Court of Appeal decision in which an intermediate appellate panel held that the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act does not allow for plaintiffs to sue over the negligent maintenance of their confidential medical information unless their information was accessed wrongfully or without authorization.

In the underlying case, a doctor took home a hard drive containing the personal health information for 16,000 patients. The hard drive, as well as the encryption passcodes, were stolen, but no one knows if the thief viewed or tried to view the patients' personal health information.

Drug and Device Blog said the case has "broad appeal because the fact pattern is so typical of 'data security breach' lawsuits: Private information resides on a stolen hard drive or is sent off into the ether with nary an indication that anyone received, reviewed, used, or otherwise paid any attention to the information. At another level, such lawsuits (which are usually class actions) almost never articulate any credible basis that the plaintiffs suffered any actual harm."

Even though the Third Circuit has held that "secular, for-profit companies aren't afforded religious protection and the constitutional rights of their owners don't pass through to the corporate entity," a district-court federal judge sided with employers that are challenging Obamacare's contraceptive-coverage mandate on the grounds that it violates their freedom of religion, The Legal Intelligencer, Pennsylvania's legal newspaper, reported. The Legal also reported that U.S. District Chief Judge Joy Flowers Conti of the Western District of Pennsylvania denied a request from the Obama administration for an indicative ruling on the application of the Third Circuit case when Conti had granted an injunction for a plaintiff from the contraception mandate.

The issue is being primed for the U.S. Supreme Court. A circuit split is present on the issue between the Third Circuit and the Tenth Circuit.
 

James Anaya, U.N. special rapporteur on indigenous rights, said during a visit to Canada that "there's a crisis in Canada with regard to indigenous issues, notwithstanding some important developments within Canada over the last decades," the Associated Press reported.

The disparities include: one in five indigenous Canadians live in dilapidated and often overcrowded homes, Anaya said, and "funding for aboriginal housing is woefully inadequate;" and that the suicide rate among Inuit and First Nations youth who live on reservations is more than five times greater than that of other Canadians.

The Washington Post reports on a joint effort from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to investigate how many civilians are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan: "In Yemen, Human Rights Watch investigated six selected airstrikes since 2009 and concluded that at least 57 of the 82 people killed were civilians, including a pregnant woman and three children who perished in a September 2012 attack. In Pakistan, Amnesty International investigated nine suspected U.S. drone strikes that occurred between May 2012 and July 2013 in the territory of North Waziristan. The group said it found strong evidence that more than 30 civilians were killed in four of the attacks."

Both groups said it is nearly impossible to gauge if the civilians who were killed met the legal standard of posing an imminent threat to the United States because of the secrecy governing drone strikes, The Washington Post also reported.

The Wall Street Journal will now be able to report the names of individuals that British prosecutors plan to implicate in a criminal case alleging that they were involved in a scheme to manipulate "benchmark interest rates," that paper reports today. The judge in the case will not contine a temporary order barring the WSJ from publishing the names in England and Wales as well as to remove the identities of those people on-line. Prosecutors had sought the order. Dow Jones & Co., WSJ's publisher, had called the order "a serious affront to press freedom," WSJ also reported.

The Illinois Supreme Court has become the first court in the country to find a federal law preempts a state law requiring sales taxes be paid on Internet sales, USA Today reports. The paper also reports: "the court determined that Illinois' 2011 'Main Street Fairness Act' was superseded by the federal law, which prohibits imposing a tax on 'electronic commerce' and obligates collection that's not required of transactions by other means, such as print or television." The issue might be primed for the U.S. Supreme Court as New York upheld its Internet sales tax-law and Amazon is appealing.

The federal insurance exchange for consumers to shop for health-care insurance policies might be extremely problematic but an exchange for financial instruments started off well, according to The Washington Post's Q&A with  the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commision. Derivatives now must be traded on the exchange.

Chairman Gary Gensler explained: "'A swap execution facility is where buyers and sellers of a special derivative called a swap can meet to enter into contracts. Think of an exchange, like the New York Stock Exchange for stocks or exchanges for futures. These kinds of exchanges have been regulated by the federal government since the 1930s. But swap execution facilities had not been under any oversight. [As part of Dodd-Frank,] Congress decided to repeal these exemptions, with the public benefiting from greater transparency in these markets."'

Protecting traditional knowledge from appropriation by others is a problem around the world. Earlier this year, South Africa launched a registry for traditional knowledge that is passed down orally. South Africa's The Southern Times reports: "'One of the aims is to try to make those communities that hold this traditional knowledge, part of the mainstream economy. An important feature of the system is that it immediately allows access to information about the geographical location of the traditional knowledge owners. This is important as it increases the efficiency of prior art research. The system will also provide prior art information for intellectual property offices for patent applications examination purposes."'