By JOE HARRIS 


     ST. LOUIS (CN) - Margaret Bush Wilson, an attorney and civil rights pioneer who was the second black woman to pass the Bar in Missouri, died Tuesday at 90. Wilson, the first chairwoman of the NAACP, worked on the Shelley v. Kraemer case in1948, in which the U.S. Supreme Court gave African-Americans the right to live anywhere.

By ROBERT KAHN 

     I can't get the lawsuit out of my head.
     It's a little thing, one of thousands of cases that passed through the Courthouse News system this week. But it seems to personify life in the United States these days - except for one thing. In this case, the Person in a Position of Power suffered too.
     Here's the lead sentence from our Tuesday story out of Cleveland.
     "A customer who returned an incorrect order and said, 'How hard is it to make a chicken sandwich?' claims McDonald's failed to intervene as the girl to whom she returned the sandwich, and the girl's mother, punched her, knocked her down and kicked her."
     Let's call the customer Diana and let's call the girl at the counter Natalia and let's call her mother Nellie - because that's their names.
     Now, I hardly endorse the concept of people beating up on rude customers. But if I had to pick a pal here, I'd pick Natalia or Nellie. I have no sympathy for Diana.
     People in the United States used to stick up for underdogs. But we've become a nation of bullies - not just in our foreign and economic policies, but in our daily life. What passes for news "talk shows" these days consists, by and large, of Rude, Rich People in Positions of Power beating up on the helpless.
     That's also true of the people who run our banks, credit card, mortgage and insurance companies.
     And the helpless people they beat up on include the U.S. Congress and the president.
     On the same day the rude customer sued McDonalds in Cleveland, a federal judge in New York tore Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and the SEC a new one. Federal judges seem to be the only ones, aside from Natalia and Nellie, who have any guts today.
     U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff refused to accept the SEC's $33 million settlement with Bank of America, which lied about the $3.6 billion in bonuses it allowed Merrill Lynch to pay its corporate hogs last year, though Merrill had just lost $27 billion.
     Those $3.6 billion in bonuses came from U.S. taxpayers, whether Bank of America admits it or not. "Money is money, the last time I checked," Rakoff said. He refused to accept the $33 million fine, which is less than 1 percent of the bonuses the corporate swine paid to their piglets.
     Astonishingly, throughout that court hearing, Bank of America's attorney "periodically whispered what appeared to be suggestions" to the SEC attorney, The New York Times reported.
     The bank's attorney, Lewis Liman, told Judge Rakoff that 39,000 Merrill employees got average bonuses of "only" $91,000 apiece.
     Liman failed to mention that 696 of those piglets got bonuses of more than $1 million apiece, and that one Big Hog got a bonus of more than $33 million - more than the SEC was ready to accept as a fine for the whole shooting match.
     Bank of America got $20 billion in federal bailout money from you and me, and another $118 billion in loan "guarantees." As the bank bought Merrill Lynch late last year, the bosses of both companies lied to shareholders by claiming they had made no deals on bonuses, though they had - for $3.6 billion.
     As giant banks and their crooked and abusive credit-card divisions shake down an entire country in plain sight, take their houses and walk off with billions of dollars, what does the federal government do? It sends an attorney to court to listen to "what appeared to be suggestions" from the crooks.
     That's why I can't get Natalia and Diana out of my mind.
     Diana, who is savvy enough to get a lawyer to sue McDonald's, did not have to admit in her lawsuit that she insulted Natalia. But she did admit it. She insulted the intelligence of a young woman who, as anyone who's been to a fast-food restaurant knows, didn't even cook the wrong order.
     Why was Natalia's mom there? Was there trouble in the family? Was Natalia already under pressure, aside from working for minimum wage, when a rude customer called her stupid? We don't know. All we know is that Natalia couldn't take it anymore, and she fought back. She knocked down and beat up Person in a Position of Power.
     Now McDonald's will probably pay a few thousand dollars to Diana, which won't hurt the corporation one bit.
     Natalia will surely be fired from her minimum-wage job, if she hasn't lost it already. She'll have to find a new job, with the unemployment rate at 10 percent.
     I think the SEC should hire her. It needs people like Natalia.

By DAN MCCUE 

     CHARLESTON, S.C. (CN) - Les Paul, the guitar virtuoso and inventor who died Thursday at 94, always found a funny way to confront me with a bit of history. The first time we met - me the young rock journalist, he a living legend - was in the far-too-small men's room at Fat Tuesdays, the basement jazz club in New York City. Paul was occupied when I entered, but as he turned to leave he caught my eye and said, "You know, I was just thinking about Franklin Roosevelt."

By MARIA DINZEO 

     SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The social networking site Tagged.com electronically pilfers email address books and uses them to solicit new members with a deceptive "viral email campaign" whose messages appear to come from friends, a class action claims in Federal Court. The class claims a federal judge enjoined the CEO from doing that 3 years ago.  

By KARINA BROWN 

     (CN) - Redbox, the DVD kiosk rental giant, says Twentieth Century Fox is trying to kill its business by cutting off the supply of DVDs because Redbox refused to agree to a 30-day "blackout period," during which it will withhold new releases. In its antitrust complaint in Delaware Federal Court, Redbox claims Fox is conducting an illegal boycott in restraint of trade.  

By JONATHAN PERLOW 

     MANHATTAN (CN) - A white police officer will not face charges for fatally shooting an off-duty black officer, the District Attorney's Office said. A Manhattan Grand Jury heard testimony from 20 witnesses and examined 68 documents before voting not to indict NYPD Officer Andrew Dunton for killing Officer Omar Edwards in East Harlem.

By ROBERT KAHN 


     (CN) - A family demands $10 million from Honda, claiming a side window shattered and injured them when a tornado picked up their Honda Odyssey, which "remained airborne for a few seconds before plummeting to the ground and landing on all four wheels. Upon impact, the driver's side passenger window shattered and glass flew into the car."  

By MELISSA THOMAS 

      CINCINNATI (CN) - A police union has sued Cincinnati to fight unpaid leaves and layoffs, claiming the city's budget deficit is only $440,000 - not the $28 million the city claims. The police and a second union say the city lied about its finances to try to bust up the unions. 

By KARINA BROWN 

     LOS ANGELES (CN) - A Superior Court class action claims TV Guide sends its 3 million subscribers fewer issues of its magazine than it promised. Subscribers say TV Guide unfairly counts its "special issues" as two issues, though they contain neither twice the pages nor twice the content of a regular issue.

By ELIZABETH BANICKI 

     LOS ANGELES (CN) - A private school says the September 2008 Metrolink crash polluted its property with 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel, sulfuric acid and lead from two dozen batteries, and more than 150 pounds of biomedical waste.

By SONYA ANGELICA DIEHN 

     JACKSON, Miss. (CN) - The Environmental Protection Agency ignored a congressional mandate in vetoing the capstone of a flood control project 40 years in the making, the Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners claims in Federal Court. The board says the Yazoo Backwater Project is needed to prevent routine flooding in the Yazoo Backwater, bounded to the south by the Yazoo River.  

By BARBARA LEONARD 

     MANHATTAN (CN) - Venture capitalists "destroyed the only woman-owned alternative energy hedge fund in America" by bribing public officials to invest the pensions they controlled in exchange for kickbacks, the hedge fund's creator claims in New York County Court. Barrett Wissman, who co-owns Hunt Financial Ventures with Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, pleaded guilty in April to felony securities fraud in a scheme that funneled billions of dollars out of New York pension funds, according to the complaint.  

By BRIDGET FREELAND 

      DETROIT (CN) - Two men who masterminded BBC Equities and Bravata Financial Group stole $50 million from hundreds of people in a Ponzi scheme, a class action claims in Federal Court. The SEC also has sued John Bravata and Richard Trabulsy, who promised 8 to 12 percent returns in a real estate scam, guaranteeing "safer returns than other investment options," according to the complaint. 

     MANHATTAN (CN) - A federal class action demands that Citigroup be enjoined from requiring its securities brokers from repaying their "signing bonuses" if they quit. The class of 500 claims Citigroup has failed to offer the "level of security and service" it promised.

      CLEVELAND (CN) - The SEC claims the CEO and CFO of Brantley Capital Corp. juggled the books to take higher "investment advisory fees" while two companies that accounted for more than half of the company's portfolio actually were failing. CEO Robert Pinkas contests the accusations; CFO Tab Keplinger settled for $50,000, the SEC said. 

      MANHATTAN (CN) - The director of a nonprofit foster care agency was convicted of defrauding New York City of more than $100,000 for needy children who do not exist. Stay Thompson aka Stay Daniels ran her game as head of Concord Family Services, federal prosecutors said.

     MANHATTAN (CN) - An art collector claims that in the course of spending $10 million with the Gerald Peters Gallery, they developed a deal in which he could "live with" art for a while to decide if he wanted to keep it, and if not, he could return it for a refund or "art of equivalent value." But after he spent $3.5 million on three pieces, Peters refused to take them back or exchange them, Norman Waitt claims in New York County Court.  

By TIM HULL 

     (CN) - A federal class action in Chicago accuses Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown of soliciting advertising for a court Web site and using the money, along with millions of dollars in court filing fees, as a slush fund to buy cars, pay for campaign events, hire vaguely defined "consultants" and outfit a personal "protective detail."  
By ANNIE YOUDERIAN 


     (CN) - A federal judge in Manhattan refused to dismiss libel claims against the author of the bestselling book "Blonde Ambition: The Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith's Death" for her allegedly damaging statements about Smith's former lawyer, Howard K. Stern. The same claims against the publisher were dismissed.  

By NICK DIVITO 

     (CN) - The 1st Circuit revived a Medicare fraud case that accused a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary of giving doctors kickbacks in the 1990s for prescribing its expensive anemia drug ProCrit. 

By JEFF GORMAN 


     (CN) - The Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation can sell a Picasso painting at auction without interference from a man who claims his family was forced to sell the artwork in Germany before World War II, a New York appellate division ruled.  

By TIM HULL 

     (CN) - A group of renewable energy plants in New England can't challenge a Massachusetts agency's decision to let new companies into a biofuels program, the state Supreme Court ruled. 

By ANNIE YOUDERIAN 

     (CN) - The 3rd Circuit reinstated a class action accusing Snapple of deceptively labeling its drinks as "all natural," when they contain high-fructose corn syrup and other artificial ingredients.  

By NICK DIVITO 

     (CN) - A coal-fired power plant in Virginia lacks standing to challenge state environmental laws that it claimed would force it out of business, the 4th Circuit ruled. 

     (CN) - In a defeat for Indiana pensioners, the 2nd Circuit upheld a bankruptcy judge's approval of Chrysler's sale to Italy's Fiat. 

By ANNIE YOUDERIAN 

     (CN) - A federal judge in Texas ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million in fines and banned it from selling Word in the United States, because the word-processing software violated a patent held by a small company called i4i. 

     (CN) - A California appeals court overturned a ruling for Kaleidescape, maker of DVD-copying systems, and ordered the trial court to decide if the company has breached its licensing agreement with the DVD Copy Control Association.  

By ANNIE YOUDERIAN 

     (CN) - The 4th Circuit upheld the conviction of the first U.S. civilian, a former CIA contractor, to be found guilty of abusing a detainee in the wars on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

By ANNIE YOUDERIAN 

     (CN) - The 5th Circuit upheld a lower court's refusal to extend class-action status to a securities fraud lawsuit over inflated circulation at the Dallas Morning News. 

By AVERY FELLOW 

     (CN) - The 2nd Circuit upheld a district court's refusal to let the wife and children of an ex-CIA official use state secrets in a case against the agency. The plaintiffs can't use protected information to argue that the secrets are not really state secrets, the Manhattan-based court ruled. 

     (CN) - The 7th Circuit said it can't retroactively enforce a judgment for the estate of an Indiana man who, after being picked up for drunk driving, was beaten by officers and left for dead in the jail's drunk tank.  

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The Securities and Exchange Commission hopes to crack down on "pay to play" practices by investment advisers through a proposed new rule under the Investment Advisers that would prohibit investment advisers who have donated to politicians from paid employment with a government client for two years. 

By TISH KRAFT 

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The Department of Veterans Affairs plans stop collection of certain debts arising from a VA benefit program when "the indebted individual is a member of the Armed Forces or a veteran who dies as a result of injury incurred or aggravated in the line of duty while serving in a theater of combat operations in a war or in combat against a hostile force during a period of hostilities after Sept. 11, 2001," and to refund amounts collected after the individual's death.  

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The Consumer Product Safety Commission has released a document regarding what product components are considered to be "inaccessible" to children. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act provides that the lead limits do not apply to any component part of a children's product that is not accessible to a child through normal and reasonably foreseeable use and abuse.
     Click the document icon for this and other new regulations.

By TRAVIS SANFORD 

     WASHINGTON (CN) - The National Marine Fisheries Service has placed new restrictions on the number of allowable fishing days for purse seine boats in the western and central Pacific Ocean to catch tuna.  
By MATTHEW HELLER 

     The Nebraska Supreme Court has rescued an unusual "rescue doctrine" case, finding that a driver whose negligence creates a rescue situation is liable for injuries to the rescuer that were inflicted by a third party. more

     The Landmark Legal Foundation demands records from the CIA on its "enhanced interrogation techniques." The FOIA complaint in DC Federal Court relates to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA did not properly inform her about what it was doing. 


     Lowe's Home Center charges $65 to install dryers but breaches contract by failing to install them as directed in the manual, creating hazards that can cause fire and death, a class action claims in Statesville, N.C., Federal Court.  

     Associated Tax Relief, Bich Nguyen, Young Bin Chung, and Linda Wilson cheated thousands of people by taking up-front fees for bogus "debt relief" services, a class action claims in Orange County Court, Calif. 

      Textron juggled its books to inflate its share price through false and misleading statements, a class action claims in Providence, R.I., Federal Court. 


     Volvo XC90 T6 autos in 2003-05 model years have defective automatic transmissions that slip, seize and fail, a class action claims in Newark Federal Court. The class says the 4T65 trannys were made by (nonparty) General Motors and modified by Volvo. 

     Allstate denies property claims for water and steam damage in bad faith, a class action claims in Philadelphia state court. 

     Precision Metal Industries fired a black welder for complaining about a white worker who threatened him with a hangman's noose and a pipe, the man claims in Fort Lauderdale Federal Court. 

     American National Trading Corp. demands $50 million from McGladrey & Pullen, accountants, in a complaint springing from the Sentinel Management Group scheme, in Los Angeles Superior Court.

     Andrew Cornaglia claims The Press of Atlantic City and Irelia Gomberg aka The Answer Guy defamed him in August 2008, apparently by reprinting or referring to a 1992 Press article that claimed he has Mob connections, in Atlantic County Court, N.J. 

      LG Electronics claims that Funai Electric violates patents on video displays, in Texarkana, Texas, Federal Court. 

     J Lee's Metals dba D&M Metals pollutes federal waters, Inland Empire Waterkeeper claims in Los Angeles Federal Court.

     Wells Fargo juggles accounts to extract maximum, and unfair, overdraft fees from its customers, a class action claims in Houston Federal Court. 

     Corbis claims McKeon Products violates copyright on digital images. It demands $30,000 per image, and $150,000 per willful infringement, in Manhattan Federal Court.

     Casella Wines claims Bronco Wine and Barrel Ten Quarter Circle violate its "Yellow Tail" trademark, in Manhattan Federal Court.