Declarations

“The circuit court fairly concluded that St. Paul’s parallel suit in California was filed for improper purposes, namely forum shopping and the disruption of the orderly resolution of the West Virginia suit. The record reflects a substantially different factual picture than that painted by St. Paul in its brief.”

— West Virginia Supreme Court Justice John Hutchison, in an opinion that barred St. Paul Fire & Marine from filing a similar lawsuit in California over a coverage dispute. St. Paul had denied a claim from AmerisourceBergen Drug Co., which is facing multimillion-dollar settlements and judgments from lawsuits brought over its role in the opioid addiction crisis. Amerisource had liability coverage through St. Paul and it sued the insurer for refusing to cover the claims. The drug firm asked the West Virginia Supreme Court to uphold a trial court’s injunction that aimed to block St. Paul from filing a suit in California court over the coverage question. The high court agreed and slammed St. Paul for shopping for a more favorable court and for claiming that the California action excluded the West Virginia case.

“Continued criminalization hurts us all and goes against our professed ideals of freedom, liberty and justice.”

— Indiana Democratic Rep. Vanessa Summers on the state’s prohibition of marijuana, which Summers says disproportionately leads to arrests of Black and Hispanic people. State Democrats are lining up in support of marijuana legalization ahead of next year’s legislative session but face opposition from the Republican-dominated legislature. Democrats argue that legalizing marijuana would benefit those wanting to use it for medical purposes, create new jobs and become an additional state tax revenue source.

“It is something that we’ve seen occur, and can occur, if we continue to have that extreme weather.”

— John Moura, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), said in a recently published forecast that Texas is still at risk of power blackouts this winter like the one it experienced in February 2021. That storm led to one of the largest power outages in U.S. history, knocking out electricity to more than 4 million customers and leading to hundreds of deaths. Projections by NERC show that Texas could have a nearly 40% shortfall in available power to meet demand in the event of another severe winter storm.

“There was nothing in the script about the gun being discharged by DEFENDANT BALDWIN or by any other person.”

— A lawsuit from script supervisor Mamie Mitchell alleges that Alec Baldwin recklessly fired a gun when it wasn’t called for in the script when he shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza on the New Mexico set of the film “Rust.”

“At bottom, this case implicates a clash of national values.”

— Gun manufacturers, which include Smith & Wesson, Sturm, Ruger & Co., Beretta USA, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Colt’s Manufacturing Co. and Glock Inc., said to a federal judge in Boston in a brief asking to dismiss a $10 billion lawsuit by the Mexican government accusing them of facilitating the trafficking of weapons to drug cartels, leading to thousands of deaths. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard during a United Nations Security Council meeting on small arms in November called the country’s decision to file the unusual lawsuit in August “a question of principle and a moral obligation.” Mexico’s lawsuit said over 500,000 guns are trafficked annually from the United States into Mexico, of which more than 68% are made by the manufacturers it sued.