Seven Critical Truths About North Korea - The New York Times

Seven Critical Truths About North Korea - The New York Times

by Max Fisher

North Korea’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile test has provoked understandable alarm, particularly among Americans worried about the threat.

But many analysts reacted with something closer to grizzled stoicism, greeting the launch as dispiriting but unsurprising confirmation of North Korea’s capabilities and intentions. For them, news of the test, like the missile program itself, is unwelcome and concerning but not too terrifying.

It’s worth reviewing, then, some of the fundamentals that guide those experts’ views of North Korea and its weapons.

(1) It’s over. North Korea is a nuclear power now.

Policymakers will debate for years the precise moment at which the door closed to preventing or rolling back North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. But that door is most likely now closed.

The North Koreans have little reason to give up their weapons programs, which bring them security against their otherwise vastly superior adversaries, and we have no way to make them.

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$247 million verdict in J&J hip implant trial

BREAKING: J&J Slammed With $247M Verdict In Texas Hip Bellwether

Share us on: By Jess Krochtengel

Law360, Dallas (November 16, 2017, 12:34 PM EST) -- A Texas federal jury on Thursday hit Johnson & Johnson and its DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. unit with a combined $247 million verdict in a bellwether trial over DePuy’s Pinnacle line of metal-on-metal hip implants, delivering the third consecutive nine-figure verdict in the multidistrict litigation.

The unanimous jury found J&J and DePuy liable for a series of design and manufacturing defects, fraud and deceptive business practices, and found the companies had acted with wanton, reckless or malicious conduct. They awarded $90 million in punitive damages against J&J and $78 million in punitive damages against DePuy.

For the six individual plaintiffs, each of whom is from New York, the jury awarded more than $77 million in past and future medical expenses and pain and suffering, including each plaintiffs’ actual past medical expenses, the amounts of which were stipulated to by the parties. Four of the plaintiffs’ spouses were awarded loss of consortium damages totaling $1.7 million.

The verdict followed a two-month trial, the fourth bellwether in multidistrict litigation that includes more than 9,000 cases alleging design defects in DePuy’s Pinnacle Ultamet line of metal-on-metal hip implants. In 2016, Texas juries found in favor of two groups of plaintiffs from Texas and California, awarding them $502 million and more than $1 billion in damages respectively, though those verdicts were later reduced to $150 million and $543 million. In the first bellwether trial involving the Pinnacle Ultamet, a jury sided with J&J against a sole plaintiff from Montana.

The jury specifically found J&J and DePuy liable for design defect, negligent design, inadequate warning, manufacturing defect, negligent manufacture, negligent misrepresentation, intentional misrepresentation to the surgeons who performed the initial hip implant surgeries on the plaintiffs, fraudulent concealment from the plaintiffs and from the surgeons and deceptive business practices as to the plaintiffs and the surgeons. The jury also found J&J liable for negligent undertaking of a duty to provide services to DePuy and for aiding and abetting DePuy in its tortious conduct. The jury did not find J&J or DePuy liable for intentional misrepresentation to the plaintiffs.

During the trial, the six plaintiffs told jurors they’d suffered a range of injuries, including severe tissue damage that caused permanent muscle loss, intense pain, loss of hip movement and walking with a permanent limp. They say the Pinnacle product shed microscopic metal ions into their bodies, causing side effects that J&J and DePuy didn’t warn surgeons about and that could have been avoided with a safer design.

The plaintiffs alleged J&J and DePuy valued marketing above research and development and rushed the Pinnacle product into production without any testing in humans out of a desire to capture a greater market share. They claimed the companies pushed the Pinnacle product with an incorrect statistic that it was 99 percent successful and that they’d used cheaper, less safe alternatives in the manufacturing process to keep costs down, and said the alleged defects in the product turned people’s hips into “ticking time bombs.”

In his closing statement, plaintiffs' counsel Mark Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm asked the jury to punish J&J "for being indifferent to our health” through a large punitive damages award that would capture the attention of company executives who didn’t attend the trial.

J&J and DePuy made the case during the trial that metal-on-metal was a viable, reasonable option for hip implants and that its Pinnacle Ultamet product was offered to help doctors choose the device that best fit their patients. The companies said the metal-on-metal implant was developed to solve a bone degradation problem with an existing polyethylene hip implant on the market and denied putting profits above patient safety and long-term results.

In a closing statement, defense counsel Steve Quattlebaum of Quattlebaum Grooms & Tull PLLC said the plaintiffs had made an emotional appeal and told a good story but that their allegations were not backed up by evidence or science. Quattlebaum said there’s no evidence the surgeons who treated the six plaintiffs relied on or even saw the 99 percent statistic when choosing which kind of implant to use and said there’s no evidence the plaintiffs’ injuries were caused by the product specifications the plaintiffs had complained about during the trial.

The plaintiffs are represented by Mark Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm, Jayne Conroy of Simmons Hanly Conroy, Richard Arsenault ofNeblett Beard & Arsenault and Wayne Fisher of Fisher Boyd Johnson & Huguenard LLP

The defendants are represented by John H. Beisner, Stephen J. Harburg and Jessica Davidson Miller of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, Steven W. Quattlebaum of Quattlebaum Grooms & Tull PLLC and Tracie J. Renfroe of King & Spalding LLP.

The consolidated cases are Alicea et al. v. DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. et al., case number 3:15-cv-03489; Barzel v. DePuy et al., case number 3:16-cv-01245; Kirschner v. DePuy et al., case number 3:16-cv-01526; Miura v. DePuy et al., case number 3:13-cv-04119; Stevens v. DePuy et al., case number 3:14-cv-01776; and Stevens v. DePuy et al., case number 3:14-cv-02341, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas

The Latest Ploy GOP Considers to Avoid a Roy Moore Senate Problem Likely Violates the 17th Amendment | Election Law Blog

The Latest Ploy GOP Considers to Avoid a Roy Moore Senate Problem Likely Violates the 17th Amendment | Election Law Blog

by Prof. Richard L. Hasen (UCLA Law School)

"I spent a good part of my Saturday afternoon tweeting and blogging in conversations with Hugh Hewitt about ways Republicans could deal with the Roy Moore mess.

At first Hewitt suggested cancelling the election altogether, and letting Strange just complete the term. I protested that cancelling an election already underway (military and other absentee  voter have already voted) is profoundly undemocratic and dangerous. It also appears to violate the 17th Amendment, which requires that an appointment of a temporary Senator be temporary, and that the state schedule a replacement vote.

Eventually Hewitt relented on this point (not because he thought it was undemocratic—indeed he seemed to believe Republicans are somehow entitled to Alabama’s two Senate seats without an election), but because he thought it would violate the 17th Amendment.

So he hit on another idea, and according to Politico it is an idea Republican leaders nationally are now weighing:  get Luther Strange, the temporary Senator appointed to replace Jeff Sessions, to resign, and then with the new vacancy, declare this election void and start over.

I’ll talk about the political implications in a bit, but first the constitutional issue.  Here’s what the 17th Amendment says, in pertinent part:

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

When Jeff Sessions resigned, that created a vacancy. Alabama law allowed the governor to fill that vacancy and to set the date for a special election. The governor (actually the predecessor) appointed Luther Strange and purported to set the date of the replacement election. (There’s some controversy about whether he had the authority to do this). The new governor reset (or properly set) the replacement election. We’ve had the primary, and now we are in the general election.

The governor was mandated to issue a writ of election. Because the writ of election has been already issued to fill a vacancy, the election goes forward under the language of the 17th Amendment. Temporary vacancies filled by the governor don’t change that. That’s a separate part of the 17th amendment and separate from the duty to issue the writ of election when there is the vacancy of an elected Senator."

New Jersey School Segregation Persists

'APARTHEID SCHOOLS' - "Segregation of N.J. schools 'has gone largely unchecked,' study finds," by POLITICO's Linh Tat: "Many black and Hispanic students in New Jersey continue to attend highly segregated schools - a situation that often starts in pre-K and could worsen as charter schools grow, according to a study released Wednesday. More than a quarter of the state's black students attend so-called 'apartheid schools' - where less than 1 percent of students are white - while the number of Hispanic students in such schools has doubled since 1989 and is increasing, according to the UCLA Civil Rights Project. Moreover, the vast majority of black and Latino students are enrolled in schools considered doubly segregated by race and income, the researchers said." Read the report