Fiat-Chrysler Unveils Incentive Program to Repair Defective Vehicles

The company announced that it is offering a $1,000 trade-in credit towards a new Fiat-Chrysler vehicle, or $2,000 towards the purchase of a Ram model pickup. For those who desire to keep their repaired vehicles, the company will offer a $100 prepaid credit card for completing the repair which consumers can spend as they wish.


Valeant Strikes Collaboration Deal with AstraZeneca over Experimental Psoriasis Drug

The terms of the agreement include Valeant paying AstraZeneca $100 million up front, adding another $170 million depending on pre-launch benchmarks, as well as up to $175 million depending upon sales benchmarks. After the product’s launch, the two companies will share profits. Valeant will handle the regulatory submission processes and the associated costs. In return, Valeant will retain the commercialization rights to brodalumab in all markets except in Japan and some Asian countries, where Amgen, the originator of the drug, had made a pre-existing agreement with Japanese biotech firm Kyowa Hakko Kirin.


USDA Approves Second-Generation Genetically-Engineered Potato

Simplot is hoping that the FDA will approve the blight-resistant potatoes by early 2017, enough time for crops to be ready for consumers by the fall of that year. Since hitting the market, Simplot has sold about 400 acres worth of the first-generation potatoes to supermarkets in 10 Midwestern states.


Appeals Court Rules Supreme Court Plaza off-Limits for Demonstrations

The appeals ruling involved the civil rights of protestor Harold Hodge of Southern Maryland. In January 2011 after ignoring three warnings by Supreme Court police, Hodge was arrested while wearing a sign inside of the plaza near the front of the Court’s entrance that read, “The U.S. Gov. Allows Police to Illegally Murder and Brutalize African Americans and Hispanic People.”


Hello Denali!

Needless to say, several Ohio lawmakers are really bent out of shape by the name change. House Speaker John Boehner said he was “deeply disappointed” by the decision, and Republican U.S. Representative Bob Gibbs said, “This political stunt is insulting to all Ohioans, and I will be working with the House Committee on Natural Resources to determine what can be done to prevent this action.”


9th Circuit to Debate California’s Death Penalty

The hearing also comes as California begins resuming executions this fall, introducing a new single-drug lethal injection procedure. The state had issued a defacto suspension of executions since 2006, joining many states’ concerns over the effectiveness and pain level of the established injection substances. It also comes just weeks after Connecticut’s Supreme Court commuted all of its condemned prisoners’ death sentences to life without parole. Voters in that state abolished the death penalty in 2012; however the law that was adopted only abolished it for future crimes, not for those already sentenced.


Will Lexmark’s ‘Ink War’ Reach the Supreme Court?

Lexmark added Impression products to the list of over two dozen defendants in a patent infringement lawsuit filed in U.S. Court for the Southern District of Ohio, a suit that began by the company in 2010. Although all of the other defendants buckled to Lexmark’s clout, either choosing to settle, or with the court granting Lexmark default judgments against absentee defendants, Smith and his attorney stood their ground electing to fight the lawsuit.



Dole Executives Fined $148 Million for Valuation Fraud

Laster believed that the executives fraudulently created grim sales forecasts, as well as drove the stock price down by understating the cost savings of Dole’s 2012 sale of its Asian operations, as well as cancelling a planned stock buyback. These activities led to Murdock purchasing the remaining shares for $13.50 each in a $1.2 billion purchase. Laster ruled that the executives undervalued the shares by $2.74 apiece, ordering that they pay the difference, a total of $148.2 million to the investors, many of them pension funds, that filed the class-action lawsuit.


NLRB Rules in Favor of Increased Bargaining power for Subcontractors, Temporary Workers

IFA president Steve Caldeira released a statement following the ruling, saying “The Board’s tortured analysis will undoubtedly be met with skepticism and will be rejected by local franchise owners, legislators and, ultimately, the courts. IFA and its allies are asking Congress to intervene to halt these out-of-control, unelected Washington bureaucrats to preserve the established joint employer standard.”