Lawyers Blog

MONTEBELLO — A petty theft of some beer turned into a robbery Tuesday when the suspect wrestled a phone away from a convenience store clerk as she dialed 9-1-1, police said.Jesus Naranjo, 25, of Montebello was arrested following the 3:25 p.m. incident at 7-Eleven, 1106 W. Beverly Blvd., Montebello police Lt. Andy Vuncanon said.He and another man entered the store and both grabbed a three-pack of 24-ounce of beer, the lieutenant said.One of the men paid for his beer, while the other concealed his and walked out of the store without paying, Vuncanon said.The store clerk, with a cordless phone in hand, confronted the suspect outside the store and demanded he return the beer, police said. Read all post…

One governor. Three members of Congress. Thirty state lawmakers.

And counting.

That’s how many North Carolina elected officials have announced they’re not running for re-election. Before candidate filing ends Feb. 29, there are certain to be more in what’s shaping up to be a year of historic change.

Democratic Rep. Mel Watt said Wednesday that he’s considering retiring after 20 years in the 12th District – a day after Republican U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick said she won’t run again after 18 years representing the 9th District.

“We have high levels of turnover on top of three previous election cycles that also had high levels,” said Eric Heberlig, a UNC Charlotte political scientist.

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TAMPA, Fla. — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid about $3 million in federal income taxes in 2010, having earned more than seven times that from his investments. Those earnings, $21.7 million, put him among the wealthiest of American taxpayers. Romney’s campaign said Tuesday he followed all tax laws.

At the same time, Romney gave nearly $3 million to charity—about half of that amount to the Mormon Church—which helped lower his effective tax rate to a modest 14 percent, according to records his campaign released early Tuesday.

Romney’s income puts him in the top 0.006 percent of Americans, based on the most recent Internal Revenue Service data, from 2009. That ye

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Washington, DC: As years go, 2011 was a relatively quiet one on the Zimmer Knee Replacement front. A bid to add to the existing Zimmer Multi District Litigation (MDL) for pending NexGen lawsuits didn’t go through—and Zimmer has taken the offensive toward critics of its products by actually launching a lawsuit of its own against a legal firm in Ohio that represents one of the plaintiffs currently suing Zimmer.Aside from that, 2011 was uneventful, save for those patients having to deal with an allegedly defective Zimmer NexGen Knee Replacement component, and the impact such a failure is having on their lives. Read all post…

Family of Train Victim Faces Bystander’s Suit

By JEFF D. GORMAN

(CN) – A woman who was hit by the flying body of a Chicago man after a train accident can sue the dead man’s family, an Illinois appeals court ruled.On a rainy Saturday morning in 2008, Hiroyuki Joho was using a crosswalk over the train tracks to get from one platform to the other at the Edgebrook Metra station, on the corner of Lehigh and Devon Avenues in Chicago. The 18-year-old was carrying an umbrella and computer bag as a bright blue train bore down on him at 73 mph, sounding its horn and flashing its lights.Witnesses were unsure of whether Joho realized the train was coming, but he was smiling at commuters on the opposite platform when the train hit him.The train sent Joho’s 100 feet up, hitting the backside of a commuter on the platform, 58-year-old Gayane Zokhrabov.

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