The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered Hawkins County Schools on Monday to implement a number of measures to “end racial discrimination in its schools.”
A DOJ-led investigation into Hawkins County Schools that began in March 2023 found that the school system was “deliberately indifferent to known race-based harassment in its schools” and was ordered to spend at least three years under a federal settlement with the DOJ.
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Kari Lake agreed earlier this month to settle the defamation lawsuit against her filed by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, citing the enormous cost it would take to go through a full trial. Her attorneys sent a letter on Monday to Richer’s attorneys regarding Richer’s proposed meet and confer terms, rejecting all three proposals from him, at times sarcastically.
Lake is running for the U.S. Senate and still fighting two election lawsuits, one over her loss in the gubernatorial race and another challenging the use of voting machine tabulators in elections. Richer filed a defamation lawsuit against her for stating that he intentionally sabotaged the 2022 election. Approximately 300,000 ballots in the 2022 election lacked a chain of custody, a class 2 misdemeanor, but the county has strenuously fought litigation efforts to allow Lake to inspect the ballot affidavit envelopes and other requests from her and voter integrity groups related to the election anomalies.
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Norfolk Southern Corporation announced Tuesday that it reached a $600 million settlement in a class action lawsuit in response to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last year.
The railroad company said in a press release that if the court approves the settlement, all class action lawsuits within a 20-mile radius of the derailment and all personal injury claims within a 10-mile radius of the derailment will be resolved.
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Norfolk Southern Corporation on Tuesday announced it reached a $600 million settlement in a class action lawsuit brought in response to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced Thursday his office was apart of a $350 million multistate settlement with Publicis Health to resolve investigations into the marketing firm’s role in the prescription opioid crisis.
The Volunteer State will receive more than $9 million from the settlement, with a majority of the funds placed into the state’s Opioid Abatement Trust Fund to support local efforts addressing the opioid epidemic.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced Thursday the state will receive $882,312 from a multi-state settlement with software company Blackbaud.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced Thursday his office reached a $44.5 million settlement with Food City over the grocery store chain’s opioid-related misconduct.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced Tuesday that the Volunteer State was included in the 41 states and the District of Columbia which reached a $35 million settlement with leasing company Tempoe, LLC.
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The consumer goods company 3M agreed to pay more than $6.5 million to resolve charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act after its China-based subsidiary took Chinese government officials on overseas trips in an attempt to convince them to purchase 3M products, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said.
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The family of Lashawn Thompson reached a $4 million settlement with Fulton County in the death of Thompson, who was found dead in a cell on the county jail’s psychiatric floor covered in bed bugs and insects last year.
Fulton County commissioners voted six to zero to approve the family’s settlement, 11 Alive reported. The outlet noted that the settlement comes two months after the family released the results of a private autopsy of Thompson, which showed that he died from “severe neglect.”
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Maricopa County agreed last week to pay The Gateway Pundit (TGP) and its reporter Jordan Conradson $175,000 to settle their lawsuit over refusing to provide Conradson with a press pass to cover elections. An Obama-appointed trial court judge sided with the county in November, but after an injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals followed by oral arguments that revealed the three-judge panel was likely to fully reverse the lower court, the Maricopa County Supervisors voted to settle.
The controversy began in September 2022, when the county implemented a press pass regulation blocking journalists from election press conferences if they showed “conflicts of interest” and were not “free of associations that would compromise journalistic integrity or damage credibility.” The county cited Conradson’s attendance at Republican events as a conflict of interest, and told him, “[Y]ou are not a bona fide correspondent of repute in your profession.”
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Tennessee will receive $265 million in opioid crisis funds from a settlement with Walgreens and CVS, according to Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s Office.
The state’s settlement with the two companies is a part of a national multistate settlement which will see Walgreens and CVS paying more than $10.7 billion combined.
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Tennessee is one of 34 states that will share nearly $435 million in the settlement with JUUL. Tennessee will receive approximately $13 million from the settlement, according to Skrmetti’s office.
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On Tuesday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced that he, along with 15 other state attorneys general, led negotiations on a $3.1 billion settlement with Walmart.
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Tennessee has joined 39 other attorneys general in reaching a $391.5 million multi-state settlement with Google over the company’s location tracking practices relating to Google Account settings. Tennessee was one of the states that led the settlement negotiations, according to a press release by the state attorney general’s office.
“Companies should not collect one bit of data from consumers unless they provide complete transparency about what data is collected and how it will be used,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has sued numerous big players throughout his two terms, including the Biden administration, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Arizona State University, and the City of Tucson. Perhaps the biggest entity he sued was Google in 2020, for “deceiving consumers” by tracking their location on smartphones without their knowledge and then selling the information. After over two years of litigation, the tech giant capitulated, settling for $85 million, more than the country of Australia snagged in a similar settlement with Google, $60 million.
The first attorney general in the country to sue Google over the practice, Brnovich told The Arizona Sun Times that what prompted him in part to file the complaint was the shocking extent of how much personal information was obtained. “Google knew more about where you were going and who you hung out with, more than your travel agent or spouse,” he said. He found out about the practice after a news article revealed that Google was tracking users through its app preloaded on Android smartphones even after they’d disabled their “Location History” setting. Google was told to stop and did not.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced an $85 million settlement with tech giant Google LLC in a lawsuit involving the company making a profit by deceptively using users’ locations.
“When I was elected attorney general, I promised Arizonans I would fight for them and hold everyone, including corporations like Google, accountable,” said Brnovich in a press release. “I am proud of this historic settlement that proves no entity, not even big tech companies, is above the law.”
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Tennessee and several other states will receive extensive funds due to a settlement with Teva, an opioid manufacturer based in Israel.
According to a release from Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, the drug maker will pay $4.25 billion to state and local governments.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) recently announced two historic multistate settlements, totaling $26 billion, with four pharmaceutical companies over their roles in the opioid crisis.
“We are working to get these opioid abatement funds to local communities as quickly as possible,” Brnovich said in a press release. “They will help facilitate more effective treatment, education, and prevention as our state continues to tackle this heartbreaking crisis.”
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Tennessee will receive approximately $5 million from a settlement with pharmaceutical company Mallinckrodt, according to a release from Attorney General Herbert Slatery.
In total, the company will be required to pay more than $233 million over the next seven years to all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., and the federal government.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced an $80 million settlement with the Monsanto Company Thursday that “forces the company to pay for the long-standing environmental damage it knowingly caused in Ohio with its toxic products.”
“Ohio has been absorbing the health and environmental costs of PCB contamination for decades, and the cleanup will likely continue for even longer,” Attorney General Dave Yost said. “This settlement not only holds Monsanto accountable for its actions but also provides significant financial resources to assist in environmental cleanup.”
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Nine families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting have reached a settlement in their case against the firearms maker Remington, according to several news reports Tuesday.
The settlement comes roughly seven years after the suit was filed, according to a court document filed Tuesday and reviewed by CNN.
Remington was the maker of the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used in the massacre in which the lone shooter killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.
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On Thursday, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III marked a key milestone in the $26 billion opioid agreement with the nation’s three major pharmaceutical distributors – Cardinal, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen – and Johnson & Johnson over the companies’ role in creating and fueling the nationwide opioid crisis.
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Pennsylvania student loan borrowers will receive over $70 million in relief as part of a national settlement with Navient, one of the nation’s largest student loan servicers.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Navient will provide $1.85 billion to resolve allegations of unfair, deceptive, and abusive loan servicing practices dating back more than a decade.
“Navient repeatedly and deliberately put profits ahead of its borrowers – it engaged in deceptive and abusive practices, targeted students who it knew would struggle to pay loans back, and placed an unfair burden on people trying to improve their lives through education,” Shaprio said in a statement.
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A bipartisan coalition of state attorney generals, including Tennessee’s Herb Slatery, announced a $1.8 billion settlement with Navient, a large, nationwide student loan provider.
The agreement will dispense millions to residents of the state that were negatively impacted by Navient’s lending practices.
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Michigan Rieth-Riley Construction Company employees Rob Nevins and Jesse London won settlements against the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 324 union.
The settlements order IUOE union bosses not to discriminate against London and Nevins for leaving the union and pay $364 to London for owed health insurance premium.
The settlements stem from charges of retaliation the workers filed during the strike IUOE union bosses ordered in mid-2019. London and Nevins ended their union memberships and chose to keep working.
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Michigan could receive $800 million under a proposed multibillion-dollar national opioid settlement, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said.
The settlement would involve Johnson & Johnson and the three largest pharmaceutical distributors in the country: Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen.
The historic agreement would resolve the claims of state and local governments nationwide and require industry changes.
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The hearing to determine the official approval of the state’s $600 million Flint water civil settlement began Monday at 10 a.m. in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
In January, Judge Judith Levy preliminarily approved the settlement establishing the process for eligible Flint residents to file settlement claims processed and paid by the claims administrator.
In August, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced the state’s portion of the preliminary agreement to settle the lawsuits after the city of Flint switched its public water supply to the Flint River in 2014.
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Attorney General Keith Ellison announced Minnesota will get $50 million from the settlement of the state’s lawsuit against the Sackler family’s company Purdue Pharma, which manufactured the opioid drug Oxycontin that contributed to the deadly opioid crisis nationwide.
The resolution will make public more than 30 million documents related to Purdue’s role in the opioid crisis and require the Sacklers to pay $4.3 billion for prevention, treatment, and recovery efforts in communities across the country.
Minnesota’s share of those payments is expected to exceed $50 million over nine years, the spending of which will be overseen by the State’s Opioid Epidemic Response Advisory Council.
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A coalition of 15 states agreed to a deal with drug maker Purdue Pharma, which could soon lead to a $4.5 billion settlement over the company’s role in the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The states agreed to no longer oppose Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy plan while the pharmaceutical company agreed to publicly release a trove of millions of documents, according to a court filing late Wednesday night. The Sackler family, which owns the company, would pay an additional $50 million under the settlement.
The agreement will be tacked onto a broader proposal that is set to be voted on by more than 3,000 plaintiffs, The New York Times reported. In addition to the states, plaintiffs include cities, counties and tribes that sued the company over its role in boosting its painkiller OxyContin, the cause of thousands of opioid deaths.
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Ohio State University said it has reached settlements with parties in 11 of 18 lawsuits filed against the school related to accused sex abuser Richard Strauss, but the agreements do not require taxpayer funds.
The lawsuits represent “nearly half of the individuals who have brought claims against the university,” the school said in a news release.
The settlements did not use taxpayer, tuition or donor funds, according to the release. Funds come from existing institutional discretionary funding.
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Michigan will pay $80 million to settle a lawsuit filed against the state’s Department of Corrections (MDOC) in 2013 by a group of juvenile offenders who said they were sexually assaulted while housed in adult prisons.
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