Suits

The state Education Department has ignored its obligation to make sure that thousands of students learning English receive adequate and legally required assistance, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. State officials said they had not studied the lawsuit, but insisted they are meeting their legal obligations. The suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, focuses on an estimated 20,000 students who are receiving no help or inadequate services as they work to learn English and keep up academically at the same time.

Two years ago, Rupert Murdoch and other board members of News Corp. were sued by shareholders for lax oversight and alleged misdeeds within the sprawling media conglomerate. News Corp. on Monday agreed to settle the case.  Now here's the punch line: News Corp. will be the one collecting the $139 million settlement -- not the shareholders who brought the suit. ON LOCATION: Where the cameras roll Here's how that worked out: Insurance companies that represent News Corp.'s board will make the payout on behalf of Murdoch and others on News Corp.'s board.

Olga Rios is a middle-school teacher with a Harvard University graduate degree and a passion to politically represent the low-income Latino children she says mirror herself growing up in hard-scrabble Hawaiian Gardens. But that quest is virtually impossible, she says, under the current at-large electoral system that she argues gives an overwhelming political advantage to school board candidates from the bigger, richer city of Cerritos next door. Not one Latino sits on the seven-member ABC Unified District school board in southeastern Los Angeles County, even though a quarter of the district's registered voters share that ethnic background.

A federal judge has refused to dismiss a civil rights lawsuit against the Beverly Hills Police Department, forcing investigators to reveal evidence against a man they suspect killed his wife. The suit by Gary Klein, 59, charges that Beverly Hills detectives harassed him and tried to implicate him in his wife's death, repeatedly searching his house and interviewing his aged parents, his young sons and the mothers of his children's classmates. Klein's wife, Rina, 41, died in a hospital in 2009 after suffering seizures at home.

A lawsuit alleging that approval of the high-speed rail system's first sections in the Central Valley violated state environmental laws was settled Thursday, eliminating a legal obstacle that could have delayed construction. A Sacramento County Superior Court judge approved an agreement that calls for the California High-Speed Rail Authority to further reduce the project's effects on farming operations, preserve agricultural land and provide additional compensation for landowners.

Pilots and a top airline group have filed a lawsuit to stop the federal government from cutting work hours for air traffic controllers this weekend, saying the furloughs will lead to travel delays of up to an hour across the country. Airlines for America, a trade group for the nation's airlines, on Friday joined a pilots association and operators of regional carriers in a suit that asks the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to prevent job furloughs called for under the so-called budget sequestration.

In an epic clash between old and new media, Google Inc.'s video website YouTube has scored another huge victory in the long-running skirmish over copyright infringement brought by television giant Viacom Inc. A federal judge in New York on Thursday ruled that YouTube had not violated Viacom's copyright even though users of the popular online site were allowed to post unauthorized video clips from some of Viacom's most popular shows, including Comedy...

Could primitive extraterrestrial life have traveled the universe in tiny spacesuits and colonized alien planets? Perhaps, according to a team of Japanese scientists who used electron beams to turn insect larvae's natural secretions into a protective “nano-suit” that allowed the young bugs to survive in a vacuum for a whole hour. The nano-suit, a 50-to-100-nanometer layer that allowed the soft-bodied insects to survive a vacuum that should have instantly killed them, was described this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

WASHINGTON - U.S. courts will not be the world forum for lawsuits brought by victims of human rights abuses abroad who seek damages from multinational corporations or deposed tyrants, the Supreme Court declared Wednesday. In a decision welcomed by corporate leaders and decried by human rights activists, the justices said U.S. courts are limited mostly to deciding disputes over conduct that took place on American territory, not on foreign soil. By a 9-0 vote, the high court tossed out a closely watched lawsuit brought by Nigerians against Royal Dutch Petroleum for allegedly conspiring with the Nigerian regime in a campaign of rape, torture and murder in the oil-rich delta in the early 1990s.

About 100 potential jurors have been summoned to a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Monday in the legal clash between Michael Jackson's mother and three children and entertainment powerhouse AEG over the death of the pop singer. For days, potential jurors have been asked to determine whether they could spend up to four months weighing the wrongful death case. Those who made the cut will now be questioned by attorneys before a jury is sworn in. Jackson's mother and children contend that AEG negligently hired and supervised Dr, Conrad Murray, who gave the singer a fatal dose of the anesthetic propofol on the eve of what was to be Jackson's comeback tour.