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A Texas natural gas marketer has sued a unit of Chevron USA Inc in Houston federal court, asking for nearly $85 million from the oil giant for failing to make natural gas deliveries during a deep freeze across the state in February.

In a complaint filed on Friday, Cailip Gas Marketing LLC located in Houston accuses Chevron Natural Gas of breaching a sales contract by delivering lower-than-agreed volumes of natural gas to a facility near Houston just as Winter Storm Uri knocked out power and sent natural-gas spot prices soaring.

Chevron did not immediately provide a comment. The complaint says that the San Ramon, California-based company has said force majeure excused the missed and incomplete deliveries.

Continue reading “Chevron hit with $85 mln lawsuit over gas deliveries during Texas freeze”

Declaring Lubbock a “sanctuary city” for the unborn, voters have approved a local ban on almost all abortions, and the Texas legislature is considering a law to bar the procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Lubbock, home to some 260,000 people, is the 25th such “sanctuary city” – all but two in Texas – to have banned abortions in the last two years.

Drucilla Tigner, a policy and advocacy strategist for ACLU-Texas, said most other towns that have passed similar sanctuary city measures have populations of a few hundred or thousand, and often have no medical providers whatsoever, let alone one that provides abortions, as Lubbock does.

Continue reading “Texas city bans abortion, allows family to sue providers, helpers”

The U.S. Supreme Court stepped back into the heated debate over gun rights on Monday, agreeing to hear a challenge backed by the National Rifle Association to New York state’s restrictions on people carrying concealed handguns in public in a case that could further undermine firearms control efforts nationally.

The justices took up an appeal by two gun owners and the New York affiliate of the NRA, an influential gun rights group closely aligned with Republicans, of a lower court ruling throwing out their challenge to the restrictions on concealed handguns outside the home.

Lower courts rejected the argument made by the plaintiffs that the restrictions violated the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The lawsuit seeks an unfettered right to carry concealed handguns in public.

Continue reading “U.S. Supreme Court takes major case on carrying concealed handguns”

The jury said it has reached a verdict on its second day of deliberations in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murder and manslaughter after kneeling on the neck of a dying George Floyd during an arrest last May.

The verdict will be read aloud in court between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m. local time (2030 GMT to 2100 GMT), the court said. The jury deliberated for four hours on Monday and resumed on Tuesday morning.

The 12 sequestered jurors have considered three weeks of testimony from 45 witnesses, including bystanders, police officials and medical experts, along with hours of video evidence in the most high-profile U.S. case involving accusations of police misconduct in decades.

Continue reading “Jurors reach verdict in Chauvin trial in Minneapolis”

U.S. President Joe Biden’s interim regulators are wasting no time unraveling Wall Street-friendly measures introduced under former Republican President Donald Trump, using quick-fix legal tactics.

They have spiked or stalled more than a dozen contentious Trump-era measures that critics said eroded consumer protections, weakened enforcement, and curbed investors’ ability to push for environmental, social and governance (ESG) changes.

Rather than embarking on the lengthy process of rewriting the rules, the agencies have in many instances used speedy legal tools, according to lawyers, consumer groups, and a review by Reuters. These include delaying unfinished rules, issuing informal guidance, rescinding old policy statements or issuing new ones, and choosing not to enforce existing rules.

Continue reading “Biden’s agencies reverse Trump’s Wall Street-friendly rules”