Institutional Investor (March 12)
“Sixty-eight percent of U.S. institutional investors do not use ESG in their portfolios.” They’ve been abandoning ESG as it “has become politicized, leading to state legislation banning the practice, lawsuits, and reputation concerns.” Elsewhere, in contrast, ESG investment is “forging ahead”. A recent global survey of 310 institutional investors, showed that “94 percent of European respondents have incorporated ESG into their investment process…. Within Asia, that portion is 86 percent.”
Tags: Banning, ESG, Global, Institutional investors, Investment, Lawsuits, Legislation, Politicized, Portfolios, Reputation, Survey Europe, U.S.
Wall Street Journal (March 31)
“China’s support for Russia is the most serious but far from only reason Europe is losing patience. Beijing has launched an economic war on EU member Lithuania over its upgraded ties to Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party’s human-rights record remains abysmal. Bullying behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic and stonewalling of the origins investigation hurt China’s credibility. The question is what Europe will do beyond condemnations, token sanctions and the occasional lawsuit.”
Tags: CCP, China, Condemnations, COVID-19, Credibility, Economic war, EU, Europe, Human rights, Lawsuits, Lithuania, Russia, Stonewalling, Taiwan, Token sanctions
Boston Globe (September 8)
The shift to online learning has been filled with challenges and pitfalls. For professors, “reinvention has meant reworking syllabuses, prerecording lectures, and reconsidering how to test students’ knowledge of material – and even how to bond with them virtually.” The universities want “to avoid a repeat of last spring, when disgruntled parents and students filed lawsuits claiming the online learning experience was not worth the thousands of dollars in tuition costs.” Meanwhile, one survey showed that roughly half of the students “feel that higher education is no longer worth the cost, and 40 percent believe it’s a bad deal now that It has moved online.”
Tags: Challenges, Disgruntled, Lawsuits, Online learning, Parents, Pitfalls, Professors, Reinvention, Students, Tuition, Universities
CNN (March 23)
“The thickening legal morass around the President involving the three sex-related lawsuits threatens to deepen his legal exposure and add to the incessant chaos that whirls around the White House.” If the suits “are allowed to go forward they could eventually force the President to provide depositions. Given his demonstrated tendency not to always tell the truth he would potentially risk perjuring himself under oath, thereby taking a case from the civil to the criminal realm.”
Tags: Chaos, Criminal, Depositions, Lawsuits, Legal exposure, Morass, Perjury, Sex, Threat, Trump, Truth
Bloomberg (May 10)
Tsuyoshi Maruki, the founder of Tokyo-based Strategic Capital Inc., “stands out like a lone wolf in Japan, where societal intolerance for aggressive shareholder campaigns has spurred a breed of friendly activists.” When persuasion fails, Maruki “turns to techniques that include banding with other investors to oust management and filing lawsuits to overhaul corporate practices in order to boost returns for his 9.7 billion yen ($90 million) fund.” Committed to improving corporate governance in Japan, Maruki is convinced his aggressive stance works.
Tags: Aggressive, Friendly activists, Governance, Investors, Japan, Lawsuits, Management, Maruki, Persuasion, Shareholder, Strategic Capital, Tokyo
New York Times (May 6)
“In recent years, the number of patent-infringement lawsuits has increased sharply, by 25 percent just in 2013.” This explosion of frivolous lawsuits has “made a mockery of the protections the government grants to inventors.” Fortunately, Congress looks poised to pass legislation that could reduce some of the worst abuses.
Tags: Abuses, Congress, Frivolous, Government, Infringement, Inventors, Lawsuits, Legislation, Patents
Los Angeles Times (June 17)
Despite the politicians who still deny climate change, major insurers are taking steps to manage the potentially costly reality created by climate change. “As insurers begin to shift the costs of that reality through rate increases, exclusions, lawsuits and market retreat, consumers can ask such politicians, ‘Why, if climate change is a hoax, are we paying for it?’”
Tags: Climate change, Consumers, Costs, Exclusions, Hoax, Insurers, Lawsuits, Market retreat, Politicians, Rate increases
The New York Times (December 1, 2013)
Theoretically “patents provide an incentive for inventors to generate new products and services by giving them a temporary monopoly on their creations.” Over little more than a decade, however, patent applications have more than tripled to 576,000 in 2012 and “the Patent and Trademark Office appears to have granted many that are overly broad or vague.” The result has been frivolous lawsuits filed by patent trolls. Currently proposed legislation in Congress will help reduce the frivolous lawsuits, but it doesn’t “directly address the underlying problem of vague and overbroad patents.”
Tags: Applications, Congress, Frivolous, Inventors, Lawsuits, Legislation, Overbroad, Patent and Trademark Office, Patent trolls, Patents, Vague
