Possible lawsuits, reports the National Law Journal, might be on their way. The National Law Journal reports that Squire, Sanders & Dempsey is representing a coalition of rejected Chrysler dealers and has scheduled a meeting with President Obama's auto task force next week to ask for federal assistance. The firm claims that the closures are unlawful and that roughly 100,000 employees stand to lose their jobs. It vows to litigate if franchise rights are ignored. WSJ Law Blog May 15, 2009

GM has not made its list of closings public as of May 15.

Free is good. But free is not necessarily equal. Click link for 10 sites that provide free access to case law. Each has its peculiar strengths and weaknesses. http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202430532688

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the Consumer Credit Reporting Companies (Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion) are permitted to include your name on lists used by creditors or insurers to make firm offers of credit or insurance that are not initiated by you ("Firm Offers"). The FCRA also provides you the right to "Opt-Out", which prevents Consumer Credit Reporting Companies from providing your credit file information for Firm Offers.
Through this website, you may request to:
• Opt-Out from receiving Firm Offers for Five Years - (electronically through this website).
• Opt-Out from receiving Firm Offers permanently - (mail Permanent Opt-Out Election form available through this website).
• Opt-In and be eligible to receive Firm Offers. This option is for consumers who have previously completed an Opt-Out request - (electronically through this website).
If you choose to Opt-Out, you will no longer be included in firm offer lists provided by these four consumer credit reporting companies. If you are not receiving firm offers because you have previously completed a request to Opt-Out, you can request to Opt-In. In doing so, you will soon be among the many consumers who can significantly benefit from having ready access to product information on credit and insurance products that may not be available to the general public. https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t

A French court on May 13 rejected a claim from the cosmetics company L’Oréal that the online auctioneer eBay was profiting from sales of counterfeit perfumes. The court said that eBay was making a reasonable effort to keep fake goods off its site. The lawsuit pitted L’Oréal, a French brand owner, against an outsider, eBay, in a country where the laissez-faire ethos of American Internet companies sometimes clashed with local business and legal traditions. EBay has lost several similar cases brought by other brand owners in France, including LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Hermès. L’Oréal has also sued eBay in Belgium, Britain and Spain. A Belgian court recently sided with the online auctioneer; a decision is expected soon in Britain. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/technology/companies/14loreal.html

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?” Some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire. “It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/technology/internet/12digital.html

May 17 is the birthday of composer Erik Satie, born in a seaport town in northern France (1866). He's known for his eccentric piano pieces, with French titles that roughly translate into Flabby Preludes (for a Dog) (1912) and Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear (1903). His scores also contain instructions to the performers like "Light as an egg," "With astonishment," or "Work it out yourself."
May 17 is the birthday of Mexican writer and diplomat Alfonso Reyes, (books by this author) born in Monterrey, Mexico (1889). When he was 21, he published a very successful book of essays, Cuestiones estéticas. And when he was 22, he wrote a short story called "La Cena" ("The Supper"), which was one of the first pieces to be classified as Latin American magical realism—the genre that's now used to describe work by authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. The year after he wrote that story, his father, a governor, was assassinated. Reyes graduated from law school and got a job with Mexico's foreign service. He was posted to France and then spent a decade in Spain, largely missing out on the violent Mexican Revolution at home. He served as ambassador to Argentina and Brazil, and returned to Mexico after he retired. His complete works have been published in 26 volumes, and he has translated the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov, and Homer.
May 18 is the birthday of Omar Khayyám, born in Nishapur, Iran (1048). During his lifetime, he was known as a scientist and a mathematician, and his treatise on algebra is considered one of the greatest mathematical works of the Middle Ages. But today we know him for his Rubáiyát—which means, simply, "quatrains," four-lined stanzas with a rhyming pattern. In 1859, E.B. Cowell, a scholar of Persian at Oxford University, stumbled on a manuscript copy of 158 of Khayyám's quatrains at Oxford's Bodleian Library. He passed it on to one of his students, Edward FitzGerald, and FitzGerald translated 75 of the quatrains. He thought some of the quatrains were too sensual or made Khayyám seem too much like an atheist, so those he left in Persian, and he made liberal changes to the verses he did translate. FitzGerald self-published the Rubáiyát, and sold it in a local bookstore for a shilling, about 12 cents. But he didn't sell a single copy, so he moved it to the penny bin on the street, where it was picked up by Whitley Stokes, the editor of the famous weekly paper The Saturday Review.Stokes passed it on to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who passed it to Algernon Charles Swinburne, who gave it to George Meredith, and so on, and soon it was all the rage of the English and American literati. It became one of the most reproduced works of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Rubáiyát has been translated by many translators since then, some of them much more faithful to the original text, but it is FitzGerald's translation that remains the most popular in English. Here is his translation of one of Khayyám's quatrains:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow.
On May 18, 1980 Mount St. Helens erupted. There had been earthquakes and smaller steam eruptions in the volcano for two months, but on the morning of May 18, 1980, an earthquake caused the entire north side of the mountain to collapse. This caused the largest landslide in recorded history and a volcanic eruption that was as powerful as 500 atomic bombs. No one expected the eruption to be so large, but they did know it was coming, so the Forest Service had worked to keep visitors away, although 57 people still died. The blast destroyed 230 square miles of old-growth forest, and the ash was deposited in 11 states. The Writer’s Almanac