On February 16, 2022, Joby Aviation, a California-based company developing all-electric aircraft for commercial passenger service, reported that one of its prototype experimental unmanned aerial taxis crashed in flight in South Monterey County, California. Although no injuries were reported, damage to the aircraft itself was substantial.
The Joby prototype was one
To respond effectively to climate change, local, state, and federal governments should adopt complementary policies, but that’s much easier said than done. A case in point is the drive to reduce emissions from the building sector, which accounts for nearly 30% of U.S. emissions despite substantial improvements in energy efficiency.
In recent years, some
On February 16, 2022, less than a week after nine Phoenix police officers were injured in a fatal standoff in South Phoenix, the City Council by a 6-3 vote, approved more than $500,000 in expenditures on behalf of the Phoenix Police Department to purchase drones and to develop a program to
In an opinion filed January 28, and later certified for publication on February 16, 2022, the Third District Court of Appeal affirmed a judgment denying a petition for writ of mandate that challenged on CEQA grounds the El Dorado Irrigation District’s (“EID”) decision to undertake its Upper Main Ditch piping project. Save the El Dorado Canal v. El Dorado Irrigation District, et al. (2022) 75 Cal.App.5th 239. The challenged water conveyance project would replace about three miles of EID’s open and unlined earthen ditch system with a buried water transmission pipeline in order to conserve water and improve water quality. Petitioner alleged the EIR’s project description was inadequate because it omitted the material fact that the ditch section to be abandoned as a water conveyance also served as the watershed’s only drainage system, and that the EIR insufficiently analyzed the abandonment’s impacts on hydrology, biological resources, and wildfires.
The consultations seek views on regulated product applications for six novel foods that have been submitted for authorisation to the FSA and on precautionary allergen labelling and precautionary allergen information, such as “may contain”, on many types of food.
The bill seeks to extend certain provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
By Erin Brown Jones, Paul A. Davies, Nathan H. Seltzer, and James Bee
The U.S. Congress continues to take interest in implementing legislation to curb alleged human rights abuses in the supply chain in China and elsewhere, as evidenced by two new pieces of legislation introduced in the Senate this month. These bills follow the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, in December 2021. For more information on the UFLPA, see this Latham blog post.
In a recent Legal Update[1], we discussed the intersection between Tax and ESG and the challenges companies will face responding to external pressures for greater transparency into a company’s global tax position. We predicted that once the SEC reporting season began this month, the press would focus on the effective tax rates of high-profile companies. That is exactly what happened recently when a leading national news outlet reported on the tax position of a well-known multinational. The article paints an unflattering picture of the multinational’s global tax position and makes generalized observations on structures it might have used to achieve its tax results. In this blog post, we discuss how companies can prepare for similar reporting.
On January 26, the Massachusetts Appeals Court issued a decision in Boston Clear Water Company, LLC v. Town of Lynnfield, finding a Conservation Commission lost jurisdiction over a project before its’ review even began. The case reaffirmed the Appeals Court’s 2007 holding in Oyster Creek Preservation Inc v. Harwich: a commission can lose
Two recent actions by the Biden Administration will identify areas of focus for environmental justice and therefore influence environmental enforcement priorities, federal permitting and licensing, and federal spending, among other actions. On February 18, the White House Council on Environmental Quality released the beta (or draft) version of its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a key component of President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative. The Justice40 Initiative set the goal of “delivering 40 percent of the overall benefits of relevant federal investments” to disadvantaged communities. The CEJST serves a specific purpose: to help agencies identify disadvantaged communities in order to direct federal benefits and help agencies measure whether 40 percent of benefits are being received by those communities.
Russia’s unprovoked attack on the Ukraine has not been restricted to land. Ukrainian tech resources have been hit by cyber-attacks, particularly against its government and banking systems in a coordinated effort by Russia’s military intelligence unit.[1] Several websites of Ukrainian government departments and banks were hit with distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), which
