Consumer Attorneys

The Supreme Court added four cases to its docket for the current term yesterday, including a review of a judge’s decision to dismiss a potential juror from a death-penalty case because of the man’s equivocal statements about capital punishment.

A federal appeals court overturned the trial judge’s ruling in a rape and murder trial in the state of Washington. One of the issues in the case is whether federal courts should defer to a trial judge who is in a position to actually talk to and observe a potential juror in making the decision about his ability to carry out the law.
The court has added 11 cases to its slimmer-than-usual caseload in the past eight days, all of which are scheduled to be argued and decided before the term’s usual close at the end of June. Among the cases justices said yesterday that they will decide is a question of whether a cigarette manufacturer can move a lawsuit against it to federal jurisdiction and out of the state courts, where judgments against tobacco companies have been mounting.

The death-penalty case , Uttecht v. Brown (06-413), stems from the 1991 conviction of Cal Coburn Brown. One of the prospective jurors in the case indicated on a questionnaire that he could support a death sentence if convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the accused had killed and would kill again, and that he would have severe doubts without that. Because the only other alternative sentence for Brown would be life in prison without parole, he was told it would be unlikely such evidence would be presented.

After additional questioning, the prosecution asked that the juror be dismissed, and the defense did not object. The Washington state Supreme Court and a federal district judge upheld the state judge’s decision to dismiss.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, with which the Supreme Court has already disagreed on a death-penalty case this year, reversed the sentence. The potential juror’s statement that he “would impose the death penalty when the defendant would be likely to kill again did not exclude the possibility that he would vote to impose the death penalty in other circumstances as well,” the court ruled.

In deeply disturbing ways, he is a prototype of his generation.

He lived the divorce revolution, age 10 when his parents split in 1978 for that increasingly familiar reason: They were just too different. He was an underachiever in high school, uninterested in college. He hit the job market in the mid-1980s as it ran out of room for young men with blue-collar skills. Aware of affirmative action for women and minorities, he began to feel shortchanged as a white male.

He worked dead-end jobs, voiced fears of going nowhere, tried a well-trod escape route — the Army — but bailed out as the military downsized with the fall of communism. Like millions in his generation, he ended up back home as an adult, a man sleeping in a boy’s room, headed exactly where he’d feared: nowhere.

When he was charged with blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, everyone who knew TimothyJames McVeigh in his formative years blamed this monumental madness on the Army, on Desert Storm, on places and people far from the wholesome community where he came of age with an American flag flying over his front yard. He was so indistinguishable from everyone else, they said. Even the problems in his life — his parents’ divorce, his alienated ennui as a young man — were average.

No set of experiences would predict — or explain — an act as catastrophic as the Oklahoma bombing. Yet the roots of McVeigh’s extremism are clearly traceable to his youth in pastoral western New York. By the time he was in junior high school, an early interest in guns had become an obsession; by high school, when he ran track and sold fast food, he was arming himself to fight alone in an apocalyptic war; by age 20, he was making and exploding bombs and shooting guns on a wooded lot that he described to Army buddies as a survivalist bunker.

Americans were shocked to learn that the prime suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing were not foreign terrorists but men from the nation’s heartland. The plot was not hatched in Beirut or Baghdad but possibly in the backwoods of northeast Michigan by a paramilitary cell that investigators allege McVeigh formed with accused conspirator Terry Lynn Nichols and Nichols’s brother James.

Both Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are products of Middle America, and their lives raise troubling questions about the strength of the social fabric there. This two-part series of articles will explore their experiences against the backdrop of their times.

For the most part, any aberrations in Tim McVeigh’s life were hidden under an exterior so bland as to be nondescript. Many acquaintances had to struggle to think of something — anything — to relate about him. His interest in firearms was known only to friends who also liked them; a good friend from the track team never even knew McVeigh owned a BB gun. In retrospect, merely appearing regular seems to have been a lifelong pursuit.

Even today, as the case against him grows ever tighter, a person who has seen and talked to McVeigh in prison near Oklahoma City saw in him a normalcy that rendered him “the scariest man in the world.”

“There’s nothing alarming about him — nothing,” this person said. “He’s respectful of his elders, he’s polite. When he expresses political views, for most of what he says, Rush Limbaugh is scarier. That’s what’s incredibly frightening. If he is what he appears to be, there must be other people out there like him. You look at him and you think: This isn’t the end of something; this is the beginning of something.”

Psychologists have warned for years that young people like McVeigh born in the late 1960s, whose families fractured in record numbers, whose economic frustrations far exceed those of their parents, are unusually alienated and vulnerable to fringe movements. In this view, the social and economic upheavals of the last 20 years have planted a virus in American society with still unrealized capacity for damage.

“A kid from the heart of America who feels the society has let him down can be very dangerous if he has underlying emotional quirks,” said Charles Bahn, a forensic psychologist from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who studies the psyche of terrorists. “In urban America, gangs fill this void. In the Midwest, it’s cults, the macho gun world, militias, belonging to fringe groups.”

McVeigh’s mother, Mildred Fraser, remarried and living in Florida, recently wrote of her son to the local Fort Pierce Tribune: “Sounds like he could be any of our children, right? People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. It could happen to your family just as it has to this one.”

In the summer of 1990, the Soviet Union’s terminal economic crisis descended upon the product that many Russians considered their most irreplaceable: cigarettes. Faced with mass shortages of Soviet-made brands, angry smokers in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other Soviet cities staged the protests that became known as the tobacco rebellion. A desperate President Mikhail Gorbachev fired the minister in charge of the industry and pleaded with the West for help.

To the rescue rode Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

In return for cash and barter goods, the American tobacco giants agreed to deliver 34 billion cigarettes — the single biggest export order in their history. The crisis abated, and Gorbachev and the old order helped buy themselves an extra year in power. And the companies achieved an important foothold in a vast market that for decades had kept them tightly restricted or had shut them out altogether.

Since then, the American companies and their European counterparts have swept across Eastern Europe and the republics of the shattered Soviet Union, buying up failing state-owned enterprises and ancient factories, launching mass advertising campaigns and asserting broad influence over new governments and political leaders. In the process, they have laid the foundation for a Western-owned tobacco industry in a vast market that may someday surpass the shrinking markets of the United States and Western Europe.

Big Tobacco’s entry into Ukraine, one of the largest former communist markets, is in many ways typical. While other Western industries hung back, scared off by Ukraine’s formidable bureaucracy, chaotic laws and unstable currency, Philip Morris Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Reemtsma, the giant German tobacco conglomerate, moved in quickly, buying up shares in the new nation’s five largest cigarette factories and capturing 75 percent of its manufacturing capacity.

Their billboards became a regular feature of Kiev’s urban landscape, and they launched advertising campaigns that provided much of the revenue that kept the state-run broadcast industry afloat. And when the country’s small but active anti-smoking movement persuaded parliament to pass a ban on tobacco ads, the industry responded with a well-financed lobbying campaign that recently overturned the ban.

The results are visible throughout Ukraine: Billboards for the Marlboro Man and the rugged Lucky Strike motorcyclist are back; ads for American brands again dominate the country’s coffee shops and trolley cars, and the brands’ brightly painted logos adorn posters, T-shirts and shopping bags. And while the companies have yet to see the kind of profits that would justify their vast investment in Ukraine, they have great hopes for the future. “It’s risky . . . but the potential is huge,” said Ronnie Lindquist, general director of Reynolds in Ukraine.

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is scheduled to die May 16 by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a seven-ton truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people, including 19 children, in the deadliest act of terrorism ever committed on US soil.

The impending execution has once again raised issues surrounding the bombing and the figure of McVeigh himself. Various commentaries have appeared in the media, most of them superficial in the extreme. As a rule, they go no farther than discussing McVeigh’s subjective motives, and generally reach the conclusion that he is nothing more than a monstrous aberration, whose emergence is not related to broader social questions.

Approaching McVeigh in this manner is not only inadequate, it is an evasion. To grasp the Oklahoma City tragedy and the character of its perpetrator requires seriously examining and coming to grips with some ugly truths about American society.

The most striking and immediate aspect of McVeigh and the atrocity he committed is something official commentators pass over in virtual silence—the intense alienation from society and its official establishment that he exhibits. What accounts for such a level of alienation, and the anti-social form it has assumed in the figure of McVeigh? What is the socio-psychological process that transformed a working class youth into an unrepentant mass murderer?

McVeigh’s cold-blooded act horrified millions in the US and around the world. But a recently published book, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by two Buffalo News reporters, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, reports that McVeigh has no regrets about his act. He openly acknowledged having set off the bomb to the authors and claims sole responsibility for the mass killing. During an appearance on ABC News’s “Prime Time Thursday” March 29, Herbeck commented, “He [McVeigh] never expressed one ounce of remorse for the Oklahoma City bombing.” Michel described McVeigh’s reaction to the explosion’s aftermath: “Damn, I didn’t knock the building down. I didn’t take it down.”

According to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh claimed not to have known that a day-care center was located in the Murrah Building, and that if he had known it, in his own words, “it might have given me pause to switch targets. That’s a large amount of collateral damage.”

Michel and Herbeck quote McVeigh, with whom they spoke for some 75 hours, on his attitude to the victims: “To these people in Oklahoma who have lost a loved one, I’m sorry but it happens every day. You’re not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or a granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the world. I’m not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a fetal ball, and cry just because the victims want me to do that.”

A Shanghai tea house whose name translates roughly as “Frog Keeps a Mistress” has been deemed a threat to public morality and told to get a new moniker, local media said Friday.

The “Qingwa Bao Ernai” shop was violating China’s advertising law, the Shanghai Daily and other newspapers said, citing a local commercial bureau official, Xu Jun.

“The name is also against social morality and common ethics,” Xu was quoted as saying, adding the change was needed to “purify the city’s ad markets.”

The shop had no listed phone number, although a manager identified in the reports only by his surname, Li, was quoted as saying the name was not meant to be risque.

Despite rising wealth and sophistication, Shanghai remains highly conservative in politics and culture and its communist leaders are quick to crack down on ads, art exhibits or media seen as exceeding the vaguely drawn limits.

The move also underscores extreme sensitivity over the widespread practice of keeping mistresses, particularly among government officials who have been ordered by the party to declare any such liaisons.

Shanghai’s former party chief, dismissed last year amid corruption allegations, was rumored to have kept several mistresses.

Hey, FTC! WAKE UP! Shouldn’t some truth-in-advertising law require someone to rename “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” something like “Zzzzzzzz,” or “Yawn,” or what about “See Paint Dry!”? Isn’t that your job?

Surely the dullest of Hollywood’s many comic-book-derived summer movies, “Silver Surfer” is drearier than corn dying in the Iowa sun, slower than molasses in Antarctica, as grim as February in Rockville. Sentient humans should stay away; all others may enter confident that their IQs are already in the Chernobyl-fried range and will not be affected, except for downward.

So many flaws, so little time. Hmmm, we could waste a few minutes on the total absence of chemistry between the dweebs and dweebette known as “The Fantastic Four,” and if you still want to go with “Fantastic,” maybe there’s a lawsuit in your future. Or maybe we could try to discern whose eyes are deader: poor, dim, thick Jessica Alba as Invisible Woman, who looks as if she got a concussion on the field hockey meadow from some 300-pound, hormonally confused midfielder with a grudge, or Michael Chiklis, laboring under 700 pounds of rock disguise as The Thing (he looks like the landscape in “From the Earth to the Moon”). Or what about Actual Actor Ioan Gruffudd, hiding his Welsh gravitas behind a cheesy Yank accent as Mr. Fantastic, affecting the enthusiasms of a Real Smart Science Guy Who Turns to Rubber.

Then there’s the schadenfreude dimension, by which the afflictions of the talented are always worth a chuckle or two, as in the rich misfortune of actor Andre Braugher and writer-producer Mark Frost, who once revivified TV with great work on “Homicide” and “Twin Peaks,” respectively, and are now reduced to degradation on this piffle of a kerfuffle of a flopola of a trifle. Hollywood: so cruel, so ugly, so destructive. God, I love that filthy town!

But no: Let’s go straight to the most important summer issue, the issue of design. As a concocter of fanciful machines, ominous labs, thrilling action sequences and potential ends of days, “Silver Surfer” isn’t a dud; it’s a Milk Dud, a blank, a misfire, a bang that went poof.

Visually, the movie is dead on arrival.

Here’s an example: It turns out that Fantastic Four hotshot leader Reed Richards (Gruffudd) has built a secret vehicle by which to transport the four supermutants around the world to deal with various crises. We see it in his lab — the lab looks like the lobby of a Club Med in the ’70s and you could almost smell the disinfectant slathered on the floor! — under a sheet, and when dork-o-mensch Chiklis reaches to pull the sheet off (or maybe it’s mousse-lacquered, almost-irrelevant flameboy Johnny Storm, a.k.a. Human Torch, played by a haircut named Chris Evans), he’s stopped. “No peeking, crust-face!” That’s called a tease

Yesterday the advertisers’ secret emerged: they have been circumventing the ban by filming the adverts not in Italy but in the tiny — and sovereign — landlocked enclave of San Marino on the Adriatic coast.

Two years ago there were howls of anguish from the advertising industry when Parliament banned the use of children under the age of 14 in television advertising. “How can we advertise nappies without a baby, or a new toy without a child playing with it?” asked Federica Ariagno, of McCann-Erickson Italy.

Felice Lioy, head of UPA, the Italian association of advertisers, said that it was silly “to create a world without children”. The problem is acute not only at Christmas but also at Twelfth Night, when a witch on a broomstick called La Befana brings presents to children.

This year January 6 falls on Friday, making next weekend as important to children (and to advertisers) as Christmas itself. One solution has been to film advertisements involving children in South Africa, Spain or Switzerland.

But Pierangelo Spina, an advertiser from Rimini, told La Stampa he had spotted the ideal location much closer to hand: the autonomous Republic of San Marino, founded in AD300, which has its own mint and postage stamps, and even a militia of 1,000 men.

Lapo Tanelli, who set up an advertising agency in San Marino after the law came in, said that he drew on a pool of more than 600 child actors aged up to 12. “If you consider that San Marino has a population of only 30,000, that’s a fair proportion of its children,” he said.Most of the children used in television commercials were from San Marino, “though if a client wants to use a child from outside we bring them here”.

Maurizio Gasparri, the former Communications Minister who introduced the law in 2003, said that it was supposed to protect children but had clearly been unworkable. Despite the decline of the large Italian family, children are used to advertise not only toys but almost everything from pasta to washing powder.

The Supreme Court struck down Monday the federal government’s ban that prevented pharmacies from advertising any drug that is mixed and created as a specialty medicine for children and other patients with specific needs.

The court, by a 5-4 vote, said the ban amounted to unconstitutional restrictions on commercial speech protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was a defeat for the Bush administration, which argued the 5-year-old advertising law was needed to protect the public.

The decision continued the court’s trend of protecting free speech rights in the business arena. In recent years justices have struck down limits on tobacco advertising near schools and a ban on casino gambling ads.

At issue was the process called drug compounding, where a pharmacist or doctor can remove an ingredient that causes allergic reactions, put a medicine in a form easier to consume or make other changes to fit a patient’s needs.

The practice is widespread, among corner drug stores and larger pharmacies. The federal law was intended to curb potential abuses by the larger pharmacies or mail-order businesses.

The Bush administration had argued that some pharmacists were making major changes to drugs and that the compounds had not been tested.

Congress changed the law for drug compounding in 1997, including the advertising ban. The government was sued by a group of licensed pharmacies that specialize in compounding drugs.

A U.S. appeals court sided with pharmacies, ruling the advertising prohibition violated free-speech rights. Writing for the court majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed.

She said the advertising ban would prevent pharmacists with no interest in mass-producing medications, but who serve clientele with special medical needs, from telling doctors about alternative drugs available through compounding.

The law was challenged by pharmacies in Colorado, Nevada, New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

An entrepreneur has won his wiener war with city hall.

A judge granted Walton “Wally” Armour permission to erect a 30-foot replica of a hot dog atop his new restaurant.

City officials had tried to halt the plans, saying it would lead to more and could make the city look like the Las Vegas strip.

The Alliance Board of Zoning Appeals granted Armour a variance allowing him to skirt an ordinance against rooftop advertising. Law Director Andrew Zumbar argued that the ordinance shouldn’t be bypassed, but the judge said the city could not challenge its appeals board.

Zumbar said it would be up to the city council whether to appeal Sinclair’s ruling.

HOLLYWOOD — Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton said Thursday that the L.A. law firm has named three more partners for its newly formed entertainment practice.

Attorneys Robert Darwell, Benjamin Mulcahy and Shaun Clark will be based in West Los Angeles.

“All three are tremendously talented in all aspects of motion picture and television development, production, finance and distribution,” said Guy Halgren, chair of the firm’s exec committee.

Darwell, Mulcahy and Clark also have deep experience in advertising law issues, firm officials said.

The newly appointed partners join entertainment-law unit’s founding attorneys Lou Meisinger, who recently ankled as general counsel at Disney; Bob Wynne, a former Sony exec; and Dick Troop, an entertainment law vet. Also on board are several other former colleagues of the former Hill Wynne Troop & Meisinger firm who have joined the Sheppard, Mullin unit.

The firm’s entertainment and media practice now has 20 attorneys.

When Jon Bauman isn’t performing with Bowzer’s Rock ‘N Roll Party, he’s busy trying to stop fraud in the music industry.

Bauman is probably best known as the lead singer of Sha Na Na — that 1970s group who looked like 1950s rockers.

Bauman stopped here Sunday and Monday to attend a fundraiser for state Sen. Bob Robbins, one of the early advocates of the Truth in Musical Advertising legislation that became law in Pennsylvania earlier this year.

The law calls for fines of up to $15,000 for people passing themselves off as original music acts without any original members.

Bauman took time on Monday at the Vocal Group Hall of Fame to talk about his efforts to make this law national.

The hall of fame and its founder, Tony Butala, have been the guiding forces behind the law.

Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Illinois, South Caroline and North Dakota have already passed Truth in Musical Advertising laws and four other states have it moving through their legislatures, he said.

Palm users in the US have started a consumer class-action lawsuit against the firm after it admitted overstating the colour display features of its new m130 handheld computer.

Last week the company formally apologised to customers after discovering that the m130 supports about 58,621 colour combinations, some 7,000 less than advertised.

According to Reuters, the suit filed in the California Superior Court accuses Palm of “unfair competition and fraudulent, unfair, deceptive and false advertising”.

Law firm Sheller, Ludwig & Badey filed the lawsuit on behalf of Yansu Ouyang of Castro Valley, Jonathan Lipner of Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, and any “similarly situated” m130 customers.

Palm said that it will “aggressively fight” the lawsuit as it was already working on a plan to compensate customers.

Monday, Jan. 24, Hot Links: Using the Web to Start Your Business. Seminar on the process of legal entity registration, federal and state tax registration, and the specifics for doing business in Fairfax County.

6 to 8 p.m., South Fairfax Small Business Development Center at the Community Business Partnership, 7001 Loisdale Rd., 2nd floor, Springfield. Sponsor: Community Business Partnership. No charge. Registration is required. Jesse Patton, 703-768-1440.

Tuesday, Jan. 25, Start Your Business. Seminar on the essential steps in starting a successful small business.

6 to 8:30 p.m., Eastern Loudoun Regional Library, 21030 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. Sponsor: Loudoun County Small Business Development Center. No charge. Registration is required. Contact: Cathy Campbell, 703-430-7222, sbdc@loudounsbdc.org. Event Web site: www.loudounsbdc.org.

Tuesday, Jan. 25, Playing by the Rules: Regulations That Affect Marketing. Learn the essentials of Federal Trade Commission advertising law, including ad meaning, express vs. implied claims, endorsements, demonstrations and disclosures.

6:30 to 8:30 p.m., TeqCorner Conference Center, 1616 Anderson Rd., 3rd floor, McLean. Sponsor: American Marketing Association-DC Chapter. Cost: Varies. Contact: Pat Lovenhart or Monica Robles, 301-320-7310, patlovenhart@verizon.netor mkrobles@verizon.net. Event Web site: www.amadc.org.

Wednesday, Jan. 26, Technology Special Interest Group Happy Hour. A networking event to discuss marketing in the high-technology industries.

6 to 8 p.m., Carpool, 208 Elden St., Herndon. Sponsor: American Marketing Association-DC Chapter. No charge. Registration is required. Contact: 703-683-4883. Event Web site: www.amadc.org.

Wednesday, Jan. 26, How to Protect (and Profit From) Your Intellectual Property. Learn to identify, protect and profit from your company’s major intellectual property assets, patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets.

7 to 9 p.m., Nath & Associates, 1030 15th St. NW, 6th floor. Sponsor: Yes Circle. Cost: $20 for members; $30 for nonmembers; $10 extra at the door. Contact: register@yescircle.org. Event Web site: www.yescircle.org.

Thursday, Jan. 27, Small Business Legal Clinic. Meet with attorneys at an advice and referral clinic to get information on compliance with tax laws, contracts and agreements, business formation, and more.

4 to 7 p.m., DC Small Business Development Center at Anacostia Economic Development Corporation, 2021 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. SE. Sponsor: DC Bar Pro Bono Program. No charge. Registration is required. Contact: 202-889-5090.

Thursday, Jan. 27, One Billion Tags Read: Exploring the Myths of RFID. Join a panel of radio-frequency-identification experts to discuss the implications of RFID in our professional and personal lives.

6 to 8:30 p.m., Hilton McLean Tysons Corner, 7920 Jones Branch Dr., McLean. Sponsor: Women in Technology. Cost: $35 for members; $55 for nonmembers; $10 extra at the door. Contact: Women in Technology, 703-683-4003.

Nike’s(NKE - Cramer’s Take - Stockpickr) shares were being pressured on three fronts Friday following an earnings miss, a legal setback and an analyst downgrade.

The Beaverton, Ore., sneaker giant reported an 18% rise in fourth-quarter earnings, helped in part by strong overseas sales, but the results missed Wall Street estimates by a penny.

Shares of the company were dropping 3.2% in Instinet premarket trading at $53.70.

Nike earned $246.2 million, or 92 cents a share, in the quarter ended May 31, compared with $208.4 million, or 77 cents a share, in the previous-year quarter. Revenue rose 11% to $3 billion.

The company said U.S. revenue increased 2% to $1.2 billion, but U.S. athletic footwear revenue was $797 million, down 3%. European revenue rose 20% and Asia Pacific revenue increased 22%, both helped by currency exchange rates.

Nike noted that worldwide athletic footwear and apparel futures orders scheduled for delivery between June and November 2003 total $4.9 billion, 4.4% higher than orders reported for the same period last year, and also helped by exchange rates. By region, U.S. orders fell 10%; Europe rose 17%; Asia Pacific increased 20%; and the Americas were up 4%, the company said.

Merrill Lynch analyst Virginia Genereux cut the company’s investment rating to neutral from buy Friday. The earnings shortfall and orders numbers were below her forecasts and at $56.90, she said, the shares aren’t cheap relative to peers.

Genreaux also said the relationship between Nike and Foot Locker(FL - Cramer’s Take - Stockpickr) doesn’t seem to be improving, as Foot Locker ordered at least 50% less merchandise from Nike in the quarter. Foot Locker said in December that it would no longer distribute Nike shoes.

Additionally, “Nike’s outlook calls for fiscal 2004 earnings growth to be back-half loaded.” But, the analyst said, “A lot can happen between now and then.”

Russia’s right to host the Champions League final next year is at risk after the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service ruled that an ad for Heineken during a match in Europe’s premier football tournament was illegal, Kommersant said Wednesday.

Beer advertisements in stadiums are legally banned and the service threatened to fine Heineken should it place any again after examining a game in Moscow, the newspaper said, citing Sergei Puzyrevsky, the service’s head of control over advertising law.

Yukos has won a rare court victory. It can now legally sell Cannabis Vodka. The oil giant and its billionaire owners, who are fighting multibillion-dollar tax claims, as well as tax and fraud charges, may rest a little easier after a Voronezh court threw out a lawsuit claiming they were promoting drug use by selling the vodka at one of their gas stations.

The case started when three drug agents confiscated a bottle of the Czech-made vodka from Gas Station No. 26 in Voronezh on April 2nd, said Prokhor Merkushov, spokesman for Voronezhnefteprodukt, the Yukos subsidiary that owns the station.

The Federal Anti-Drug Service then filed a complaint that Voronezhnefteprodukt had violated Article 6.13 of the Administrative Code, which forbids the promotion of drugs, and the law on advertising, which forbids the promotion of drinking and drugs.

It said the court could just read the label of a bottle to see the merits of the case. Cannabis Vodka is sold in a clear glass bottle with a green marijuana leaf. Its label reads, “Cannabis vodka. An alcoholic drink prepared from hemp seed extract. Try this wonderful drink, but don’t forget its extraordinary powers.”

The Central Voro-nezh Court ordered a psycholinguistic examination of the label and ruled Monday that the text promoted vodka sales rather than drug use. The court also found that Voronezhnefteprodukt was not in violation of the advertising law since it has not promoted the vodka in any way. Merkushov said Tuesday that his company has no plans to take the case further. He said, however, that he found it strange that the vodka, which is sold in stores across the country, was only confiscated from the one gas station. “Why was only Yukos mentioned in this case? This suggests that it was done for show,” Merkushov said. He said the vodka bottle has been returned. An anti-drug official, however, suggested that the case was not over. “They won today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?” said the official, who spoke on condition that his name not be printed. Cannabis Vodka is made by the Czech-based L’OR, which also produces a range of absinthes. Robert Gross, L’OR’s spokesman for Russia and English-speaking countries, said he was unaware of the Yukos case but not surprised by it.

He insisted that the vodka is absolutely safe and legal since it contains no delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main chemical ingredient in marijuana.

Rotor House, which has been distributing Cannabis Vodka in Russia for two years, said it has won several cases filed by the anti-drug service this year. Anti-drug officials took an interest three months ago when Rotor House starting selling the bottles in a gift box with shot glasses decorated with marijuana leaves, said a senior company official, who asked not to be identified.

On Wednesday Alaska DigiTel filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Alaska Communication Systems (ACS) for violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act and other laws that prohibit deceptive advertising. Alaska DigiTel is asking the FTC to investigate deceptive and unfair advertising by ACS, which includes violations of the law regarding unfair trade practices and false advertising. ACS and Alaska DigiTel are competitors in the provision of wireless communication services to residents in the State of Alaska.

On July 13th, ACS issued a press release followed by an advertising campaign utilizing the headline, “The results weren’t even close” comparing both “blocked” and “dropped” call rates of other statewide wireless communication providers. The comparison touted that ACS had fewer “blocked” and “dropped” calls overall. According to ACS, these results were derived from their own “drive-test” and not by an independent firm. The formal filing with the FTC cites, “The ACS ‘drive-test’ ads violate the truth in advertising law as developed by the Commission. They make misrepresentations about material facts … that are likely to mislead consumers.” The filing by Alaska DigiTel also cites “false advertising” in regards to the Lanham Act, “unjust and unreasonable practices” under the Communications Act of 1934, violations of the Commissioner’s Policy Statement on Deception, as well as multiple violations of Alaska state law. The formal filing concludes, “Because of these violations of law and policy, Alaska DigiTel asks the Commission to initiate an investigation; to seek such preliminary injunctive relief as may be necessary to prevent future injury to consumers; to seek to permanently enjoin ACS from further violations of the FTC Act and other applicable laws.”

“ACS’ so-called ‘comparative’ ads are unfair and deceptive,” said Jeff Roe, Chief Operating Officer of Alaska DigiTel. The ads imply the use of objective and verifiable testing techniques, but industry insiders know that “drive-test” data can be easily skewed by the choice of methodology used to collect the data. “Independent testers are readily available and are a regular part of doing business in our industry,” continued Roe, “Throwing out a lot of statistics clothed as facts does consumers a disservice as they evaluate their communications options.”

If an outside, unbiased third party had performed an objective test the results would have been significantly different. Based on both their own drive-test and switch data (which provides additional call quality measures) Alaska DigiTel’s measurement of “blocked” and “dropped” calls are substantially better than ACS’ so called “drive-test” results and indicated that the number of blocks and drops of each of ACS and Alaska DigiTel in Anchorage are approximately equal, with Alaska DigiTel performing better in some areas of Anchorage.

Alaska DigiTel is confident that results from an independent source would not provide ACS with the types of claims their current campaign is hinged upon. “Consumers deserve the truth, so we decided to take measures with the FTC to halt the spread of misinformation. ACS needs to know that our community will not stand for bogus advertising claims,” concluded Roe.

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has begun investigating mobile phone carrier Softbank Mobile Corp. over possible advertising law violations, a news report said Tuesday.

Softbank aggressively slashed its prices last week to undercut rivals, only to stop accepting new customers on Saturday and Sunday when its computer system couldn’t handle the barrage of new applications.

The rush of applications followed the arrival of number portability in Japan last week, a system that lets people keep the same numbers when they switch carriers.

The FTC is now investigating the content of Softbank’s advertising on suspicion that parts of it may violate advertising laws, Kyodo News reported.

Fair Trade Commission official Tatsuya Suzumura said he could not comment on individual cases.

Cobbetts’ Birmingham office has taken a partner from new neighbours Martineau Johnson.

Mauro Paiano will join Cobbetts in November as head of the contentious intellectual property (IP) team, moving just a few floors from Martineaus. The two firms recently took up separate leases in new offices at 1 Colmore Square in Birmingham.

Paiano, who brings an associate with him from Martineaus, specialises in advertising law. He will be Cobbetts’ fourth IP partner nationally.

The hires signal Cobbetts’ commitment to developing its IP practice, which operates within the commercial department.

All radio and television broadcasts, perhaps even foreign networks such as CNN and BBC News, will have to warn audiences when a commercial break starts and ends under a law that goes into effect Saturday.

In addition, nearly all advertising in newspapers and magazines must include the word “advertisement,” according to the new advertising law.