The City should go ahead and sign the Memorandum of Understanding. Most MOUs are worded so that they are not binding contracts.

I truly hope the Council suckers these idiots who run the Culinary Union, Weiss and Taylor, into signing an unenforceable, meaningless document.

Station employees, start practicing the new company song: "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles".

One news article this afternoon mentioned that one of the defendants lived near this police officer. My gut instinct tells me that there might have been some prior altercation in the neighborhood, and that this policeman was targeted.

The other distinct possibility is that this was a gang initiation hit, where the decedent was the target of a gang member's ire, and two young gang banger wannabes, wanting to come up in the ranks of the gang, had to kill at the direction of their gang's leader.

My bet is that the stoned looking 20 year old was the driver, instigating the younger ones to do the shooting.

God bless and my sympathies to the whole Metro family including Officer Nettleton's wife, parents and children.

I am happy that the FBI is involved in this issue. Under the famous "honest services law" the FBI can request prosecution, in Federal Court, for all sorts of chicanery. All of our esteemed ex-County Commissioners who did time in the Federal slam were prosecuted under that law. It's the same law being used to prosecute former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for trying to gain a benefit for himself in exercising his power to appoint someone to President Obama's seat in the Senate.

As a result, this case seems pretty elementary to me. You check into UMC expecting to receive medical care, and among the mountain of papers they make you sign is their disclosure of how they comply with the Federal medical privacy law. As a result, someone who uses UMC's medical records, obtained in violation of that law, commits an honest services law. Thus, it is a Federal crime, even if violation of the medical privacy law isn't a crime in and of itself.

I wonder how far this prosecution can go, starting with the person(s) who pull the information off the UMC computer, to the first people who buy it, to the people the information is sold to, to the lawyers who magically get cases for plaintiffs who don't know these lawyers from Adam. Is that the sound of law firm shredders I hear running tonight?

The computer nerds in my family think that it is possible for someone to have hacked into UMC's computer system, to get this information, without their being employed by UMC. This is a great case for the FBI to handle, because it's cyber crime involving the use of interstate commerce tools, i.e. the telephone companies.

Somehow, I have a sense that this "discovery" ties into the concept of the "Medical Mafia" cases which the U.S. Attorney is already prosecuting.

Very cool.

Now, if the investigation of Kathy Silver's conduct could include the quesion of why UMC patient rooms are not cleaned every day, that would be good too. I suspect there is a Federal law or hospital regulation requiring that too. That seems like another "honest services" crime. While investigations are being made about Kathy Silver's management style, someone should also be looking at the nosocomial infection rate.

The mechanics lien claimants/contractors are 100% correct in their arguments, based on the express text of Bankruptcy Code Section 363.

The real question will be whether the Bankruptcy Courts in Miami are going to follow the law, or follow the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York and Second Circuit's opinion in the Chrysler bankruptcy case, which says, in interest, if the debtor business operation is a total dog, all of the lien claimants will be ignored and the business will be sold for what it is really worth...next to nothing. Mind you that the bankruptcy court case precedent for that position was pretty stakey, in contrast with the express text of Section 363, but when you're the Obama Administration bailing out Chrysler, you tend to get your way, the law be damned.

So, the practical question will be whether the Miami bankruptcy court judge will follow the Chrysler Opinion or the express text of the law passed by Congress.

Stay tuned.

Obviously, most of this "gang problem" has migrated from Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.

More than 10 years ago, the Los Angeles City Attorney started getting "anti-gang injunctions" against known gang members doing just about anything but staying in their own homes. I know it sounds very unconstitutional, but so far the California and Federal courts have upheld them.

Piling on to the "anti-gang injunctions" has been criminal code legislation allowing District Attorneys to send gang members away to jail, for a very long, long time, for committing a crime while subject to such an injunction. Here, it seems like gang members get off scott free until they actually kill someone.

It's time for Metro and out other local police departments to take a serious look at whether this sort of anti-gang injunction program, combined with the related send-them-to-jail-before-they-kill laws would be of use in protecting both members of law enforcement and the general public.

Either that or pass a Texas style "you can shoot them if they come on your property" law.

Either way, the tools available to Clark County law enforcement are not working when you have teenaged gang members roaming around with guns, and little if any means of preventing them from killing people.

Remember that innocent boy, a teacher's son, who was shot to death by 2 gang affiliates, while walking home from high school in Summerlin? Clearly these problems are not confined to "North Las Vegas".

How nice for the creditors of Lehman Brothers and Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy estate. They are suing Barclays for fraud and a bunch of other nasty deeds. Now if the Lehman crew succeeds in getting a judgment against Barclays, there will be more Barclays tangible assets in the U.S.A. to execute against.

I haven't read the documents, but this looks like a Hail Mary pass by Deutsche Bank and Station Casinos to try to convince the Bankruptcy Court judge not to appoint an Examiner to look into the company's alleged self-dealing.

The fact that this is only a rent reduction for 3 months makes it seem the parties to the deal want to, in effect, rescind it, if their effort to prevent the appointment of an Examiner fails.

So I look forward to the news of whether the Bankruptcy Judge did his statutory duty and appointed his Examiner, or whether, like all other things in the Banana Republic of Nevada, even a Federal Bankruptcy Court Judge can be "persuaded" despite the express text of Federal law.

Steve Green, please make sure to phone the unsecured creditors lawyers and find out what happened in court today. Win or lose, they will give you the straight story.

Comment Part 3:

This problem of aggressive client solicitation is not unique to Nevada. California law also absolutely bars the use of cappers and runners. However, in California, there have been so many train crashes, with horrific deaths and injuries, that the State Bar of California has had to adopt special rules regulating lawyer conduct in connection with train and airplane crashes. Apparently, during the most recent, horrific Chatsworth crash, lawyers rushed to the scene and were directly soliciting clients while they were waiting for transport to hospitals.

Yes, I remember laying on a stretcher, on the dirt, after being pulled out of my crashed train, waiting for my turn to be put into an ambulance. That was many years ago. The only person keeping me company while I lay there, in horrific pain, was a Capper or Runner, who entertained me by telling me stories about all of the hot shot trial lawyers he represented. When I reminded him that Cappers and Runners were operating illegally in California, he just laughed.

No, I didn't return his kindness by hiring one of his lawyer clients. I hired my own law firm to represent me, because I knew I could control the quality of the lawyering. That's the other problem seriously injured laymen and their families have. They simply don't have any way to tell if their lawyer is doing a good job for them, or not.

The fact that a lawyer can afford lots of television advertising does not tell an injured person, or his family, anything other than the fact that the lawyer's means of manipulating his clients and his cases produces enough revenue to pay for television ads.

There is a website called superlawyers.com, where there is a "peer review" and only hot shots who can get the job done for their client are included. I just wish there was more publicity about that website, because it does separate the wheat from the chaff in personal injury plaintiff's lawyers.

I don't know where this investigation of UMC will go, but realistically unless Kathy Silver has been getting kick backs to look the other way, the situation is not her fault, and she shouldn't be fired for it.

Instead, perhaps she should be fired for NOT forcing UMC employees to tell uninsured patients that Nevada law requires that hospitals give cash patients at least a 30% discount. She never told me that, when I wrote her a letter about bogus billing by UMC Quick Care doctors. Instead, she just wrote me back and offered a 50% discount to shut me up.

Comment Part 2:

I had heard of Cappers and Runners in my Ethics class in law school, but never had to deal with one until I was in practice for about 20 years.

A friend was driving her Ford Explorer with "Famous brand" tires on the 15 Freeway, when the tires blew out, and the car rolled. The friend was airlifted to a hospital in San Bernardino, and her nearly dead husband and nearly dead mother were airlifted to UMC, but they they died on the way. Nevertheless, the family's phone number went into circulation in Las Vegas. Less than 24 hours after the accident, the Nevada Cappers and Runners were calling my friend's house in La Crescenta, and family members were being accosted by Cappers and Runners at the hospital in San Bernardino.

There was literally nothing which could be done to keep the Cappers and Runners from calling the family's home, and nothing to keep them away from the family at the hospital. My job in the fracas was to look at the "resumes" handed out by the Cappers and Runners, to see if the lawyers they were proposing were legitimate. Frankly, none of the lawyers presented to my friend's family were first rank plaintiff's personal injury lawyers.

I contacted the State Bar of California, and made complaints about the Cappers and Runners (and their lawyer clients) who were haranguing the family at the hospital in San Bernardino. That Bar Association was very concerned, and wanted the information.

I also contacted the Nevada Bar with this same information, about the Cappers and Runners calling the family from Nevada, shilling for Nevada personal injury lawyers. I was told that there is no law or Bar Association Conduct Rule in Nevada which prohibited the Cappers and Runners from contacting family members about patients who died in Nevada, as long as it wasn't lawyers directly doing the contacting.

Ultimately the Cappers and Runners from Nevada stopped calling, because my friend's daughter finally told them the family had hired an attorney.

The problem with the use of Cappers and Runners is that very often families and patients with very good money claims do not end up hiring the most successful personal injury plaintiff's lawyers, thereby increasing the families and the victims chances of receiving fair compensation for their injuries. Instead people with good claims often end up with very mediocre lawyers, thanks to Cappera and Runners. I personally believe one reason that local Bar Associations do not outlaw this practice is because the sentiment is "Second rate or inexperienced lawyers have to get clients somewhere."