Governor Rick Perry has appointed a new district attorney in Kaufman County, Texas, to fill the post left vacant by the slaying of Mike McLelland, who was killed on March 30 along with his wife Cynthia inside their home. Erleigh Norville Wiley, a judge in Kaufman County, previously was a supervising attorney at the Dallas County district attorney’s office. The Texas state Senate will consider her nomination on April 17.
BP PAYOUTS TO CONTINUE
A federal judge has refused BP PLC’s request to halt payments to businesses allegedly claiming "fictitious losses" from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans issued a final judgment against two BP subsidiaries on April 8 and the next day ordered all parties to adhere to the method he’d established on March 5 for calculating damages under the $7.8 billion settlement reached last year with plaintiffs asserting economic damages from the 2010 spill. BP entities had moved for a preliminary injunction to halt payments to businesses claiming what it insisted amounted to speculative losses.
