Norfolk Southern Files Motion to Dismiss Lawsuit Over Ohio Train Derailment

Five months after the disastrous Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the rail giant is looking to dismiss a mass class action lawsuit it faces.

Norfolk Southern is seeking to shut down the case, which is in fact a consolidation of over 30 separate lawsuits filed against the railroad company.

“The first car to derail did not belong to Norfolk Southern,” the company’s legal team claimed in its motion to dismiss the slate of lawsuits, filed Friday evening. “Nor did Norfolk Southern construct the wheel bearing that allegedly ‘overheated’ and ‘caused the train to derail.’”

“And Norfolk Southern,” the memo continued, “as a common carrier, was required by federal law to transport vinyl chloride, a hazardous chemical with numerous industrial uses.”

In the motion, Norfolk Southern’s lawyers labored to argue that the plaintiffs’ array of claims fell short. “Norfolk Southern is committed to making things right,” the memo read, listing off efforts the company says it has pursued to assist the community: “millions of dollars” in financial aid, committing to create a health care fund, a property fund for homeowners who sell their homes, and a water-testing fund.

“Plaintiffs’ claims are based on conduct that Norfolk Southern allegedly undertook in this heavily regulated environment,” the company’s legal team continued, arguing that the claims against the company “would unreasonably burden railroad transportation” in general. In other words, how could Norfolk Southern be responsible when regulation of the industry already exists?

The finger-pointing legal argument is risible when you recall that Norfolk Southern has funneled some $100 million into politics since 1990, buying deregulation (yes, the same regulatory atmosphere the company now points to as giving it immunity). The company was a big proponent of rolling back an Obama-era rule that could have required trains, like the one that derailed in Ohio, to use updated electronic brakes instead of Civil War–era ones, for example.

East Palestine residents to this day report a range of troubling symptoms, including rashes, bloody stools, and vomiting bile. Some also say that Norfolk Southern is denying relocation assistance claims or reimbursements for expenses like chemical exposure tests—leaving people to pay out of pocket for it all. After the derailment, the company also reportedly left dozens of maintenance workers out to dry, directing them to clean up the crash site without giving them personal protective equipment.

The motion to dismiss the lawsuit comes after the Supreme Court followed the lead of conservative members of Congress in weakening the Clean Water Act, opening up even further avenues for corporations to try evading legal responsibility for their own disastrous actions.

In the meantime, Norfolk Southern also faces a since-consolidated lawsuit brought by both the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state of Ohio.

“No community should have to go through what East Palestine residents have faced,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in March upon the agency’s lawsuit filing. “With today’s action, we are once more delivering on our commitment to ensure Norfolk Southern cleans up the mess they made and pays for the damage they have inflicted as we work to ensure this community can feel safe at home again.”

A Utah school district has banned the Bible for younger students after someone complained that it contained too much sexual content—in an interesting twist on the book bans sweeping the country.

Utah passed a controversial law last year intended to remove “sensitive material” from school libraries and classrooms. The law defines “sensitive material” as subjects that are pornographic or indecent. Anyone can request that a book be reviewed by a committee for propriety. School librarians and teachers saw a huge spike in review requests after the law was passed, mainly for books that dealt with racial justice, gender ideology, and LGBTQ representation.

In December, someone filed a review request with Davis School District officials for the Bible. The challenge specifically mentioned Utah Parents United, a conservative parents rights group that backed the book ban law. The person’s name was redacted when the request was shared with the local news outlet KSL.

“I thank the Utah Legislature and Utah Parents United for making this bad faith process so much easier and way more efficient. Now we can all ban books and you don’t even need to read them or be accurate about it. Heck, you don’t even need to see the book!” the person said in the request, highlighting the ridiculous nature of book bans.

The person referred to the Bible as “one of the most sex-ridden books around” and pointed out the text mentions incest, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, and rape. They included a list of examples.

“You’ll no doubt find that the Bible … has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition. Get this PORN out of our schools!”

Davis School District officials decided last week to remove the Bible from elementary and middle school libraries. It would still be available in high school libraries “based on age appropriateness due to vulgarity or violence,” the school district communications director Christopher Williams told KSL.

Someone filed an appeal to the decision on Wednesday, asking that the Bible be made available to all age groups. State Representative Ken Ivory said in March that the challenge to the Bible was “a backhanded slap to parents that are simply trying to keep a healthy learning environment for all students in the schools.”

The decision about the Bible comes after reports of Florida schools banning a host of materials that all deal with racial justice, including the movie Ruby Bridges, the graphic novel Little Rock Nine, and The Hill We Climb, the poem read at Joe Biden’s inauguration.

As the person who challenged the Bible highlighted, the solution isn’t to unilaterally ban books. The solution is to learn from them so we can do better.

In Ohio, there are no background checks required for handgun purchases, people can carry guns without concealed-carry permits, guns don’t have to be securely stored away from children, and domestic abusers are allowed to keep carrying their weapons—even when facing restraining orders. But that’s not enough for the state’s Republican lawmakers, who now want to allow people to buy guns tax-free.

House Bill 189, introduced by state Representative Al Cutrona, would remove sales taxes from guns and ammunition and give gun and ammunition manufacturers tax incentives.

The tax-free purchases would give gun buyers even more privileged status than they already have in a country where guns come before children’s lives. “Rights guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights should not be taxed,” Cutrona said on the bill, justifying the notion of people paying their fair share of taxes on everything but machines meant explicitly for killing.

Internalizing the flimsy logic too: “Life” and “liberty” are also invoked in the Bill of Rights; both are taxed every day by the number of mass shootings in this country—268 so far this year, four of which were in Ohio in the last week alone. So too are they taxed by virtue of our environments being poisoned by fossil fuels or people’s liberties being infringed through mass incarceration and the police state. One wonders if Cutrona would use his strained logic there as well.

On gun manufacturer incentives, the bill explicitly aims to offset the federal excise taxes these companies (like many other industries) are subject to. In other words, Ohio Republicans want to fill the pockets of massive corporations that should be facing further, not less, regulation. Shame, given Ohio’s East Palestine has been in the front seat of witnessing the consequences of such a dynamic.

The push by Ohio Republicans follows a shocking exhibition of gun violence across the country, on both small and large scales. Kids have been shot for playing hide and seek or accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell; on a larger scale, mass shootings have left cities like Nashville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky, in shock. Nevertheless, Republicans persist in their acceptance, and embrace, of such senseless, preventable death.

Former President Donald Trump may still have a classified document, one that details a potential Pentagon plan for attacking Iran.

Federal prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, obtained an audio recording of a meeting held in July 2021, during which the former president essentially admitted that he knows he can’t declassify documents at will. He brags explicitly about having kept a classified Pentagon plan to potentially attack Iran, and the sound of rustling papers can be overheard, as if Trump were waving that document around.

That meeting took place six months before Trump’s legal team sent 15 boxes of records and classified documents back to the National Archives, and more than a year before the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, seizing more than 100 documents.

But now, no one can find the Iran document.

Trump’s attorneys handed over material related to the document in mid-March, in response to another federal subpoena, CNN reported Friday, citing anonymous sources. But the legal team was unable to find the actual document in question.

Prosecutors were already skeptical that Trump had returned all of the classified documents he took. The special counsel’s team even reportedly asked a judge last year to hold Trump in contempt until he handed over all documents, but the judge declined. Trump’s team instead hired two outside people to search his properties again.

It is entirely unclear where the Iran document is, or if it was already returned to the government in one of the many boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago. Considering it lays out a plan to attack a foreign nation, it sounds like a pretty important document. Maybe someone should have kept closer tabs on its whereabouts.

Trump has been getting a lot of heat in recent weeks, as new reports continue to surface that he knew that he wasn’t supposed to keep classified documents and that he couldn’t classify them at will. But when asked about the recording during a Fox News town hall on Thursday, Trump denied all wrongdoing.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said. “All I know is this: Everything I did was right.”

Elon Musk wants to criminalize gender-affirming care, and he supports imprisoning any therapists and medical professionals involved.

The Twitter CEO on Friday morning promoted a transphobic documentary produced by the petulant, vicious, and dull extremist commentator Matt Walsh.

“Every parent should watch this,” said Musk, the global elite whose own daughter disowned him.

But that wasn’t enough. Amid his  bowing down to the far-right mob, which he so desperately wants to earn the approval of, Musk called gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18 “a major problem” that he will be “actively lobbying to criminalize.”

Far-right “thinker” Jordan Peterson hopped on to Musk’s tweet, adding his vision for what that regime would look like: “Prison. Long term. Without parole. No mercy,” he said, adding that he’d subject the therapists who support this medical care to such policing.

“Absolutely,” Musk responded.

This is how the CEO of Tesla, which used to celebrate Pride Month, is beginning it this time. “Musk’s words are not an empty threat, as anti-trans bills, many criminalizing medical professionals, are sweeping across the nation in state legislatures everywhere.”

Reminder once again that the richest man in the world is not taking on the rich and powerful. He is not only doing the bidding of power-hungry governments but welcoming and promoting content that punches down on some of the most marginalized among us.