Return press photos, Rogers' firm ordered
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Alice Gray on Friday ordered a business of John Rogers to return photo archives to the Los Angeles Daily News and five other California newspapers.
The newspapers sued Rogers of North Little Rock and JMFR LLC, a Rogers-owned business, on June 22, claiming that he agreed in 2014 to digitize the newspapers' photo archives but instead used some of the photos to repay multimillion-dollar debts.
Besides the Daily News, the other California newspapers are the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Whittier Daily News, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the Redlands Daily Facts and the Daily Breeze.
The Daily News has about 15 million photos, negatives and clip files. The Daily News said in the lawsuit it did not know the location of the archives.
JMFR has been served with a summons and refused to respond to it, Gray said in her order.
-- David Smith
$2.15M for 400 fired by Celadon upheld
Celadon Trucking Services Inc. must pay $2.15 million in damages to over 400 former Continental Express Inc. employees, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.
The terminated employees originally filed the class-action lawsuit in Little Rock in 2009, and Celadon appealed a 2015 ruling in favor of the employees.
The lawsuit alleged that Celadon, an Indianapolis-based company, violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by not providing 60 days' notice before the layoff.
"We thought we were in the right from the very beginning, and it turns out we were. Our clients deserve to be compensated," said John Myers, one of the attorneys representing the terminated employees.
Celadon and its lawyers had no comment on whether they would appeal again.
-- Emma N. Hurt
State index up 8.98, capping robust week
The Arkansas Index, a price-weighted index that tracks the largest public companies based in the state, rose 8.98 to 334.32 Friday.
All but two of the 18 stocks in the index gained ground for the week.
USA Truck had the best week, rising 9.5 percent. Murphy Oil fell the most, off 6.1 percent for the week.
Total volume for the index was 21.4 million shares.
The index was developed by Bloomberg News and the Democrat-Gazette with a base value of 100 as of Dec. 30, 1997.
Business on 07/09/2016