Mixed business: Two Hollywood stars will spend as much as two weeks in a New Orleans courtroom, beginning today, on opposing sides of a real-life legal drama. Jury selection was scheduled to begin today for Stephen Baldwin’s federal lawsuit against fellow actor Kevin Costner over their investments in a device BP used in trying to clean up the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Both are expected to testify. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled last month that every litigant must be in court every day “because of the seriousness of the claims and issues raised by the parties” and in case of midtrial settlement talks. The federal lawsuit claims Costner and a business partner duped Baldwin and a friend out of their shares of an $18 million deal for BP to buy oil-separating centrifuges. Read the full story from The Associated Press here.
Charged up: The cost of air travel has rebounded to pre-recession levels, and now The Los Angeles Times reports it looks like the prices of hotel rooms for business travelers are on their way to those heights. Hotel rates for business travelers in North America surged 9.3% in April, coming within 3 percentage points of the peak pre-recession rates in fall 2008, according to Pegasus Solutions, a technology company for the hotel industry. For leisure travelers, rates increased 7.3% in April but remained below pre-recession peaks by double-digit percentage points, the company says. Get more details from the full story here.
What a long, strange trip it’s been: Lawmakers enter their last day of the three-month legislative session today with two big-money matters still in dispute. Remaining for final decisions are a $3.4 billion elementary and secondary education funding formula and a multiyear state construction budget topping $4 billion. Those will come up for a final vote by 6 p.m., when the regular legislative session must end. The House gave final passage Sunday to most of the outstanding budget bills, including a $25.6 billion operating budget for the next fiscal year and legislation to tap into the state’s “rainy day fund” to offset a current-year deficit of more than $200 million.
