Martha Stewart Living and Macy’s Settle Dispute and Keep Partnership

On Thursday, Macy’s and Martha Stewart announced that they had settled the breach-of-contract case, saying the details were confidential and not material to either company. They said their partnership would continue, but declined to comment further.

Macy’s larger suit against J. C. Penney still remains. Macy’s said the settlement with Martha Stewart Living would not affect that case.

Macy’s and Martha Stewart Living joined forces in 2006 with an agreement to sell “Martha Stewart” branded products in Macy’s stores, including exclusive items like kitchenware and bedding. The partnership has done well over the years, accounting for $250 million in sales in 2012.

But Martha Stewart Living and J. C. Penney announced a deal in 2011 to sell home décor products out of Martha Stewart store-within-a-store locations at Penney’s stores. The move was part of a broader turnaround effort by J. C. Penney’s previous chief executive, Ron Johnson, who was fired last year as losses mounted at the retailer.

After the deal was announced, Macy’s sued them both, saying the deal violated the terms of its original contract with Martha Stewart Living. The retailer called for pulling certain items off Penney’s shelves and demanded compensation for loss of profits. Penney and Martha Stewart Living countered that their agreement fell into an exception carved out in the Macy’s contract.

Days before a judge was expected to rule on the Penney case, Penney and Martha Stewart Living backed down, revising their agreement to exclude kitchen, bed and bath products, items that the Macy’s suit said were exclusive. In effect, J. C. Penney gave up many core home décor products and was left with items like rugs and window treatments.

Theodore M. Grossman of the Jones Day law firm, the lead counsel for Macy’s in the case, said at the time that the new agreement “was a complete surrender.”

With the settlement, Martha Stewart Living puts to rest a costly and contentious case. In October, Martha Stewart Living reported a disappointing third quarter, partly because the diminished relationship with J. C. Penney had cut into revenue. J. C. Penney has shown some signs of improvement in recent months, although it continues to post losses.

Macy’s has been a standout. The company’s earnings per share increased 31 percent over the same period the year before, easily beating analysts’ expectations.

Parliament Hearing to Focus on BBC Severance Dispute

Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in 2012 and is now the president and chief executive officer of The New York Times, has challenged July testimony by Mr. Patten about how much the trust was told about a series of large severance payments to executives who left the corporation in an effort to reduce costs.

In a 25-page witness statement submitted to Parliament on Friday, Mr. Thompson has accused the trust, which represents the interests of ordinary Britons who pay an annual television fee that goes to the BBC, of misleading the committee and the National Audit Office.

In July, Mr. Patten expressed surprise at the details of important severance payments, which were larger than contractually mandated, according to the auditors, while Mr. Thompson insisted that the trust had been fully informed and raised no objections. In particular, Mr. Thompson’s deputy, Mark Byford, was given a full year’s salary in lieu of notice despite having worked an additional eight months when the deputy’s job was eliminated.

One of the documents Mr. Thompson has presented is a briefing memo prepared for Mr. Patten explaining the payments, which were approved before Mr. Patten became chairman of the trust. He said that Mr. Patten’s testimony in July was “fundamentally misleading about the extent of trust knowledge and involvement.”

In a statement, the trust called Mr. Thompson’s submission “a bizarre document,” said that “we completely disagree with Mark Thompson’s analysis,” and said that Mr. Patten and Anthony Fry, a trustee, had not misled Parliament. Mr. Patten had not had “a full and formal briefing on the exact terms of Mark Byford’s departure,” the trust said.

Mr. Patten has come under considerable criticism for the large severance given to Mr. Thompson’s successor, George Entwistle, who lasted only 54 days in the job. He resigned in November over a reporting scandal, but was given a full year’s salary in addition to a normal severance payment. The furor over that package has made the earlier payments more politically delicate.

Both Mr. Thompson and Mr. Patten will appear before the Public Accounts Committee on Monday.

After a Fee Dispute With Time Warner Cable, CBS Goes Dark for Three Million Viewers

CBS stations went black just after 5 p.m. Eastern time. Both sides then issued statements blaming the other for being unreasonable in the negotiations, which were extended from Monday.

The dispute centers on what are known as retransmission fees, which cable companies have increasingly been compelled to pay to broadcasters, despite vigorous protest. CBS’s president, Leslie Moonves, has been a leader in seeking retransmission fees for broadcasters.

The decision to black out the stations means that Time Warner Cable subscribers will not be able to watch CBS programming until a deal is reached. In the past, subscribers have reacted with anger at such suspensions, but generally because they have missed specific programs. In this case, the summer programming roster does not contain many highly popular shows that might drive a settlement. CBS’s biggest appeal this summer is from the show “Under the Dome,” which will not have a new episode until Monday.

But the network does have the P.G.A. golf championship coming in a week. CBS emphasized on Friday that this week’s P.G.A. event was being led by Tiger Woods, who always draws viewers. And CBS, which broadcasts two soap operas, is also likely to gain support from those viewers.

Further down the road is the N.F.L. season, which might be a driving factor in why Time Warner Cable acted now.

Richard Greenfield, a media analyst who follows the company for BTIG Research, said the cable company was in “a once-in-a-lifetime position” to fight this battle because at the moment it does not face the overwhelming leverage of N.F.L. games and the most popular prime-time shows.

In addition, two top series on the Showtime network, owned by CBS, “Dexter” (which is in its final season) and “Ray Donovan,” are now also off the air, even though customers pay a separate fee for them. Time Warner Cable said it would offer a rebate to Showtime subscribers, as well as access to other subscription channels like Starz.

Time Warner Cable has insisted that the fee increases that CBS is asking for are unreasonable; CBS has argued it provides far more value than many cable networks that require much higher fees. Some reports have said CBS is asking for an increase of about 100 percent, to $2 a subscriber, from $1.

A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said that the agency was disappointed that the companies had not reached an agreement. “We urge all parties involved to resolve this situation as soon as possible.”

Despite recriminations on Friday from both sides, the negotiations are expected to resume as soon as Monday. That does not mean a quick settlement is likely, however. Mr. Greenfield said he could foresee CBS’s being dark “six weeks, if not more.” An executive close to the CBS side of the talks predicted 10 to 14 days.

In the meantime, CBS is sending messages on the radio and through other outlets urging viewers to complain to Time Warner Cable. The cable company, for its part, was telling customers to buy an antenna or sign up for Aereo, the new service that offers broadcast signals, and was also urging its customers to watch the missing CBS shows through streaming Web sites.

But for customers with Time Warner Cable broadband on Friday, CBS.com was blocking the streaming of shows, instead posting messages.

In almost every previous showdown over retransmission fees, the cable company’s stand has crumbled in short order. Mr. Greenfield said this time could be different because Time Warner Cable could take steps like appealing to Congress and selling CBS’s channel position to another bidder.

CBS stressed that it had never been taken off the air in a retransmission dispute and that it had not stopped offering extensions to keep the talks going.

Maureen Huff, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable, said, “We’ve accepted numerous extensions at this point, but it’s become clear that no matter how much time we give them, they’re not willing to come to reasonable terms.”

Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 2, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated at one point which company suspended the service. It was Time Warner Cable, not CBS.

DealBook: Detroit Gap Reveals Industry Dispute on Pension Math

Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesMany in Detroit were alarmed recently when, seemingly out of nowhere, a $3.5 billion hole appeared in the city’s pension system.

Until mid-June, there was one ray of hope in Detroit’s gathering storm: For all the city’s problems, its pension fund was in pretty good shape. If the city went under, its thousands of retired clerks, police officers, bus drivers and other workers would still be safe.

Then came bad news. Seemingly out of nowhere, a $3.5 billion hole appeared in Detroit’s pension system, courtesy of calculations by a firm hired by the city’s emergency manager.

Retirees were shaken. Pension trustees said it must be a trick. The holders of some of Detroit’s bonds realized in shock that if the city filed for bankruptcy — as it finally did on Thursday — their claims would have even more competition for whatever small pot of money is available.

But Detroit’s pension revelation is nothing new to many people who run pension plans for a living, the math-and-statistics whizzes known as actuaries. For several years, little noticed in the rest of the world, their staid profession has been fighting over how to calculate the value, in today’s dollars, of pensions that will be paid in the future.

It may sound arcane, but the stakes for the country run into the trillions of dollars. Depending on which side ultimately wins the argument, every state, city, county and school district may find out that, like Detroit, it has promised more to its retirees than it ever intended or disclosed. That does not mean all those places will declare bankruptcy, but many have more than likely promised their workers more than they can reasonably expect to deliver.

The problem has nothing to do with the usual padding and pay-to-play scandals that can plague pension funds. Rather, it is the possibility that a fundamental error has for decades been ingrained into actuarial standards of practice so that certain calculations are always done incorrectly. Over time, this mistake, if that is what it is, has worked its way into generally accepted accounting principles, been overlooked by outside auditors and even affected state and municipal credit ratings, although the ratings firms have lately been trying to correct for it.

Since the 1990s, the error has been making pensions look cheaper than they truly are, so if a city really has gone beyond its means, no one can see it.

“When the taxpayers find out, they’re going to be absolutely furious,” said Jeremy Gold, an actuary and economist who for years has called on his profession to correct what he calls “the biases embedded in present actuarial principles.” In 2000, well before the current flurry of pension-related municipal bankruptcies, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on how and why conventional pension calculations run afoul of modern economic principles.

Mr. Gold made his prediction about taxpayer fury in an interview a number of years ago in which he also explained why he had chosen his topic. He said he hoped to help put a stop to the errors he saw his colleagues making before pension problems that were already starting to brew then boiled over and a furious public heaped blame, scorn and legal liability on the profession.

When a lender calculates the value of a mortgage, or a trader sets the price of a bond, each looks at the payments scheduled in the future and translates them into today’s dollars, using a commonplace calculation called discounting. By extension, it might seem that an actuary calculating a city’s pension obligations would look at the scheduled future payments to retirees and discount them to today’s dollars.

But that is not what happens. To calculate a city’s pension liabilities, an actuary instead projects all the contributions the city will probably have to make to the pension fund over time. Many assumptions go into this projection, including an assumption that returns on the investments made by the pension fund will cover most of the plan’s costs. The greater the average annual investment returns, the less the city will presumably have to contribute. Pension plan trustees set the rate of return, usually between 7 percent and 8 percent.

In addition, actuaries “smooth” the numbers, to keep big swings in the financial markets from making the pension contributions gyrate year to year. These methods, actuarial watchdogs say, build a strong bias into the numbers. Not only can they make unsustainable pension plans look fine, they say, but they distort the all-important instructions actuaries give their clients every year on how much money to set aside to pay all benefits in the future.

If the critics are right about that, it means even the cities that diligently follow their actuaries’ instructions, contributing the required amounts each year, are falling behind, and they don’t even know it.

These critics advocate discounting pension liabilities based on a low-risk rate of return, akin to one for a very safe bond.

In the years since his doctoral research, Mr. Gold and like-minded actuaries and economists have been presenting their ideas in professional forums and in scholarly papers crammed with equations and letters of the Greek alphabet. They have won converts, but so far no changes in the actuarial standards. Their theoretical arguments tend to fly over the head of the typical taxpayer.

Year after year there has been consistent resistance from the trustees of public pensions, the actuarial firms that advise them and the unions that represent public workers. The unions suspect hidden agendas, like cutting their benefits. The actuaries say they comply fully with all actuarial standards of practice and pronouncements of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. When state and local governments go looking for a new pension actuary, they sometimes post ads saying that candidates who favor new ways of calculating liabilities need not apply.

A few years ago, with the debate still raging and cities staggering through the recession, one top professional body, the Society of Actuaries, gathered expert opinion and realized that public pension plans had come to pose the single largest reputational risk to the profession. A Public Plans Reputational Risk Task Force was convened. It held some meetings, but last year, the matter was shifted to a new body, something called the Blue Ribbon Panel, which was composed not of actuaries but public policy figures from a number of disciplines. Panelists include Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor of New York; Bradley Belt, a former executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; and Robert North, the actuary who shepherds New York City’s five big public pension plans.

This project has drawn fire from a large number of public pension officials. They recently wrote the Society of Actuaries a joint letter, urging it to reconstitute the Blue Ribbon Panel by adding more people “who can provide insight” into the many benefits of the current method, and expressed great concern about switching to a new one that could cause confusion and volatility. Of possible interest to the bondholders and taxpayers of Detroit, they also said that as fiduciaries they were required to “put the interest of all plan participants and beneficiaries above their own interests or those of any third parties.”

Much of the theoretical argument for retaining current methods is based on the belief that states and cities, unlike companies, cannot go out of business. That means public pension systems have an infinite investment horizon and can pull out of down markets if given enough time.

As Detroit has shown, that time can run out.

Monica Davey contributed reporting.

DealBook: Detroit Gap Reveals Industry Dispute on Pension Math

Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesMany in Detroit were alarmed recently when, seemingly out of nowhere, a $3.5 billion hole appeared in the city’s pension system.

Until mid-June, there was one ray of hope in Detroit’s gathering storm: For all the city’s problems, its pension fund was in pretty good shape. If the city went under, its thousands of retired clerks, police officers, bus drivers and other workers would still be safe.

Then came bad news. Seemingly out of nowhere, a $3.5 billion hole appeared in Detroit’s pension system, courtesy of calculations by a firm hired by the city’s emergency manager.

Retirees were shaken. Pension trustees said it must be a trick. The holders of some of Detroit’s bonds realized in shock that if the city filed for bankruptcy — as it finally did on Thursday — their claims would have even more competition for whatever small pot of money is available.

But Detroit’s pension revelation is nothing new to many people who run pension plans for a living, the math-and-statistics whizzes known as actuaries. For several years, little noticed in the rest of the world, their staid profession has been fighting over how to calculate the value, in today’s dollars, of pensions that will be paid in the future.

It may sound arcane, but the stakes for the country run into the trillions of dollars. Depending on which side ultimately wins the argument, every state, city, county and school district may find out that, like Detroit, it has promised more to its retirees than it ever intended or disclosed. That does not mean all those places will declare bankruptcy, but many have more than likely promised their workers more than they can reasonably expect to deliver.

The problem has nothing to do with the usual padding and pay-to-play scandals that can plague pension funds. Rather, it is the possibility that a fundamental error has for decades been ingrained into actuarial standards of practice so that certain calculations are always done incorrectly. Over time, this mistake, if that is what it is, has worked its way into generally accepted accounting principles, been overlooked by outside auditors and even affected state and municipal credit ratings, although the ratings firms have lately been trying to correct for it.

Since the 1990s, the error has been making pensions look cheaper than they truly are, so if a city really has gone beyond its means, no one can see it.

“When the taxpayers find out, they’re going to be absolutely furious,” said Jeremy Gold, an actuary and economist who for years has called on his profession to correct what he calls “the biases embedded in present actuarial principles.” In 2000, well before the current flurry of pension-related municipal bankruptcies, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on how and why conventional pension calculations run afoul of modern economic principles.

Mr. Gold made his prediction about taxpayer fury in an interview a number of years ago in which he also explained why he had chosen his topic. He said he hoped to help put a stop to the errors he saw his colleagues making before pension problems that were already starting to brew then boiled over and a furious public heaped blame, scorn and legal liability on the profession.

When a lender calculates the value of a mortgage, or a trader sets the price of a bond, each looks at the payments scheduled in the future and translates them into today’s dollars, using a commonplace calculation called discounting. By extension, it might seem that an actuary calculating a city’s pension obligations would look at the scheduled future payments to retirees and discount them to today’s dollars.

But that is not what happens. To calculate a city’s pension liabilities, an actuary instead projects all the contributions the city will probably have to make to the pension fund over time. Many assumptions go into this projection, including an assumption that returns on the investments made by the pension fund will cover most of the plan’s costs. The greater the average annual investment returns, the less the city will presumably have to contribute. Pension plan trustees set the rate of return, usually between 7 percent and 8 percent.

In addition, actuaries “smooth” the numbers, to keep big swings in the financial markets from making the pension contributions gyrate year to year. These methods, actuarial watchdogs say, build a strong bias into the numbers. Not only can they make unsustainable pension plans look fine, they say, but they distort the all-important instructions actuaries give their clients every year on how much money to set aside to pay all benefits in the future.

If the critics are right about that, it means even the cities that diligently follow their actuaries’ instructions, contributing the required amounts each year, are falling behind, and they don’t even know it.

These critics advocate discounting pension liabilities based on a low-risk rate of return, akin to one for a very safe bond.

In the years since his doctoral research, Mr. Gold and like-minded actuaries and economists have been presenting their ideas in professional forums and in scholarly papers crammed with equations and letters of the Greek alphabet. They have won converts, but so far no changes in the actuarial standards. Their theoretical arguments tend to fly over the head of the typical taxpayer.

Year after year there has been consistent resistance from the trustees of public pensions, the actuarial firms that advise them and the unions that represent public workers. The unions suspect hidden agendas, like cutting their benefits. The actuaries say they comply fully with all actuarial standards of practice and pronouncements of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. When state and local governments go looking for a new pension actuary, they sometimes post ads saying that candidates who favor new ways of calculating liabilities need not apply.

A few years ago, with the debate still raging and cities staggering through the recession, one top professional body, the Society of Actuaries, gathered expert opinion and realized that public pension plans had come to pose the single largest reputational risk to the profession. A Public Plans Reputational Risk Task Force was convened. It held some meetings, but last year, the matter was shifted to a new body, something called the Blue Ribbon Panel, which was composed not of actuaries but public policy figures from a number of disciplines. Panelists include Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor of New York; Bradley Belt, a former executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; and Robert North, the actuary who shepherds New York City’s five big public pension plans.

This project has drawn fire from a large number of public pension officials. They recently wrote the Society of Actuaries a joint letter, urging it to reconstitute the Blue Ribbon Panel by adding more people “who can provide insight” into the many benefits of the current method, and expressed great concern about switching to a new one that could cause confusion and volatility. Of possible interest to the bondholders and taxpayers of Detroit, they also said that as fiduciaries they were required to “put the interest of all plan participants and beneficiaries above their own interests or those of any third parties.”

Much of the theoretical argument for retaining current methods is based on the belief that states and cities, unlike companies, cannot go out of business. That means public pension systems have an infinite investment horizon and can pull out of down markets if given enough time.

As Detroit has shown, that time can run out.

Monica Davey contributed reporting.

Second Thoughts on Safety of Avandia Stir a Dispute

Three years ago, in one of the more notable drug-safety scandals in recent history, the diabetes drug Avandia was all but banned from use in the United States after researchers found that thousands of people had heart problems after taking it. Today, it is a drug of last resort for people with diabetes who are so sick that a heart attack is worth the risk.

But now, in a highly unusual move, the Food and Drug Administration has decided to reopen the case on Avandia and will ask a panel of experts this week whether the agency must reconsider the restrictions on the drug.

That is just one of several options before the advisory committee, but lifting the limits would amount to a major policy reversal and could be a huge victory for the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline. Avandia was once a top-selling drug, reaching more than $3 billion in sales in 2006 before controversy flared. It could also help rewrite one of the most embarrassing chapters in the F.D.A.’s recent history.

But critics, like Dr. Steven Nissen, the well-known Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who was the first to sound a public alarm about the drug, say it is far too dangerous to use in diabetes treatment. He said an analysis of more than 50 studies linked Avandia to an elevated risk of heart attack; one study linked the drug to more than 47,000 cases of heart attack, stroke or heart failure from 1999 to 2009.

Dr. Nissen and others contend that the F.D.A.’s decision to revisit the drug is more about saving face than protecting patients. “The efforts to whitewash this entire affair is really an unacceptable misuse of their regulatory role,” Dr. Nissen said. He added that he would be “horrified” if the panel were to recommend that the restrictions be removed. “The evidence against this drug is overwhelming,” he said.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the F.D.A.’s top drug official, said the two-day meeting that begins on Wednesday was convened to weigh a review she requested in 2010 of an earlier clinical trial that Glaxo itself had conducted. Past findings were riddled with questions, she said, and the agency has an obligation to try to answer them.

“I made the decision last time about Avandia, and it’s not that it was an open-and-shut case,” she said in a phone interview. “What we’re trying to do here is resolve that uncertainty as much as we can with all the available data.”

The F.D.A. typically follows the recommendations of its advisory panels. While experts said widening access to the drug would be unlikely, many found it puzzling that it was even under consideration. The process and its outcome are likely to be among the most closely watched drug-safety cases in recent years.

Avandia’s troubles began in 2007, eight years after it was approved by the F.D.A., when Dr. Nissen published evidence showing that the drug raised the risk of heart attack by more than 40 percent. A Senate inquiry ensued, and the episode exposed what many said were serious gaps in the agency’s oversight of prescription drugs. It has reshaped the regulatory landscape for diabetes drugs at a time when the number of people with the disease is exploding: companies are now required to show that new drugs do not hurt the heart.

An estimated 26 million Americans have diabetes, a difficult disease to treat that often requires patients to try a variety of drugs. Spending on diabetes medications totaled $22 billion in 2012, according to IMS Health. The drug Januvia and a related drug, Janumet, both made by Merck, were the best-selling oral diabetes drugs in 2012, with combined global sales of $5.7 billion.

In 2010, European regulators removed Avandia from the market, and its use was severely restricted in the United States. That year, the F.D.A. ordered an outside review of Glaxo’s clinical trial, which had lasted six years and whose results were published in 2009.

It is that review, conducted by researchers at Duke University, that experts are being asked to consider this week. According to a preliminary summary posted on Glaxo’s Web site, the review found previously unreported cases of heart complications and deaths, but not enough to change the Glaxo trial’s conclusions that Avandia did not significantly raise the risk of cardiovascular harm. However, some outside experts have said that the Glaxo trial was seriously flawed. Some also question the independence of the Duke review, which was paid for by Glaxo.

Barnes & Noble-Simon & Schuster Dispute Said to Hurt Sales

Industry executives, as well as authors of recently published Simon & Schuster books and their agents, say that Barnes & Noble has reduced book orders greatly, to almost nothing in the case of some lesser-known writers. They contend that the move is damaging their sales. Authors say the retail chain has taken other steps, like not giving them display space or allowing book tour appearances in its stores.

Simon Lipskar, the president of Writers House, a literary agency in New York, said, “Without pointing fingers, authors are being hurt by this, and I think it is despicable.”

The conflict, which is being closely watched by other publishers, underscores the pressure on the publishing industry and Barnes & Noble as they try to compete with online retailers like Amazon. This is the first time that Barnes & Noble has used the sales of books as a negotiating tool, industry executives say. Amazon, which is known as an aggressive negotiator, has removed online “buy” buttons from books during negotiations before, most famously with Macmillan in January 2010.

The dispute centers on the financial arrangement between Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster. While neither side will specify exactly what new terms Barnes & Noble is seeking, a senior executive familiar with the negotiations said that the bookseller wanted to pay less for books and receive more money for giving titles prominent display in its stores. Such display spots are coveted because they are thought to be critical in helping customers discover new books.

Those familiar with the disagreement — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential — say Barnes & Noble believes that because its physical display space is so important to publishers, and because it is the last major retail chain remaining, publishers should be doing more to support it. Barnes & Noble has told Simon & Schuster, a senior executive said, that at least one other publisher has accepted these new terms.

Simon & Schuster has argued that while it wants to support the retail chain, it cannot afford the terms Barnes & Noble is demanding. The publisher’s chief executive, Carolyn Reidy, would not give specific details, but said the two sides were at odds over many issues, including both physical and digital distribution.

“In this new world, it is just getting more complicated,” she said in a phone interview. “There are more factors involved. They get more fraught. Terms have to work for both sides, and obviously we have not agreed yet.”

While it was clear that an accord  was not imminent, Ms. Reidy tried to put the best face on the situation. “We expect ultimately there will be an agreement,” she said.

Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, said: “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on relationships with individual publishers. However, we do support publishers who support our digital and retail book businesses.”

Barnes & Noble first asked for new terms from Simon & Schuster last summer, but the negotiations became more serious in January when the bookseller started limiting orders as part of its strategy. The development was reported in late January in Publishers Weekly, and on Friday The Wall Street Journal’s Web site reported further on the standoff.

Barnes & Noble would not confirm that it had reduced Simon & Schuster books as leverage. But Simon & Schuster editors, as well as agents and writers who work with them, are apoplectic on the subject, since Barnes & Noble accounts for about 20 percent of consumer book spending and is a main conduit for publicizing new releases.

Laura Gross, the literary agent for the best-selling author Jodi Picoult, said the dispute had certainly hurt sales of her client’s latest book, “The Storyteller.” Barnes & Noble has “taken limited orders, limited placement, and did not do the normal outreach to their customers online, which really hurt,” Ms. Gross said.

Ms. Gross said that through public speaking engagements, Ms. Picoult has been able to rally sales (her book is now No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list), but, she added, “This must be hitting smaller authors hard.”

Sovereign Bank, Land Developer Reach Accord in Bankruptcy Discovery Dispute

On the eve of a hearing to determine monetary sanctions, Sovereign Bank settled the underlying discovery-abuse claims with property developer 400 Walnut Associates, which is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

NFL Tries to Frame Concussion Litigation As Labor Dispute

The multidistrict litigation brought by thousands of current and former football players who have suffered from the effects of repeated concussions should be dismissed because the responsibility for players' health rested with the individual teams, not the league, the National Football League argued in its motion to dismiss.