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Google in Fight Over Content That Appears in Search Results

Mr. Mosley was the victim of a spectacular 2008 sting by News of the World — Rupert Murdoch’s disgraced, and now defunct, tabloid weekly — which posted photos and video of him participating in a sadomasochistic sex party that the paper described as “a sick Nazi orgy with hookers.”

The Nazi claim, in particular, was a bitter one; the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, a World War II-era British fascist, Mr. Mosley has long bristled at the suggestion of Nazi sympathies. He sued News of the World in a London court for breach of privacy and was awarded £60,000, or about $94,000, in damages.

The High Court ruled that there was “no evidence” that the sex party had been “intended to be an enactment of Nazi behavior or adoption of any of its attitudes.” It also found that there had been “no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording.”

The court ordered News of the World to remove the material in question from the Web, naturally, and there the story might have ended. Except, of course, that the photos and video continue to live on the Internet, via social media and on Web sites maintained by individuals. Mr. Mosley has been fighting ever since to make them disappear.

And that is where Google comes in: Mr. Mosley asked a Paris court during the past week to order the Internet giant to create an algorithm to filter all such photos from its service and search engine, now and forever. His lawyer told the court, the Tribunal de Grande Instance, that if Google France refused to remove the offending images it should face fines.

The French court said it would issue a ruling on Oct. 21. Mr. Mosley has filed a similar case in Hamburg that is to be heard this month.

Google strongly disputes any responsibility.

“We sympathize with Mr. Mosley’s situation,” Google said in a statement, noting that it had always honored his requests to remove obviously incriminating links. “But his proposal to filter the Web would censor legitimate speech, restrict access to information, and stifle innovation.”

The company noted that there was already a solution to the problem: “Going after the actual publishers of the material, and working with Google through our existing and effective removals process.”

Google says that it has already taken down “hundreds of pages” with images that obviously infringe on the court ruling when it is requested to do so, but that there are many cases in which it is not immediately clear whether the content is affected by the ruling, and that in those cases a judge or other competent official should make the decision.

It cites French and E.U. law, which do not require search engines to comb the Web for unlawful content, and it argues that, in any case, many of the hits the photos receive are driven by communications among individuals, so blocking them on search would not end the problem.

A concurrent case, at the European level, would appear to back Google. The European Court of Justice, which is based in Luxembourg, is currently examining a Spanish man’s claim of a “right to be forgotten” on the Web — something Silicon Valley companies oppose.

In a sign that the case might be swinging the technology giants’ way, Niilo Jaaskinen, the Finnish lawyer who serves as advocate general of the court, issued an opinion in June that search engines were not responsible “for personal data appearing on Web pages they process.”

E.U. data protection law “does not entitle a person to restrict or terminate dissemination of personal data that he considers to be harmful or contrary to his interests,” Mr. Jaaskinen wrote. Though the court is not bound by the advocate general’s opinion, it often follows his recommendations. It has yet to decide the matter.

Why would Mr. Mosley seek action against an American company in a French court for actions committed in Britain by a now-defunct English newspaper? It might have to do with France’s strict privacy laws, which make it a criminal offense to record another person — image or sound — in a private space without the person’s consent.

His lawyer, Clara S. Zerbib, said that it was because a Paris court had ruled in 2011 that the recording of the News of the World pictures, without Mr. Mosley’s knowledge in a private place, had been illegal and that a judge might thus find that distributing such pictures on the Internet was also illegal. She noted that Mr. Mosley also worked in France as president of the International Automobile Federation, the Paris-based governing body of Formula One racing, and was concerned about his reputation there.

Mr. Mosley, in a telephone interview, said that Google had been helpful, if not always swift, in answering his requests to remove photos but that he should not have to constantly ask them to do so, since the court ruling had made plain that they were illicit.

“We shouldn’t have to keep asking them every time these photos come up,” Mr. Mosley said. “You have to employ someone to look every day. They shouldn’t put them up in the first place.”

He acknowledged that by fighting Google in court, he was inevitably attracting additional attention, but that he had to do it, because “anybody who’s interested in me will Google me, and the first thing they see are these photos.”

Mr. Mosley and his legal team say there do not appear to be any technical barriers to Google’s doing what he is asking. Google, working to address British concerns about child pornography on the Web, said in June that it had the capacity to identify and block images automatically, using “hashing” technology.

“If you have any respect for the rule of law, and it’s been decided by the court that it’s illegal, then you shouldn’t reproduce them,” he said.

But Google is adamant that the automatic filter Mr. Mosley is demanding would be a blunt tool that would indiscriminately eliminate both lawful and unlawful content, including perhaps reporting on Mr. Mosley’s own case.

“We hope that the French court will not order us to build a censorship machine,” the company said.

Economix Blog: The Audacity of the Fight for Higher Wages

Europe and China Agree to Settle Solar Panel Fight

The settlement essentially involves setting a fairly high minimum price for sales of Chinese-made solar panels in the European Union to try to prevent them from undercutting European producers. Those producers accused Chinese manufacturers of benefiting from enormous loans from state-owned banks and other government assistance that enabled them to charge prices that would otherwise be uneconomical.

“We have found an amicable solution that will result in a new equilibrium on the European solar panel market at a sustainable price level,” Karel De Gucht, the European trade commissioner, said in a statement.

The deal immediately met with ferocious criticism from the European manufacturers that had filed the complaint, and it complicates a similar dispute between the United States and China.

Mr. De Gucht’s decision in June to carry out his threat to impose tariffs on solar panels from China generated significant fears within the union about retribution from China. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called for further negotiations to avoid harm to German exporters. European importers of solar products from China also opposed the tariffs.

At the time, Mr. De Gucht said he had been left with no choice but to impose the tariffs since his investigators found a systematic effort by Chinese companies to sell solar panels in Europe below the cost of making them, a practice known as dumping.

On Saturday, officials at the European Commission said they could not give details of the deal, including the price that Chinese exporters would pay to sell their panels in Europe, until the arrangement had been formally approved by the commission. But a European Union official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal had not yet been formally approved, said the two sides had agreed to a minimum price of 0.56 euros per watt (74 cents), which would base any potential surcharge on the amount of electricity generated by each imported panel.

The European solar manufacturers who lobbied for tougher action against the Chinese exporters on Saturday promised to sue over the settlement.

The agreement “is contrary in every respect to European law,” said Milan Nitzschke, the president of EU ProSun, an industry group. A minimum price of 0.55 to 0.57 euros was at the level of “the current dumping price for Chinese modules,” the group said in a statement.

The arrangement would cover exports from 90 of about 140 Chinese exporters that were examined during the investigation, and that represent 60 percent of the panels sold in Europe, the government official said. Those 90 companies would no longer face tariffs that were put in place in June. Chinese exporters that did not agree to the terms will still face tariffs that are set to rise to 47.6 percent on Aug. 6 from the current level of 11.8 percent, the official said.

The Chinese government hoped from the start of the trade case with the European Union for a negotiated settlement instead of a legal battle. This deal comes as a relief, said He Weiwen, the co-director of the China-United States-European Union Study Center at the China Association of International Trade in Beijing.

The European settlement with Beijing in some ways complicates a similar dispute between the United States and China. The United States Commerce Department imposed final anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs last spring on imports of solar panels from China. China responded on July 18 that it was preparing to impose tariffs of more than 50 percent on polysilicon, the main material for solar panels, on imports from the United States and South Korea.

The United States began trying in early summer to arrange a comprehensive deal among Beijing, Brussels and Washington that would set new global trade arrangements for solar panels in exchange for the removal of the American tariffs and the preliminary European tariffs. But faced with a complex process in the United States for removing tariffs once the Commerce Department has made them final, the European Union pushed ahead with its own negotiations with China, a Senate aide with detailed knowledge of the issue said on Friday.

“The administration has been doing the right thing on this, pushing for talks and trying to get a joint settlement with Europe, but the Europeans have not had the same attitude and instead are pursuing talks with China independently of the U.S., which has stalled progress on U.S.-China talks,” said the aide, who spoke anonymously because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which is part of the White House, had no immediate response to the European deal, which was announced shortly before dawn in Washington.

Solar panels represent more than 6 percent of China’s exports to the Continent, making them one of the largest Chinese exports to the European Union. In 2011, Chinese exports of panels and their main components to the European Union were worth about 21 billion euros or $27.4 billion.

China grew from a tiny player in the global solar panel market five years ago to the world’s dominant producer now through a program of enormous lending by state-owned banks and a wide variety of manufacturing incentives by local and provincial governments. That has allowed Chinese producers to drive down the price of panels by three-quarters over the same period.

But Chinese manufacturers have expanded faster than the market, and the largest of them now face severe financial difficulties.

James Kanter reported from Brussels and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

On the Road: Fight for Hotel Bed Supremacy Spreads to the Skies

I’ve deliberately deployed ridiculously martial language there only to underscore a point about hotel bedding, which had been a mundane and boring business among old-line mattress makers until 1999, when Westin Hotels introduced a new mattress and bedding accessories branded as the Heavenly Bed, which was developed by Simmons, the big mattress manufacturer.

Whereupon a couple of remarkable things happened that truly did constitute a big pillow fight, or even a marketing war. First, seeing the overnight (sorry) success of the Heavenly Bed, other hotel companies rushed to develop their own branded high-end bedding, whether made by Simmons or by competitors like Serta or Sealy, which markets hotel-branded bedding through its Global Hospitality Collection, and others.

As hotel companies began buying luxury beds for their properties and also selling them through their own catalogs and online sites, the overall retail bedding industry underwent a revolution. Travelers, and especially a new wave of female business travelers after 1999, came home and decided that their own beds simply didn’t measure up to the ones they were finding in hotels.

After the Heavenly Bed introduction, hotels in every top category “understood that they couldn’t have a bed in the room that was crummier than the one the customer had at home,” said Steve Tipton, the vice president of Simmons Hospitality, the mattress company’s hotel unit. At the same time, hotel-branded mattresses started to be sold in retail outlets like department stores, and high-end mattresses and other bedding in general had become such a market standard that overall sales soared, to about $6.8 billion last year.

“The consumer connection between the bed and the hotel is a big deal” in the overall mattress business, Mr. Tipton said.

By 2006, when one hotel company, Hilton, had already invested $1 billion in new bedding since 1999, the hotel mattress race subsided. But now it’s back on. As hotels recover from the recession and begin aggressively investing again in improvements, Simmons recently introduced a line of hotel bedding called Recharge Beautyrest, positioned to sell upgraded bedding featuring foams that regulate mattress temperature. And even some airlines are now heralding the virtues of high-end mattresses and bedding in international first-class and business-class cabins, where lie-flat beds have become the industry standard.

For example, Delta Air Lines recently began promoting a new “Westin Heavenly In-Flight bedding product” for its BusinessElite cabins on international flights and on domestic flights between Kennedy Airport in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as between Atlanta and Honolulu. Singapore Airlines advertises private suites featuring luxurious double beds in first-class cabins of its A380s, and Lufthansa Technik, the maintenance and upgrade unit of the big German airline, is marketing its own Flexidreamer bed (“for a heavenly sleep”), first developed for luxury private jets and now available for first-class cabins on commercial airplanes.

While such sumptuous comforts are most definitely not available in the airlines’ increasingly cramped and austere coach cabins, the evolution of luxury bedding into premium cabins on commercial planes reflects what the hotel business learned well over the last 23 years. As Delta’s announcement of the new high-end bedding for its BusinessElite cabins put it, “In recent surveys, customers have told us that the most important part of the in-flight experience is sleep.”

In the hotel business, a good night’s sleep on high-quality bedding is increasingly a top marketing point. For example, Crowne Plaza hotels, a brand of the IHG hotel group, is emphasizing bedding improvements as part of its multiyear initiative to refurbish quality standards at its hotels in nearly 60 countries.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting aspects of the whole hotel bed-wars phenomenon to me has been the impact on the home-bedding market. For most people, buying a home mattress was always an unpleasant chore, “right up there with used cars,” said Mr. Tipton at Simmons.

But starting with the Heavenly Bed, and on through other high-end mattresses that entered the market from various manufacturers, hotels in effect became real-time showrooms for mattresses. No more plopping down uneasily on a mattress at a department store in a futile attempt to try it out. At a hotel, you use the mattress the way you’d use one at home. Then you can purchase that bedding from the hotel company, or from a retail store that sells lines of mattresses branded with whichever hotel they are found in.

“It really takes a lot of the unpleasantness out of trying a mattress out,” Mr. Tipton said.

U.S. Standards for School Snacks Move Beyond Cafeteria to Fight Obesity

“Parents and schools work hard to give our youngsters the opportunity to grow up healthy and strong, and providing healthy options through school cafeterias, vending machines and snack bars will support their great efforts,” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement.

The new rules were required under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was passed by Congress in 2010 with broad bipartisan support. The law, supported by Michelle Obama and drafted with an unusual level of cooperation between nutrition advocates and the food industry, required the Agriculture Department to set nutritional standards for all foods sold in schools.

The department had previously set the standards for fats, sugars and sodium in meals prepared in schools, and the new rules bring other foods under similar standards. When schools open in the fall of 2014, vending machines will have to be stocked with things like whole wheat crackers, granola bars and dried fruits, instead of M&Ms, Cheese Nips and gummy bears.

“By teaching and modeling healthy eating habits to children in school, these rules will encourage better eating habits over a lifetime,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which worked on the legislation. “They mean we aren’t teaching nutrition in the classroom and then undercutting what we’re teaching when kids eat in the cafeteria or buy food from the school vending machines.”

Health advocates are taking the same approach to curb the consumption of fatty, sugary and salty foods that they did to reduce smoking: educating children in the hopes that they will grow up healthier and perhaps pass along healthy eating behavior to their parents.

Ms. Wootan said she was pleased that the rules would prevent the sale of sugary sports drinks like Gatorade in high schools. The drinks have already been withdrawn from elementary and middle schools, but Ms. Wootan said teenagers mistakenly think such drinks are healthier than sodas. “All they are is a sugary drink with added salt,” she said.

Some Republicans were critical of the new rules. Representative Lee Terry, a Republican from Nebraska, tweeted his opposition using the hashtag “nannystate” and writing “RIP tater tots.” Schools could probably sell Tater Tots, a hash-brown potato nugget made by Ore-Ida, if they were baked instead of fried.

Schools and big food and beverage companies have been trying to improve the nutritional quality of food sold in educational institutions for some time. The American Beverage Association, which lobbies on behalf of the beverage makers, noted that its members had already reduced the calories in drinks that are shipped to schools by 90 percent.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents big food companies, applauded the new rules, though it said it would continue to encourage the Agriculture Department to phase them in gradually.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the agriculture secretary. He is Tom Vilsack, not Vilsak.

A Fight Over Coal Exports and the Industry’s Future

It’s part of a push by the nation’s coal industry, hobbled by plummeting demand as Americans turn to cleaner natural gas, to vastly expand what it sends to Asia and Europe. But the aggressive effort to rescue the $40 billion industry is running into fierce opposition from environmental groups, who say pollution caused by burning coal should not be exported.

The two sides have engaged in an increasingly pitched battle, in regulatory arenas and on the airwaves, scaring off some investors and raising concerns about the fate of the industry, which is seen as a key to economic growth in Western states like Montana and Wyoming.

“The future of the U.S. coal industry is at stake,” said Richard Morse, managing director at SuperCritical Capital, an energy consultancy. “Their future domestically is dim and demand growth internationally is very robust, so it is fair to say that a resuscitation of the industry has to come overseas.”

The future of the impoverished Crow Nation may also hang in the balance since it owns an enormous deposit of up to 1.4 billion tons of coal — more than the United States produces in a year. But before Cloud Peak can mine the land and send the coal to energy-hungry nations in Asia, it needs more export terminals to be built in the Pacific Northwest, and those have been delayed or, in some cases, scuttled after investors grew weary of the continued opposition from environmental groups.

Last week, the Sierra Club and other groups opened another phase in the battle, filing suit in a federal court in Seattle against Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway and several coal companies, saying coal dust escaping from trains has polluted rivers and lakes in Washington. The new export terminals, they say, would only bring more trains carrying coal to the ports and increase the amount of dust.

Coal’s share of electricity generation in the United States has fallen to under 40 percent in the last decade, from 50 percent. Annual production dropped 7 percent in 2012 to just over 1 billion tons, the lowest total in two decades, and the stock prices of many coal companies have been plummeting.

Cheap, abundant and cleaner natural gas produced in new shale fields has replaced much of the coal that American power plants once burned, and regulatory pressures are mounting to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal combustion. That has left exports as the only sure growth engine for the declining American coal industry.

Last year, American coal exports set a record of 125 million tons in sales, roughly double the volume in 2009, with most of that going to Europe. Exports fell this spring because of slower Chinese demand for steelmaking coal. But energy experts say the big potential market for American coal remains in Asia, and several proposed Pacific Northwest export terminals would have the capacity to nearly double current exports.

For the Crow Nation, which is sitting on the reserves here, and many coal companies like Cloud Peak, exports could make the difference between just getting by and prospering.

While coal mining is the largest private sector provider of jobs, half the adult population is unemployed. Homelessness would be pandemic if it were not customary for three or four families to cram into small trailers so crowded that couples sometimes go to motels for moments of privacy and children struggle to do homework through a blare of television.

Three bright days a year come when families receive small bonuses from the tribe, thanks to one coal mine that operates on the reservation, to buy presents for Christmas and beads and tepee canvas for the tribe’s annual powwow. The Crow hope more bright days may be coming, although some express concerns about the damage more coal mines could do to archaeological sites.

Products Liability Fight Over Restatement Continues

Attorneys told me that the state of products liability law in Pennsylvania is extremely uncertain in the first part of my series on hot issues in products law. The state of uncertainty was triggered because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has twice opined in the last three years that the state Supreme Court is likely to adopt provisions of the Restatement (Third) of Torts, while the Pennsylvania high court has not squarely dealt with whether the Third Restatement should replace the Restatement (Second) of Torts.

China Divides European Union in Fight Over Tariffs

HONG KONG — Adroitly alternating the threat of a trade war with the lure of its huge import market, China appears to have driven a deep wedge between Germany and the rest of the European Union. And it may even have caused a rift within the German business world.

As Chinese and European trade officials stare each other down over next week’s scheduled imposition of big tariffs on the $27 billion worth of solar panels China sells to Europe each year, Germany has come down on China’s side.

Notably, Berlin is backing Beijing, even though Europe’s biggest producer of solar equipment, SolarWorld, is a German company that desperately wants the European Union to impose tariffs on the Chinese equipment. Unless the bloc backs off under German pressure, tariffs of up to 50 percent would go into effect June 5, to punish China for the ostensible “dumping” of solar panels at below cost in Europe.

“Europe cannot succumb to blackmail — dumping is illegal, and the E.U. is obliged to defend itself by applying the international trade law,” said Milan Nitzschke, a spokesman for SolarWorld and the president of ProSun, a lobbying group for the European solar energy industry.

But many other German companies, which rely more heavily than other European manufacturers on China as a significant market for their exports — whether Volkswagen cars or Siemens factory equipment or various other goods — fear that the dispute over solar panels could lead to an all-out trade war with China, which would be disastrous for their businesses. So far, the German government appears to agree.

And little wonder. Germany is China’s most important trading partner in Europe and China is Germany’s leading partner in Asia. The Federation of German Industry estimates that one million German jobs are dependent on exports to China. Of those, the German solar industry has about 99,000.

For half a century, Germany has been one of the most loyal and enthusiastic supporters of European unity. And since the advent of the European Union in 1992, Berlin has advocated giving Brussels greater scope in the range of issues it handles. But the solar tariff showdown illustrates the way domestic priorities can sometimes trump pan-European loyalties.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany played host last weekend to Prime Minister Li Keqiang of China. More than a dozen trade agreements were signed, including between VW, Siemens, BASF and their Chinese partners, all supporting further expansion for German industry in the Chinese market and further investment by the Chinese in Germany. Special privileges that China offered German companies in its agricultural and recycling industries were clearly aimed at trying to win Berlin’s support.

After her meeting with Mr. Li, Ms. Merkel told reporters on Sunday that her government would lobby against the solar tariffs, saying the situation was “rather complicated.”

“Germany will do everything possible to resolve the conflicts that we have in trade,” Ms. Merkel said, “through as many discussions as possible to prevent it from falling into a sort of conflict that ends in the raising of tariffs from both sides.”

Germany’s economics minister, Philipp Rösler, said Monday that Germany had told the European Commission in Brussels that it was voting against the imposition of preliminary tariffs on Chinese solar panels. While the commission routinely consults member countries on preliminary tariffs, in the past that has tended to be more of a formality, and opposition has been infrequent.

But on Tuesday, a trade official in Europe with direct knowledge of the matter said it appeared that a majority of the governments were officially opposed to preliminary tariffs on Chinese solar imports. And yet, the European commissioner for trade, Karel De Gucht, could still go ahead on June 5 and impose the preliminary duties without any further approvals. That deadline was established at the opening of the commission’s investigation in September.

Whether Mr. De Gucht proceeds with the preliminary duties remains to be seen. But he “will not be intimidated in any way” and “will not bend to external pressure,” Mr. De Gucht’s spokesman, John Clancy, said at the commission’s daily news conference Tuesday.

Preliminary tariffs, which would last six months, in the past have tended to be imposed as a negotiating ploy before the European Commission decides whether to impose so-called final tariffs that last for five years. A voting majority of member nations could overturn the preliminary tariffs, although such a move would be unprecedented.

Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin. James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong.

Products Liability Fight Over Restatement Continues

Attorneys told me that the state of products liability law in Pennsylvania is extremely uncertain in the first part of my series on hot issues in products law. The state of uncertainty was triggered because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has twice opined in the last three years that the state Supreme Court is likely to adopt provisions of the Restatement (Third) of Torts, while the Pennsylvania high court has not squarely dealt with whether the Third Restatement should replace the Restatement (Second) of Torts.

DealBook: Hedge Fund Rejects Proposal by Hess to End Proxy Fight

Ángel Franco/The New York TimesHess, an oil and gas company, holds its annual meeting on Thursday.

8:22 p.m. | Updated
The Hess Corporation on Monday offered a concession to an activist investor after the investor’s board nominees waived their rights to a contentious compensation plan.

Hess, an oil and gas company, said it was prepared to support two of the five nominees put forward by the activist hedge fund Elliott Management. But the company’s proposal, which was intended to end a proxy fight waged by Elliott, was promptly rejected by the hedge fund.

Elliott, which has said Hess suffers from a lack of discipline and poor oversight, said on Monday that Hess’s latest proposal was a “P.R. stunt.”

“If Hess were serious, they would have engaged in substantive conversation with Elliott rather than blast out desperate press releases,” Elliott said in a statement on Monday evening.

The exchange was the latest development in the continuing fight between Elliott and Hess, which said on Friday that it would separate the positions of chairman and chief executive. The company hopes all five of its board nominees are elected at the annual meeting on Thursday.

Elliott’s nominees, who have the support of the influential proxy advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, announced on Monday that they would give up a compensation plan from Elliott that could have paid them millions of dollars.

The arrangement, which would have tied director compensation to Hess’s stock price, was causing an “ongoing distraction,” the nominees said in a letter to Hess shareholders on Monday.

“While each of us believes that these arrangements are appropriate and consistent with the performance of our duties as independent directors, each of us has made the decision to waive our right to receive these payments from Elliott,” the letter said.

Under the compensation plan, Elliott would have paid any nominees who won a seat and served for a year an aggregate $30,000 for each percentage point Hess’s stock price outperformed that of a peer group of stocks over three years beginning in January 2013.

Hess responded favorably to that letter from Elliott’s nominees, saying in a statement that it showed that the nominees had acknowledged that the proposed compensation plan was “wrong.”

“As we have said all along, Elliott’s directors compromised their independence and judgment by agreeing to accept Elliott’s compensation scheme,” John H. Mullin III, the lead independent director of Hess, said in a statement.

Hess then went further, saying it was “ready to be responsive” to the possibility of adding directors nominated by Elliott. The company said it was prepared to add two of Elliott’s nominees “whom we would choose in consultation with shareholders.”

“We would effect this change promptly after annual meeting if all five of Hess’ new, independent nominees are elected,” the company said.

That did not sit well with Elliott, which said in a statement: “Hess should accept all five shareholder nominees and replace as many of their incumbent directors with management’s nominees as is reasonable.

Britain Takes On Brussels in Fight Over Bank Pay

BRUSSELS — The British finance minister, George Osborne, is expected Tuesday to urge his European Union counterparts to water down proposed rules restricting the size of bankers’ bonuses.

The proposal is a sore point for Britain, which is home to Europe’s main financial hub, and where many in government and the financial industry worry that mandated limit to bonuses could make it harder for London to compete in international banking circles.

A failure by Mr. Osborne to win concessions during a monthly meeting here on Tuesday of the European Union’s 27 finance ministers could fuel disenchantment with the Union among restive members of Britain’s ruling Conservative party. Prime Minister David Cameron has already called for a referendum on Britain’s membership in the Union.

Yet if Mr. Osborne pushes too hard against the bonus cap, his government risks criticism at home for succoring bankers. They are unpopular with large swaths of the British electorate for earning lavish salaries even as a prolonged economic downturn forces many households to scrimp. Many voters also resent the banking industry for receiving a series of giant bailouts paid for by taxpayers.

The meeting Tuesday will follow a Monday evening session by 17 of the same finance ministers, representatives of the euro currency union, who discussed but deferred action on a bailout request by Cyprus. That country is seeking about €17 billion, $22 billion, to shore up government finances and its banks, which were badly exposed to a debt write-down in Greece.

But for Britain, which is not a member of the euro zone, the banker bonus proposal is the main issue. The Cameron government considers the bonus cap “misguided and fear it could impact negatively on London without even combating the excessive risk-taking it was meant to address,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform, a research organization based in London.

“But London is caught between a rock and a hard place, as there’s much popular antipathy toward the bankers,” Mr. Tilford said. The issue of banker remuneration “is pretty toxic stuff Britain,” he added.

Further undermining Britain’s position ahead of the meeting is the result of a referendum over the weekend in Switzerland, also known for its business-friendly climate but where voters approved tighter restrictions on executive compensation. That vote will give shareholders of companies listed in Switzerland a binding say on the overall pay packages for executives and directors.

The bonus cap legislation that concerns the British leadership cleared an important hurdle last week when representatives of E.U. governments and the European Parliament agreed that the coveted bonuses many bankers receive would be capped at no more than their annual salaries, starting next year. Only if a bank’s shareholders approved could a bonus be higher — and even then it would be limited to no more than double the salary.

The rules are drafted so that a banker working in New York for a British bank like Barclays would be subject to the rules, as would a banker in London working for a U.S. bank like Citigroup.

Another reason Mr. Osborne may be hesitant to oppose the bonus rules too vociferously is that they are part of a legislative package that includes something his government favors: tougher rules about how much capital European banks most hold in reserve to protect against losses.

Britain and Mr. Osborne have strongly backed the higher capital requirements as essential for preventing another financial crisis.

In any event, European Union diplomats said ministers were unlikely to formally approve the rules on Tuesday because details still needed to be nailed down. That could still give Britain weeks, or even months, to press for concessions.

There are also questions among some European countries about how strictly to apply parts of the legislation requiring banks to publish detailed information on profits, taxes and subsidies on a country-by-country basis across the globe.

In the case of the separate Cyprus bailout discussions Monday evening, euro zone finance ministers were taking up talks that stalled with the country’s previous, Communist-led government. That government was replaced late last month by a center-right administration, a change that has been welcomed in other European capitals.

Products Liability Fight Over Restatement Continues

Attorneys told me that the state of products liability law in Pennsylvania is extremely uncertain in the first part of my series on hot issues in products law. The state of uncertainty was triggered because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has twice opined in the last three years that the state Supreme Court is likely to adopt provisions of the Restatement (Third) of Torts, while the Pennsylvania high court has not squarely dealt with whether the Third Restatement should replace the Restatement (Second) of Torts.

Products Liability: Is Pennsylvania's Restatement Fight Finally Over?

Is the battle over which Restatement of Torts governs products liability in Pennsylvania finally settled?

Products Liability Fight Over Restatement Continues

Attorneys told me that the state of products liability law in Pennsylvania is extremely uncertain in the first part of my series on hot issues in products law. The state of uncertainty was triggered because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has twice opined in the last three years that the state Supreme Court is likely to adopt provisions of the Restatement (Third) of Torts, while the Pennsylvania high court has not squarely dealt with whether the Third Restatement should replace the Restatement (Second) of Torts.

Green: Progress in Fight to Keep Night Skies Dark

More than half a century after she wrote those words, it has become harder than ever to see the stars, as cities with their 24-hour lights continue to sprawl. Many children learn about the Milky Way only through books or films, a 2010 Council of Europe report warned.

A combination of economics and preservation efforts is slowing the trend toward excessive lighting in a few areas. A “dark skies” movement, aimed at increasing the public’s appreciation of stargazing, has gained strength in recent years, while cities are rediscovering that turning off streetlights can save money.

“Everywhere, light pollution is an increasing problem,” said Andrej Mohar, an amateur astronomer in Slovenia who has lobbied for lighting regulations there. A 2007 Slovenian law aimed at barring light fixtures from sending light upward has made the night sky above the capital, Ljubljana, about 20 percent darker, he said.

An Arizona-based group called the International Dark-Sky Association has led advocacy efforts worldwide for preserving the night skies.

Since 2006, the group has designated 10 “dark sky” parks globally, as well as another four reserves. The idea is to single out areas that offer excellent stargazing and also work to keep night lighting minimal. One of the latest-certified areas, added in May, is the NamibRand Nature Reserve in Namibia, where the dry air and remote location make for clear skies and good nighttime viewing.

The site is the first dark-sky reserve in Africa — or in any developing country. Before receiving the designation, local officials worked to reduce lighting within the reserve’s bounds. That included requiring vehicles traveling on remote roads at night to dim their headlights if moonlight could be used instead.

Asia has no certified dark-sky areas yet, partly from a lack of awareness there, although that is starting to change, according to Scott Kardel, the managing director for the International Dark-Sky Association.

Three of the dark-sky areas are in Britain. The first, designated in 2009, was the Galloway Forest Park in Scotland. It got “massive media coverage” — far more than expected — which invigorated the movement, said Steve Owens, a dark-sky consultant in Scotland. Since then, Exmoor National Park in England and the Isle of Sark in the Channel Islands have also received dark-sky designations, and representatives of a number of other British parks and communities have expressed interest in applying for the status, Mr. Owens said.

In Britain, the dark-sky cause has been aided by fiscal problems. Local governments, like the Somerset County Council, have begun turning off or dimming some streetlights late at night as a money-saving measure. By doing so, they can also earn credits for greenhouse gas reduction.

However, change can be slow, not least because switching off lights may cause the public to worry about crime and roadway accidents. The Somerset government notes on its Web site that such concerns have not been borne out.

Technology is making some changes easier. The importance of minimizing light pollution is “one of many attributes that we think about” nowadays when designing products, said Cheryl English, the vice president of government and industry relations at Acuity Brands, a lighting company. She is also a member of the International Dark-Sky Association.

However, even though the industry follows light-pollution issues, “if it hurts their sales, of course they’re not going to be very happy with that,” said Terry McGowan, a consultant to the American Lighting Association who also serves on a technical committee of the dark-sky group.

In addition to better fixtures, Mr. McGowan said, a key technological improvement is the rise of so-called smart grid systems, which can turn the lights off when sensors indicate no one is around, saving energy as well as light.

The biggest battle of all, of course, involves getting enough people to care, especially because new fixtures and sensors can be costly. That requires intensive campaigns by observatories and stargazing advocates.

“What keeps me going is I see the effort to raise public awareness succeeding,” said Bill Wren, an astronomer and special assistant to the superintendent at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. Recently, he said, a gas station about 30 miles, or 48 kilometers, from the observatory had planned to use “just awful” globe-style light fixtures. But after discussing their plans with him, they changed to a design that emits half the amount of light.

Last year, despite some concerns from private-property advocates, Texas passed a law that required new subdivisions being built within 57 miles of the McDonald Observatory to minimize the effects of their lighting on the observatory’s operations.

Most dark-sky advocates recognize that they are fighting a tough battle. “Everywhere on our planet is more or less the Wild West” for lighting, Mr. Mohar said, though he argued that Slovenia was an exception.

On the positive side, excessive lighting, unlike many environmental problems, is ultimately reversible, at least in theory.

Light pollution is “not destroying the nighttime sky,” said Ms. English, the Acuity Brands executive. “We can recover it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 17, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Mr. Gowan’s affiliation with the American Lighting Association. Mr. McGowan serves on a technical committee of the International Dark-Sky Association, not of the American Lighting Association.

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