What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
WESTERN ADDITION COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION et al., Appellees, v. Frank N. ALIOTO et al., Appellants. WESTERN ADDITION COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION et al., Cross-Appellants, v. Frank N. ALIOTO et al., Cross-Appellees. WESTERN ADDITION COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION et al., Appellees, v. Frank N. ALIOTO et al., Intervenor (Firefighters), Appellant. WESTERN ADDITION COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION et al., Appellees, v. Frank N. ALIOTO et al., Intervenor (Balich), Appellant.
Nos. 74-1570, 74-1529, 74-1562 and 74-1563.
United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.
March 27, 1975.
Rehearing Denied May 30, 1975.
William H. Hastie, Jr., San Francisco, Cal. (argued in 74 — 1529), Barry S. Jelli-son, San Francisco, Cal. (argued in 74-1562 and 74-1563), Thomas M. O’Connor, City Atty., San Francisco, Cal. (argued in 74-1570), for appellant and cross-ap-pellee.
Thomas M. O’Connor, City Atty., Michael C. Killelen, Philip S. Ward, San Francisco, Cal. (argued in 74-1529), William H. Hastie, Jr., Public Advocates, Inc., San Francisco, Cal. (argued in 74-1562 and 74-1563), Robert L. Gnaizda, Public Advocates, Inc., San Francisco, Cal. (argued in 74-1570), for appellee and cross-appellant.
Before BARNES, VAN OOSTERHOUT and ELY, Circuit Judges.
Honorable Martin D. Van Oosterhout, Senior U. S. Circuit Judge, Eighth Circuit, sitting by designation.
OPINION
PER CURIAM:
The detailed history of the subject controversy, to this time, is carefully set forth in four reported opinions of the District Court. 330 F.Supp. 536 (N.D.Cal.1971); 340 F.Supp. 1351 (N.D.Cal.1972); 360 F.Supp. 733 (N.D.Cal.1973); and 369 F.Supp. 77 (N.D.Cal.1973).
The suit, a civil rights class action instituted pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1983, was originally filed in the District Court on June 24, 1970. The appel-lees sought to remedy a condition that then existed, i. e., that of the 1800 firemen then employed by the San Francisco, California Fire Department, only four were blacks. In its first opinion, 330 F.Supp. 536, the court found that the written examination employed by the Fire Department to select new firemen from job applicants had a discriminatory effect. Concluding, however, that the discriminatory practice was not shown to have been intentional or invidious, the court declined to issue an injunction but reserved the power to make any such additional orders as it might deem necessary in the future. This disposition was apparently induced, in part, because of the expressed willingness of the appellants to so modify their previously existing selective process so as to eliminate its discriminatory effects. The principal object was the revision of the appellant’s previously existing “Fireman H-2” written examination so as to make then truly job-related. Delay after delay ensued. The court eventually remarked that “. . . the San Francisco Civil Service Commission has three times failed . to demonstrate, as required by law, that its challenged Fireman H-2 written examinations have been truly job-related.” 369 F.Supp. at 79. The court remarked further:
“The Commission’s dilatoriness in these matters and apparent stubborn insistence upon arguments and alternatives which this court has repeatedly found unacceptable, have created an intolerable situation; the adequacy of Fire Department manpower for the safety of the City is coming into question . .
369 F.Supp. at 80.
In its fourth opinion, from which the above quotations are extracted, the court found that of the then existing 512 qualified applicants for Fireman H-2 positions, 118 were of so-called minority derivation and 394, non-minority. The court thereupon decreed that pending a further Order, the Commission should “forthwith fill existing Fireman H-2 vacancies — one (1) qualified minority applicant and one (1) qualified non-minority applicant alternatively from sublists of qualified minority and qualified non-minority applicants — until the sublist of qualified minority applicants has been exhausted.” 369 F.Supp. at 81. It is from this Order that the appellants appeal.
The appellees cross-appeal from the District Court’s subsequent refusal to make its temporary one-to-one hiring arrangement permanent.
The appellants did not seek a stay of the District Court’s Order pending appeal. Rather, they complied with the Decree’s directive. We learned this for the first time during the oral argument of the cause. We suggested from the Bench that the appeal had become moot. The only response of the appellants, as well as of the Intervenor, to our suggestion was that the controversy remained alive because 10 of the 118 minority applicants had declined offers of Fireman H-2 positions that had been tendered to them by the appellants. This response to the court’s suggestion of mootness is not acceptable. The District Court’s Order should be fairly interpreted as requiring no more than bona fide offers of employment to the 118 applicants for the vacant Fireman H — 2 positions — not the acceptance of the offers by all of the qualified minority applicants. This being our interpretation of the District Court’s Order, we conclude that there remains no live and existing controversy in respect to the particular Order from which the appellants appeal.
On this appeal, the appellants assert that the District Court’s Order mandates the employment of a racial preference in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Since the District Court’s Order has been fully effected, however, no decision that we could now render as to the Order’s constitutionality could alter the parties’ rights and obligations under the Order. See DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 U.S. 312, 94 S.Ct. 1704, 40 L.Ed.2d 164 (1974); North Carolina v. Rice, 404 U.S. 244, 92 S.Ct. 402, 30 L.Ed.2d 413 (1971). It is purely speculative as to whether the appellees might seek, or the District Court might grant, an order of similar effect in the future. It is more likely, we think, given the passage of time, that the appellants will have performed an acceptable job-relatedness validation of their already-revised written examination for firemen applicants. Therefore, such extraordinary relief as that contained in the Order here appealed, aimed solely at the dilatory tactics of the appellants and the critical shortage of firemen that existed in 1973, will, in all probability, be unnecessary. See SEC v. Medical Committee for Human Rights, 404 U.S. 403, 92 S.Ct. 577, 30 L.Ed.2d 560 (1972). Accordingly, the principal appeal is dismissed as moot, and we express no opinion as to the constitutional validity of the District Court’s Decree.
As to the cross-appeal, a District Court, sitting in equity, is vested with the widest latitude in exercising its discretion in respect to the vacating or modification of an equitable decree. From the record before us we are not persuaded that the court clearly abused its discretion in denying to the cross-appellants, at the time they made their application for permanent relief, the modified decree which they sought. We therefore affirm the Order that the cross-appellants here challenge.
All parties to the appeal and cross-appeal, including the intervening union, shall bear the costs which they, respectively, have incurred in connection with the proceedings in this court.
So ordered.
. It is recited in one of the District Court’s opinions that at the time of the 1970 census, San Francisco’s racial composition was 43 percent minority (15 percent black and 28 percent other minority). 369 F.Supp. at 79 n. 1.
. Since a finding of mootness would deprive our court of jurisdiction, there no longer being an actual “case or controversy,” U.S.Const. art. Ill, § 2, we are obligated to consider the question of mootness, even though it was not raised by the parties. See Sosna v. Iowa, 419 U.S. 393, 95 S.Ct. 553, 42 L.Ed.2d 532 (1975).

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0