Category: Lawsuits

  The European Commission has signalled it could be preparing to break up Google’s adtech business. Speaking during a press conference this afternoon, EU EVP Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief and head of digital strategy, announced it has sent a formal statement of objections to Google for suspected anti-competitive conduct in its adtech business. If the Commission confirms its suspicions she said it is looking at breaking up Google’s adtech as the only viable solution to resolve what she…

Treasury officials have been accused of being asleep at the wheel on breaches of confidential government information. Officials were grilled on their knowledge of potential breaches of confidential Treasury data by former PwC partner Peter Collins, who has been referred to federal police to investigate the allegations. Greens senator Barbara Pocock hit out at Treasury’s decision to sign new confidentiality agreements with Mr Collins after they became aware of a possible breach. While Treasury officials told the committee they had…

WASHINGTON – US regulators sued Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao on Monday for allegedly operating a “web of deception,” piling further pressure on the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange and sending bitcoin to its lowest in almost three months. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint, filed in a federal court in Washington, DC, listed 13 charges against Binance, Zhao and the operator of its purportedly independent US exchange. The SEC alleged that Binance artificially inflated its trading volumes and…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A federal judge says Tennessee’s first-in-the-nation law designed to place strict limits on drag shows is unconstitutional. In a 70-page ruling handed down late Friday night, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker wrote that the law was both “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” He also added that the statute encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.” “There is no question that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. But there is a difference between material that is ‘obscene’ in the vernacular,…

NEW YORK, May 30 (Reuters) – Bankrupt OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma can shield its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, from opioid lawsuits in exchange for a $6 billion contribution to the company’s broader bankruptcy settlement, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that U.S. bankruptcy law allows legal protections for non-bankrupt parties, like the Sacklers, in extraordinary circumstances. In a majority opinion written by 2nd Circuit Judge Eunice…

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the…

Aderrien Murry, 11, called the police as his mother asked — but when officers arrived, one of them shot him in the chest. A new lawsuit says officials failed to train and supervise its officers. Courtesy of Nakala Murry The family of Aderrien Murry has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Indianola, Miss., and at least two police officials, after an officer shot 11-year-old Murry in the chest after the boy placed a 911 call on May 20….

Michael Sasso, a Florida attorney, was selected by DeSantis to join the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which gained control of Walt Disney World’s special tax district through recent legislation. The reason for Sasso’s resignation remains unclear.However, Governor DeSantis appointed Sasso’s wife, Judge Meredith Sasso, to the state’s Supreme Court just last week. The latter’s husband is the managing partner of Sasso and Sasso, P.A., a law practice specializing in election law, complex business, and construction litigation.In response, Disney filed a lawsuit against DeSantis and other state officials, accusing them of harming its business by revoking Disney World’s self-governing status and engaging in a targeted campaign of government retaliation. The lawsuit claims that DeSantis orchestrated these actions to punish Disney’s protected speech, threatening its business operations, economic future, and constitutional rights.Governor DeSantis, who recently announced his official 2024 White House bid, has continued to clash with Disney. He recently filed a motion to disqualify the judge overseeing the First Amendment case, citing the judge’s previous comments regarding the Disney feud.

Schwartz was using ChatGPT for legal research for the first time when he put it to work drafting the ten-page brief he hoped would convince Manhattan Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel not to dismiss his case, he told the court in an affidavit on Thursday, explaining that he “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”   When asked, ChatGPT even told Schwartz – a lawyer with 30 years of experience – that the half dozen…

Jeffrey Epstein was many things: a sexual predator, a friend to the rich and powerful and, for many years, a lucrative customer of the nation’s largest bank. Now the bank, JPMorgan Chase, faces a reckoning for its nearly 15-year relationship with the disgraced financier, one that could cost it a big payout in two civil lawsuits that claim the bank ignored warnings that he was trafficking teenage girls for sex because it was profiting from its relationship with him. New…

When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called for heads to roll after the 2016 census was pulled offline – amid fears IBM’s data servers hosting the survey had been infiltrated – the American enterprise technology giant made an important decision. IBM ran most of the big mainframe systems that had powered core government functions for several decades, earning it billions of dollars a year in fees and making the Australian government one of its top global clients. No census data was…

Justice Akintayo Aluko of the Federal High Court, in Lagos has ordered 27 commercial banks in the country, to placed Post-No-Debit (PND) on the accounts of a tourism company, ‘La Campagne Tropicana Beach Resort’ over alleged N46, 798, 095.94 . The judge, made the order of Mareva injunction on May 17, 2023, while granting an Exparte motion marked FHC/L/CS/746/2023, filed and argued by Barrister George C. Duru, on behalf of Ecobank Nigeria Limited and ETI Specialized Resolution Company Limited The…

While we’ve talked a great deal now about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, most of the focus has been on how three major regulatory bodies are handling approving, or not, the purchase. But those regulatory bodies are not the only ones challenging the purchase. A small group of gamers filed their own private suit to block the acquisition, arguing that they would be negatively impacted if it were approved. That was earlier this year and the judge dismissed the…

For a brief moment of time, a judge in Arizona conspired with a vindictive politician to pretend the First Amendment didn’t exist. Senator Wendy Rogers — who was censured by the state senate last year for stating her political opponents should be hanged — took litigious offense at the methods deployed by journalist Camryn Sanchez, who covers the state senate for the Arizona Capitol Times. Sanchez wanted answers on Senator Rogers’ seemingly excessive travel expenses, something supposedly owed her because…

Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a pension fund-led lawsuit that accused the bank of defrauding shareholders by misleading them over the progress it was making to rectify a slew of scandals. The Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension & Relief Fund and the state of Rhode Island were among the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in June 2020 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The…

First Citizens BancShares Inc, which acquired Silicon Valley Bank following its collapse, sued HSBC Holdings PLC on Monday, accusing it of poaching more than 40 of the failed bank’s employees in order to launch its own U.S. venture banking business. The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court says HSBC violated federal law by hiring away the workers so it could gain access to Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) trade secrets including information about clients in the tech and healthcare sectors….