NEW YORK (AP) — The Department of Justice has informed former Vice President Mike Pence ‘s legal team that it will not pursue criminal charges related to the discovery of classified documents at his Indiana home.
The department sent a letter to Pence’s attorney on Thursday informing him that, after an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information, no criminal charges will be sought.
The Texas House of Representatives voted Saturday to impeach scandal-plagued Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, triggering his immediate suspension from duties and setting up a trial that could permanently remove the state’s top lawyer from office.
The 121-23 vote constitutes an abrupt downfall for one of the GOP’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Donald Trump. It makes Paxton only the third sitting official in Texas’ nearly 200-year history to have been impeached.
The historic vote came after a months-long House investigation into the three-term attorney general that resulted in 20 charges alleging sweeping abuses of power, including obstruction of justice, bribery and abuse of public trust.
Paxton, 60, is just the third sitting official to be impeached in the state’s nearly 200-year history.
The House is controlled by Republicans and the matter now moves to the Republican-controlled state Senate. A two-thirds vote by the 31-member Senate would be enough to remove him from office.
Paxton’s wife, two-term state Sen. Angela Paxton, could be among those casting a vote on her husband’s political future.
Paxton has criticized the impeachment effort as an attempt to “overthrow the will of the people and disenfranchise the voters of our state.” He has said the charges are based on “hearsay and gossip, parroting long-disproven claims.”
Texas’ Republican-led House of Representatives launched historic impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Ken Paxton earlier on Saturday as Donald Trump defended the scandal-plagued GOP official from a vote that could lead to his ouster.
The House convened in the afternoon to debate whether to impeach and suspend Paxton over allegations of bribery, abuse of public trust and that he is unfit for office — just some of the accusations that have trailed Texas’ top lawyer for most of his three terms.
The hearing set up what could be a remarkably sudden downfall for one of the GOP’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Trump.
Paxton, 60, has decried what he called “political theater” based on “hearsay and gossip, parroting long-disproven claims,” and said it’s an attempt to disenfranchise voters who reelected him in November. It’s unclear where the attorney general was Saturday, but during the House proceeding he was sharing statements from supporters on Twitter.
“No one person should be above the law, least not the top law enforcement officer of the state of Texas,” Rep. David Spiller, a Republican member of the committee that investigated Paxton, said in opening statements.
Rep. Ann Johnson, a Democratic member, told lawmakers that Texas’ “top cop is on the take.” Rep. Charlie Geren, a Republican committee member, said without elaborating that Paxton had called lawmakers and threatened them with political “consequences.”
As the articles of impeachment were laid out, some of the lawmakers shook their heads.
Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor and was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial. Until this week, his fellow Republicans had taken a muted stance on the allegations.
Lawmakers allied with Paxton tried to discredit the investigation by noting that hired investigators, not panel members, interviewed witnesses. They also said several of the investigators had voted in Democratic primaries, tainting the impeachment, and that they had too little time to review evidence.
“I perceive it could be political weaponization,” said Rep. Tony Tinderholt, one of the House’s most conservative members. Republican Rep. John Smithee compared the proceeding to “a Saturday mob out for an afternoon lynching.”
Impeachment requires just a simple majority in the House.
Texas’ top elected Republicans had been notably quiet about Paxton this week. But on Saturday both Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz came to his defense, with the senator calling the impeachment process “a travesty” and saying the attorney general’s legal troubles should be left to the courts.
“Free Ken Paxton,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, warning that if House Republicans proceeded with the process, “I will fight you.”
Abbott, who lauded Paxton while swearing him in for a third term in January, has remained silent. The governor spoke at a Memorial Day service in the House chamber about three hours before the impeachment proceedings began.
Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan also attended but the two appeared to exchange few words, and Abbott left without commenting to reporters.
In one sense, Paxton’s political peril arrived with dizzying speed: The House committee’s investigation came to light Tuesday, and by Thursday lawmakers issued 20 articles of impeachment.
But to Paxton’s detractors, the rebuke was years overdue.
In 2014, he admitted to violating Texas securities law, and a year later he was indicted on securities fraud charges in his hometown near Dallas, accused of defrauding investors in a tech startup. He pleaded not guilty to two felony counts carrying a potential sentence of five to 99 years.
He opened a legal defense fund and accepted $100,000 from an executive whose company was under investigation by Paxton’s office for Medicaid fraud.
An additional $50,000 was donated by an Arizona retiree whose son Paxton later hired to a high-ranking job but was soon fired after displaying child pornography in a meeting.
In 2020, Paxton intervened in a Colorado mountain community where a Texas donor and college classmate faced removal from his lakeside home under coronavirus orders.
But what ultimately unleased the impeachment push was Paxton’s relationship with Austin real estate developer Nate Paul.
In 2020, eight top aides told the FBI they were concerned Paxton was misusing his office to help Paul over the developer’s unproven claims that an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of his properties was afoot.
The FBI searched Paul’s home in 2019, but he has not been charged and denies wrongdoing. Paxton also told staff members he had an affair with a woman who, it later emerged, worked for Paul.
The impeachment accuses Paxton of attempting to interfere in foreclosure lawsuits and issuing legal opinions to benefit Paul. Its bribery charges allege that Paul employed the woman with whom Paxton had an affair in exchange for legal help and that he paid for expensive renovations to the attorney general’s home.
A senior lawyer for Paxton’s office, Chris Hilton, said Friday that the attorney general paid for all repairs and renovations.
Other charges, including lying to investigators, date back to Paxton’s still-pending securities fraud indictment.
Four of the aides who reported Paxton to the FBI later sued under Texas’ whistleblower law, and in February he agreed to settle the case for $3.3 million. The House committee said it was Paxton seeking legislative approval for the payout that sparked their probe.
“But for Paxton’s own request for a taxpayer-funded settlement over his wrongful conduct, Paxton would not be facing impeachment,” the panel said.
A finance company boasting hundreds of apparently glowing online “customer reviews” and an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau was this week civilly charged with cheating over 700 investors — many of them senior citizens — out of more than $30 million over 5 years.
El Segundo, Calif.–based Red Rock Secured and its controlling chief executive, Sean Kelly, were accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of playing on the retirement and tax fears of older investors to sell them gold and silver coins at vastly inflated prices to hold in self-directed IRAs.
The markup on the coins “was almost always above 100 percent, and typically 120 percent or more,” the SEC said in its complaint.
Between 2017 and last year, Red Rock pocketed more than $30 million of the $50 million investors paid for the coins, said the SEC, which also sued two former Red Rock executives.
Attorney Michael Schafler of the Los Angeles law firm Cohen Williams, representing both Red Rock and its CEO, said the company had “nothing to hide” and has been “completely cooperative” with the SEC investigation.
“Red Rock has demonstrated that it is focused on compliance and providing clients with information necessary to make reasoned and informed decisions about purchasing precious metals,” he added. “Red Rock stands by that. It looks forward to the opportunity to defend itself against the government’s allegations in Court.”
According to the SEC, Red Rock used an aggressive marketing campaign to target investors, especially those who were “conservative” or “right wing” politically and “over 59½ [years old].”
Sales personnel played on customers’ fears about government policy, inflation, the stock market and retirement to persuade investors to move IRA funds to Red Rock and invest in gold and silver bullion, according to the SEC. But then, using what the commission calls a “bait and switch,” they persuaded investors instead to buy niche “premium” gold coins with huge, but hidden, markups, which included an 8% sales commission.
These so-called premium coins included an obscure silver Canadian coin for which Red Rock Secured controlled the entire market, allowing it to claim falsely that the “market value” of the coin was more than twice the value of its silver content, the SEC said.
Red Rock Secured salespeople were told to pitch the idea of a “worry-free retirement” to potential clients, while warning them that in the stock market “you could wake up and half your retirement could be gone,” the SEC said.
“The defendants used fear and lies to defraud investors out of millions of dollars from their hard-earned retirement savings,” said Antonia Apps, director of the SEC’s New York office.
There was no hint of any of this in the company’s glowing online “customer reviews.” At Google, Red Rock had an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5 from 136 self-described customers. At Trustpilot, it got an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5 from 167 alleged customers. Trustpilot said the rating was “excellent.” At the Better Business Bureau, Red Rock got an average rating of 4.75 stars out of 5 across 96 reviews. At Consumer Affairs it got an average rating of 4.9 stars out of 5.
The Better Business Bureau, contacted by MarketWatch, said it had added an alert to its site about the SEC probe into Red Rock. But, it added, “BBB ratings are not a guarantee of a business’s reliability or performance. BBB recommends that consumers consider a business’s BBB rating in addition to all other available information about the business.”
The organization, which provides information about businesses through a rating system and handles consumer complaints, said its standard policy is to check that all reviews are from legitimate customers by contacting the company being reviewed. The BBB does not possess legal or policing powers.
Business-review platform Trustpilot also told MarketWatch it had added an alert to the Red Rock Secured review page.
“Trustpilot is an open, independent review platform, meaning anyone who has had an experience with a business can leave a review — whether positive or negative — on the business’s Trustpilot profile page,” the company said in a statement “We are currently investigating Red Rock Secured to ensure that they are using our platform in line with our business guidelines, and should we find any evidence they are not, we will take the necessary steps to prevent it.”
Alphabet unit
GOOG,
GOOGL,
Google and Consumer Affairs could not be reached for comment.
Deutsche Bank AG will pay $75 million to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit claiming it aided Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday night.
The suit was filed by lawyers on behalf of an anonymous victim and others who accused the financier, who died by suicide in federal lockup in 2019, of sexual abuse and trafficking. The suit claimed Deutsche Bank
DB,
ignored red flags and did business with Epstein for five years despite knowing he was using the money from his accounts to further his sex trafficking.
Wells Fargo & Co. has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a shareholders lawsuit related to its 2016 fake-accounts scandal, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Citing court documents, the Journal reported Monday night that Wells Fargo
WFC,
settled a class-action suit brought by shareholders who claimed bank executives overstated the bank’s progress at cleaning up its risk-management systems and governance in the wake of the scandal.
In a statement to the Journal, Wells Fargo said: “While we disagree with the allegations in this case, we are pleased to have resolved this matter.”
The settlement, which still needs to be approved by a judge, likely would be the 17th-largest ever for a shareholders’ class action, the Journal reported.
Wells Fargo has paid billions in fines and settlements related to the scandal. In December, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.7 billion as a result of alleged widespread mismanagement, and in March, a former Wells Fargo executive accused of overseeing the fake-account scheme pleaded guilty to criminal charges, agreeing to a 16-month prison term and a $17 million fine.
Wells Fargo shares are down 6% year to date and are off 8% over the past 12 months, compared to the S&P 500’s
SPX,
8% gain in 2023 and 3% rise over the past year.
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday night that Republicans should force the government to default if Democrats won’t make spending-cut concessions in the debt-ceiling fight.
Trump made the comments in a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, with Republicans and undecided voters, hosted by CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins. The prime-time event quickly spiraled out of control, with Trump repeating lies about the 2020 election and mocking E. Jean Carroll, who on Tuesday won a defamation suit against him and $5 million in…
Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against embattled Rep. George Santos, CNN reported late Tuesday.
CNN said the charges have been filed under seal and the New York Republican is expected to appear in federal court Wednesday.
It was unclear what charges Santos may be facing, but CNN reported prosecutors have been investigating…
Foreign investors and businesspeople with exposure to China are becoming increasingly unnerved. And for good reason.
In March, Chinese authorities detained an employee of Japanese drug manufacturer Astellas Pharma JP:4503 ALPMY for alleged espionage violations. The Chinese seem confident in their case. Beijing’s ambassador to Japan said there was ample evidence of wrongdoing, and, despite the uproar, the Astellas employee remains detained.
That…
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — A gunman apparently firing at random killed eight people and wounded 14 in a series of villages in Serbia, authorities said, shaking a nation still in the throes of grief over a mass shooting a day earlier. Police arrested a suspect Friday after an all-night manhunt.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić called Thursday’s shootings an attack on the whole nation — and said the person arrested wore a T-shirt with a pro-Nazi slogan on it but did not specify a motive.
The slayings came a day after a 13-year-old boy used his father’s guns to kill eight fellow students and a guard at a school in Belgrade, the capital.
The bloodshed sent shockwaves through a Balkan nation scarred by wars, but unused to mass murders. Though Serbia is awash with weapons left over from the conflicts of the 1990s, Wednesday’s shooting was the first at a school in the country’s modern history.
The last mass shooting before this week was in 2013, when a war veteran killed 13 people in a central Serbian village.
Public figures, politicians and experts appeared successively on TV Friday, desperately seeking to explain the tragedies. The first made the country numb with grief, while the second heightened feelings of insecurity and anxiety over what might come next. As a nationwide period of mourning began, TV screens were filled with people wearing black and music was banned from the airwaves as well as in cafes and restaurants.
“This is a moment when a nation decides whether it will go along a healing path,” Actor Srdjan Timarov said on N1 television. “The only other way is to declare capitulation.”
Late Thursday, an attacker shot at people in three villages near Mladenovac, some 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, south of the capital. Vučić said the assailant targeted people “wherever they were.”
“I heard some tak-tak-tak sounds,” recalled Milan Prokić, a resident of Dubona, near Mladenovac. Prokić said he first thought people were shooting to celebrate a birth, as is tradition in Serbia. “But it wasn’t that. Shame, great shame,” he added.
AP/Armin Durgut
Police said a suspect, identified by the initials U.B., was arrested near the central Serbian town of Kragujevac, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Belgrade.
Authorities released a photo showing a young man in a police car in a blue T-shirt with the slogan “Generation 88” on it. The double eights are often used as shorthand for “Heil Hitler” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
Vučić said the suspect repeated the word “disparagement” but it wasn’t clear what that meant.
The president vowed to the nation in an address that the suspect “will never again see the light of the day.” He referred to the attack as an act of terror and announced tougher gun-control measures, on top of ones put forward by the government a day earlier.
He called for a moratorium on new licenses for all weapons in the next two years, a review of all current licenses, longer prison sentences for those who break the rules and “fierce” punishment for anyone with illegal weapons. But first police will offer an amnesty to encourage people to hand over illegal guns — an action that has had limited success in the past.
“We will disarm Serbia,” Vučić promised, saying the government would outline the new rules on Friday.
Before the second shooting, Serbia spent much of Thursday reeling. Students, many wearing black and carrying flowers, filled streets around the school in central Belgrade as they paid silent homage to slain peers. Serbian teachers’ unions announced protests and strikes to warn about a crisis in the school system and demand changes.
Wednesday’s shooting at the Vladislav Ribnikar school also left seven people hospitalized, six children and a teacher. One girl who was shot in the head remains in life-threatening condition, and a boy is in serious condition with spinal injuries, doctors said Thursday.
Authorities have identified the shooter as Kosta Kecmanović and said he is too young to be charged and tried. He has been placed in a mental hospital, and his father has been detained on suspicion of endangering public security.
Gun ownership is common in Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans: The country has one of the highest number of firearms per capita in the world. And guns are often fired into the air at celebrations in the region.
Experts have repeatedly warned of the danger posed by the number of weapons in Serbia, a highly divided country where convicted war criminals are frequently glorified and violence against minority groups often goes unpunished. They also note that decades of instability stemming from the conflicts of the 1990s, as well as ongoing economic hardship, could trigger such outbursts.
Dragan Popadić, a psychology professor at Belgrade University, told the Associated Press that the school shooting has exposed the level of violence present in society and caused a deep shock.
“People suddenly have been shaken into reality and the ocean of violence that we live in, how it has grown over time and how much our society has been neglected for decades,” he warned. “It is as if flashlights have been lit over our lives and we can no longer just mind our own business.”
A lawsuit filed in Delaware in April against the travel site Tripadvisor and its majority shareholder is highlighting what may be a growing trend: companies seeking to shift their incorporations to Nevada to avoid Delaware’s more stringent and entrenched legal standards.
The suit was filed on behalf of a group of Tripadvisor Inc. TRIP shareholders, who are hoping to persuade the Delaware Chancery Court to stop the company from pushing ahead with board-approved plans to reincorporate in Nevada, arguing their motive is to take…
The pickleball wars appear to be escalating.
The sport, often described as a cross between tennis and ping pong, has exploded in popularity over the past few years. Nearly 9 million Americans are now playing the game, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association reports — a year-over-year increase of 85.7%. Many towns across the U.S. are allocating federal COVID-19 aid to build pickleball courts. And the Wichita City Council recently voted to spend over $6 million on a pickleball complex.
Players…
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday preserved women’s access to a drug used in the most common method of abortion, rejecting lower-court restrictions while a lawsuit continues.
The justices granted emergency requests from the Biden administration and New York–based Danco Laboratories, maker of the drug, called mifepristone. They are appealing a lower-court ruling that would roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone.
The drug has been approved for use in the U.S. since 2000 and more than 5 million people have used it. Mifepristone is used in combination with a second drug, misoprostol, in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.
The court faced a self-imposed Friday night deadline to decide whether women’s access to a widely used abortion pill would remain unchanged or be restricted while a legal challenge to its Food and Drug Administration approval goes on.
The justices have been weighing arguments that allowing restrictions contained in lower-court rulings to take effect would severely disrupt the availability of the drug, mifepristone, which is used in the most common abortion method in the United States.
It has repeatedly been found to be safe and effective, and has been used by more than 5 million women in the U.S. since the FDA approved it in 2000.
The Supreme Court had initially said it would decide by Wednesday whether the restrictions could take effect while the case continues. A one-sentence order signed by Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday gave the justices two additional days, without explanation.
Abortion opponents filed suit in Texas in November, asserting that FDA’s original approval of mifepristone 23 years ago and subsequent changes were flawed.
Senate Judiciary Committee/AP
Further context (March 2023): Trump appointee in single-judge federal district in Texas could bar nationwide access to the abortifacient mifepristone
Also (April 2023): Access to abortion pill in limbo after competing rulings in Texas and Washington
They won a ruling on April 7 by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, revoking FDA approval of mifepristone. The judge, the lone judge in his Amarillo, Texas, federal district, gave the Biden administration and Danco a week to appeal and seek to keep his ruling on hold.
Responding to a quick appeal, two more Trump appointees on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now. But Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Englehardt said most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.
MarketWatch contributed.
Federal prosecutors have leveled a legal dropkick on former pro wrestler Ted DiBiase Jr., charging him with stealing millions of dollars meant to feed needy kids in a Mississippi scandal that has also tarnished the reputation of NFL hall of famer Brett Favre.
From the archives (September 2022): NFL star Brett Favre and Gov. Phil Bryant texted about how to use $5 million of welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium
DiBiase,…
As Silicon Valley Bank was wobbling last month, large account holders with balances exceeding the federal deposit insurance limits panicked, sparked a bank run that ultimately prompted the federal government to step in with a rescue plan, and triggered widespread debate about potential reforms to the federal deposit insurance system.
All that drama, however, was at odds with federal data showing that bank failures stretching back to the start of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis have in aggregate done very little harm…
Some clarity is emerging regarding statements from Biden administration officials that no one making less than $400,000 will see higher audit rates by the Internal Revenue Service, which is about to step up its scrutiny of wealthy taxpayers.
The Inflation Reduction Act — the tax and climate package enacted last summer — earmarked $80 billion for the IRS over the next decade and a half. The money is intended in part to facilitate more audits of corporations and wealthier individuals.
Ahead of the bill’s passage, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged that there would be no increase in the audit rate for households and small businesses with annual incomes below $400,000 “relative to historical levels.”
But Republican critics and other observers have asked what “historical levels” might actually mean.
The audit rate on returns for tax year 2018 is the reference point to keep in mind, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told senators on Wednesday. He emphasized that “there’s no surge coming for workers, retirees and others.”
The IRS audited fewer than 1% of 2018 returns with total positive incomes — the sum of all positive amounts shown for various sources of income reported on an individual income-tax return, which excludes losses — of between $1 and $500,000, according to statistics that the tax agency released last week.
The agency has three years to start an audit from the time it receives a return.
Also read: The IRS wants more people working in tax enforcement. Now it has to find them.
The numbers show that 0.4% of returns for taxpayers earning up to $25,000 were audited. That figure was 0.3% for returns between $200,000 and $500,000 and more than 9% for returns over $10 million, the IRS data show. Six years earlier, more than 13% of returns over $10 million were scrutinized, according to the IRS.
“Help us with understanding what the words ‘historic level’ means,” Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, asked Werfel during a Wednesday budget hearing.
“We will take the most recent final audit rate, and it’s historically low … and we allow that to be the marker for least several years, and then we’re revisit it,” Werfel said. The 2018 audit rates were the newest final rates, he added.
“So the 2018 number is what it’s going to be?” Lankford asked.
“Yes,” Werfel replied.
“Werfel’s explanation that 2018 audit levels will be the reference point is the most detail I’ve heard so far,” Erica York, s senior economist at the Tax Foundation, told MarketWatch. “He did seem to leave open the possibility of revisiting the reference year for ‘historical’ in the future,” she added.
Another open question has been how the $400,000 income threshold will be determined. Months after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, IRS and Treasury officials still hadn’t finalized what counted as $400,000 in income, according to a January Treasury Department watchdog report.
“How are you arriving at this number?” asked Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee. Blackburn’s state has many self-employed entrepreneurs who might appear richer on paper than they actually are, she said. “While they may have a higher gross, their net is very low,” she added.
“We’re going to look at total positive income as our metric,” Werfel said. He later added that “there would be no increased likelihood of an audit if they have less than $400,000 in total positive income.”
The IRS description of total positive income as “the sum of all positive amounts shown for the various sources of income reported on an individual income tax return and, thus, excludes losses” represents, effectively, a tally of income before taxpayers subtract their losses.
Total positive income is a metric the IRS usually applies to categorize audits, the Tax Foundation’s York noted. But one challenge of strict thresholds for more audits, she said, “is that it creates incentives for underreporting income” to stay under the line.
Compared with recent years, there are now more specifics about how the IRS will implement additional audits of higher-income taxpayers, said Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
“But still there are questions,” she noted, about how the agency will treat situations when taxpayers don’t provide full picture of their income.
Read on: Make sure the tax breaks you’re taking now won’t hammer you in retirement
Also: ‘This was a test’: IRS has handled more than 100 million returns already — Tax Day by the numbers
If you used Facebook between May 2007 and December 2022, the social-media giant may owe you some money.
A California judge preliminarily approved a $725 million settlement between Facebook parent Meta Platforms
META,
and users who say the company allowed their data to be viewed or shared by third parties, notably Cambridge Analytica, without their consent.
The judge’s approval was a precursor to the final approval hearing, which will take place in September, but people can begin submitting claims now to potentially get a cash payment.
The $725 million settlement applies to anybody who was a Facebook user in the U.S. between May 24, 2007 and Dec. 22, 2022. The class-action form simply states that people who were Facebook users during that period are eligible. It does not mention any required level of activity on the account.
It’s unclear if someone with multiple Facebook accounts would be entitled to more money than a person with a single account. To find out if you are included in the settlement group, you can email info@FacebookUserPrivacySettlement.com
The claim form must be submitted no later than Aug. 25, 2023.
The form can be completed online or downloaded and mailed to the settlement administrator at the following address: Facebook Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, c/o Settlement Administrator, 1650 Arch St., Suite 2210, Philadelphia, PA 19103.
As is typical with class-action lawsuits, the amount an individual will receive is dependent on a variety of factors.
The settlement form says the payment will vary based on how many people submit claims. Additionally, administrative costs and attorneys’ fees will be deducted from the settlement fund prior to its release.
See also: Mark Zuckerberg’s total 2022 pay rose because of the increased use of private aircraft
“Settlement payments will be distributed as soon as possible if the Court grants Final Approval of the Settlement and after any appeals are resolved,” the claim website notes.
Because Facebook has so many users and because of the 16-year time frame for this settlement, there are millions of people who could submit a claim.
According to data compiled by Statista, total Facebook users in the U.S. numbered roughly 240 million in 2022.
In December 2022, Meta agreed in principle to pay the settlement. At the time, a Meta spokesman said settling the class-action suit was “in the best interest of our community and shareholders.” The company added that it had revamped its privacy approach and “implemented a comprehensive privacy program.”
Despite agreeing to pay the settlement, “Meta expressly denies any liability or wrongdoing,” according to the lawsuit website.
Representatives for Meta didn’t immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment on this story.
See also: NPR’s CEO sayd ‘I have lost my faith in the decision-making’ at Twitter under Elon Musk
The settlement comes as Meta is set to announce another round of layoffs this week.
Meta shares were down 0.95% in the early afternoon on Wednesday and have gained nearly 80% year to date, compared with the S&P 500’s
SPX,
8.11% gain in 2023.
NEW YORK — The Delaware judge overseeing a voting machine company’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News announced late Sunday that he was delaying the start of the trial until Tuesday. He did not cite a reason.
The trial, which has drawn international interest, had been scheduled to start Monday morning with jury selection and opening statements.
The case centers on whether Fox defamed Dominion Voting Systems by spreading false claims that the company rigged the 2020 presidential election to prevent former President Donald Trump’s reelection. Records produced as part of the lawsuit show that many of the network’s hosts and executives didn’t believe the allegations but aired them, anyway.
Representatives for Dominion and for the two entities it’s suing — Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp.
FOX,
— did not immediately return requests for comment on the delay. In his statement, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said only that the trial, including jury selection, would be continued until Tuesday and that he would announce the delay in court on Monday.
That’s when Fox News executives and the network’s star hosts were scheduled to begin answering for their role in spreading doubt about the 2020 presidential election and creating the gaping wound that remains in America’s democracy.
Jurors hearing the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems would have to answer a specific question: Did Fox defame the voting machine company by airing bogus stories alleging that the election was rigged against then-President Donald Trump, even as many at the network privately doubted the false claims being pushed by Trump and his allies?
Yet the broader context looms large. A trial would test press freedom and the reputation of conservatives’ favorite news source. It also would illuminate the flow of misinformation that helped spark the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and continues to fuel Trump’s hopes to regain power in 2024.
Fox News stars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and founder Rupert Murdoch are among the people who had been expected to testify.
Barring a settlement, opening statements are now scheduled for Tuesday.
“This is Christmas Eve for defamation scholars,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor.
If the trial were a sporting event, Fox News would be taking the field on a losing streak, with key players injured and having just alienated the referee. Pretrial court rulings and embarrassing revelations about its biggest names have Fox on its heels.
Court papers released over the past two months show Fox executives, producers and personalities privately disbelieved Trump’s claims of a fraudulent election. But Dominion says Fox News was afraid of alienating its audience with the truth, particularly after many viewers were angered by the network’s decision to declare Democrat Joe Biden the winner in Arizona on election night in November 2020.
Some rulings by the judge have eased Dominion’s path. In a summary judgment, Davis said it was “CRYSTAL clear” that fraud allegations against the company were false. That means trial time won’t have to be spent disproving them at a time when millions of Republicans continue to doubt the 2020 results.
Davis said it also is clear that Dominion’s reputation was damaged, but that it would be up to a jury to decide whether Fox acted with “actual malice” — the legal standard — and, if so, what that’s worth financially.
Fox witnesses would likely testify that they thought the allegations against Dominion were newsworthy, but Davis made it clear that’s not a defense against defamation.
New York law protects news outlets from defamation for expressions of opinion. But Davis methodically went through 20 different times on Fox when allegations against Dominion were discussed, ruling that all of them were fully or partly considered statements of fact, and fair game for a potential libel finding.
“A lawsuit is a little bit like hitting a home run,” said Cary Coglianese, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “You have to go through all of the bases to get there.” The judge’s rulings “basically give Dominion a spot at third base, and all they have to do is come home to win it.”
Both Fox and Dominion are incorporated in Delaware, though Fox News is headquartered in New York and Dominion is based in Denver.
Fox angered Davis this past week when the judge said the network’s lawyers delayed producing evidence and were not forthcoming in revealing Murdoch’s role at Fox News. A Fox lawyer, Blake Rohrbacher, sent a letter of apology to Davis on Friday, saying it was a misunderstanding and not an intention to deceive.
It’s not clear whether that would affect a trial. But it’s generally not wise to have a judge wonder at the outset of a trial whether your side is telling the truth, particularly when truth is the central point of the case, Jones said.
The lawsuit essentially comes down to whether Dominion can prove Fox acted with actual malice by putting something on the air knowing that it was false or acting with a “reckless disregard” for whether it was true. In most libel cases, that is the most difficult hurdle for plaintiffs to get past.
Dominion can point to many examples where Fox figures didn’t believe the charges being made by Trump allies such as Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani. But Fox says many of those disbelievers were not in a position to decide when to air those allegations.
“We think it’s essential for them to connect those dots,” Fox lawyer Erin Murphy said.
If the case goes to trial, the jury will determine whether a powerful figure like Murdoch — who testified in a deposition that he didn’t believe the election-fraud charges — had the influence to keep the accusations off the air.
“Credibility is always important in any trial in any case. But it’s going to be really important in this case,” said Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and the Law at the University of Minnesota.
Kirtley is concerned that the suit may eventually advance to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could use it as a pretext to weaken the actual malice standard that was set in a 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. That, she feels, would be disastrous for journalists.
Dominion’s lawsuit is being closely watched by another voting-technology company with a separate but similar case against Fox News. Florida-based Smartmatic has looked to some rulings and evidence in the Dominion case to try to enhance its own $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit in New York. The Smartmatic case isn’t yet ready for trial but has survived Fox News’ effort to get it tossed out.
Many experts are surprised Fox and Dominion have not reached an out-of-court settlement, though they can at any time. There’s presumably a wide financial gulf. In court papers, Fox contends the $1.6 billion damages claim is a wild overestimate.
Dominion’s motivation may also be to inflict maximum embarrassment on Fox with the peek into the network’s internal communications following the election. Text messages from January 2021 revealed Carlson telling a friend that he passionately hated Trump and couldn’t wait to move on.
Dominion may also seek an apology.
The trial has had no apparent effect on Fox News’ viewership; it remains the top-rated cable network. Fox’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, said earlier this year that he had been banned from covering the lawsuit, but the network has since changed direction. Kurtz discussed the case on his show Sunday, saying he would be in Wilmington for the beginning of the trial.
“The real potential danger is if Fox viewers get the sense that they’ve been lied to. There’s a real downside there,” said Charlie Sykes, founder of the Bulwark website and an MSNBC contributor.
There’s little indication that the case has changed Fox’s editorial direction. Fox has embraced Trump once again in recent weeks following the former president’s indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, and Carlson presented an alternate history of Capitol riot, based on tapes given to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
Just because there has been limited discussion of the Dominion suit on Fox doesn’t mean its fans are unaware of it, said Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the conservative watchdog Media Research Center.
“There’s a certain amount of tribal reaction to this,” Graham said. “When all of the other networks are thrilling to revealing text messages and emails, they see this as the latest attempt by the liberal media to undermine Fox News. There’s going to be a rally-around-Rupert effect.”
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The San Francisco Police Department on Thursday arrested Nima Momeni, 38, of Emeryville, Calif., for allegedly stabbing to death tech executive Bob Lee.
Mission Local, an independent local news site, first reported the arrest.
City officials held a press conference Thursday afternoon, saying that the arrest occurred earlier in Emeryville,…
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Louisville bank employee armed with a rifle opened fire at his workplace Monday morning, killing four people — including a close friend of Kentucky’s governor — while livestreaming the attack on Instagram, authorities said.
Police arrived as shots were still being fired inside Old National Bank and killed the shooter in an exchange of gunfire, Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel said. The city’s mayor, Craig Greenberg, called the attack “an evil act of targeted violence.”
The shooting, the 15th mass killing in the country this year, comes just two weeks after a former student killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, about 160 miles to the south. That state’s governor and his wife also had friends killed in that shooting.
In Louisville, the chief identified the shooter as 25-year-old Connor Sturgeon, who she said was livestreaming during the attack.
“That’s tragic to know that that incident was out there and captured,” she said.
Meta
META,
the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, said in a statement that it had “quickly removed the livestream of this tragic incident this morning.”
Social company companies have imposed tougher rules over the past few years to prohibit violent and extremist content. They have set up systems to remove posts and streams that violate those restrictions, but shocking material like the Louisville shooting continues to slip through the cracks, prompting lawmakers and other critics to lash out at the technology industry for slipshod safeguards and moderation policies.
Nine people, including two police officers, were treated for injuries from the Louisville shooting, University of Louisville Hospital spokeswoman Heather Fountaine said in an email. One of the officers, 26-year-old Nickolas Wilt, graduated from the police academy on March 31. He was in critical condition after being shot in the head and having surgery, the police chief said. At least three patients had been discharged.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said he lost one of his closest friends in the shooting — Tommy Elliott — in the building not far from the minor league ballpark Louisville Slugger Field and Waterfront Park.
“Tommy Elliott helped me build my law career, helped me become governor, gave me advice on being a good dad,” said Beshear, his voice shaking with emotion. “He’s one of the people I talked to most in the world, and very rarely were we talking about my job. He was an incredible friend.”
Also killed in the shooting were Josh Barrick, Jim Tutt and Juliana Farmer, police said.
“These are irreplaceable, amazing individuals that a terrible act of violence tore from all of us,” the governor said.
It was the second time that Beshear was personally touched by a mass tragedy since becoming governor.
In late 2021, one of the towns devastated by tornadoes that tore through Kentucky was Dawson Springs, the hometown of Beshear’s father, former two-term Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear. Andy Beshear frequently visited Dawson Springs as a boy and has talked emotionally about his father’s hometown.
Beshear spoke as the investigation in Louisville continued and police searched for a motive. Crime scene investigators could be seen marking and photographing numerous bullet holes in the windows near the bank’s front door.
As part of the investigation, police descended on the neighborhood where the suspect lived, about 5 miles south of the downtown shooting. The street was blocked as federal and local officers talked to residents. One home was cordoned off with caution tape. Kami Cooper, who lives in the neighborhood, said she didn’t recall ever meeting the suspect but said it’s an unnerving feeling to have lived on the same street as someone who could do such a thing.
“I’m almost speechless. You see it on the news but not at home,” Cooper said. “It’s unbelievable, it could happen here, somebody on my street.”
A man who fled the building during the shooting told WHAS-TV that the shooter opened fire with a long rifle in a conference room in the back of the building’s first floor.
“Whoever was next to me got shot — blood is on me from it,” he told the news station, pointing to his shirt. He said he fled to a break room and shut the door.
Deputy Police Chief Paul Humphrey said the actions of responding police officers undoubtedly saved lives.
“This is a tragic event,” he said. “But it was the heroic response of officers that made sure that no more people were more seriously injured than what happened.”
Just a few hours later and blocks away, an unrelated shooting killed one man and wounded a woman outside a community college, police said.
The 15 mass shootings this year are the most during the first 100 days of a calendar year since 2009, when 16 had occurred by April 10, according to a mass killings database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University.
Going back to 2006, the first year for which data has been compiled, the years with the most mass killings were 2019 and 2022, with 45 and 42 mass killings recorded during the entire calendar year. The pace in 2009 slowed later in the year, with 32 mass killings recorded that year.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal judge in Texas on Friday ordered a hold on the U.S. approval of the abortion medication mifepristone, throwing into question access to the nation’s most common method of abortion in a ruling that waved aside decades of scientific approval.
The abortion drug has been widely used in the U.S. since 2000 and there is essentially no precedent for a lone judge overruling the medical decisions of the Food and Drug Administration. Mifepristone is one of two drugs used for medication abortion in the United…