“Since 2019, Amazon.com, Inc. has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers by manipulating the ‘auctions’ that it uses to set the price of ads on its platform,” the lawsuit said. “Amazon represents, and advertisers believe, that competitive auctions set the prices for advertising on its leading e-commerce website. But, in reality, Amazon overrides and replaces the actual auction results with higher prices set by Amazon to increase its profits.”

The FTC said it obtained internal documents and messages that reveal how Amazon secretly inflated auction prices for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display advertisements that appear alongside results seen by consumers when they search for a product. The FTC investigation began in 2024.

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On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration.

The lawsuit, filed in March in a California district court, accused the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against Anthropic for setting “red lines,” or unacceptable military use cases of its AI technology.

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” Judge Rita F. Lin, a district judge in the northern district of California, wrote in the ruling …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Erik Santana-Garcia, 34, of Salt Lake City, Utah, was sentenced July 30 to 20 years in federal prison without parole, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, for interstate transportation of a minor with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity, possession of child pornography and illegally reentering the US following a prior deportation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.

He pleaded guilty March 3, according to court documents.

ICE LINES UP TO BOOT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CHILD SEX PREDATOR AFTER BOGUS ASYLUM CLAIM, EARLY PRISON RELEASE

Santana-Garcia transported a minor across state lines intending to engage in illegal sexual activity with the child, prosecutors said.

He left Utah with the victim on Nov. 10, 2024, and intended to take the child to New York, but Oak Grove, Missouri, police located the pair two days later. Investigators with Homeland Security Investigations later discovered child pornography depicting a second minor on a phone seized from Santana-Garcia at the time of his arrest, prosecutors said.

Santana-Garcia had previously been deported and removed from the US multiple times, most recently on March 6, 2019, according to prosecutors.

“Now, Erik Santana-Garcia’s going to spend the next 20 years in a federal prison because ICE HSI Kansas City, ICE HSI Salt Lake City, ICE HSI Billings and local police from Oak Grove, Missouri, nabbed him,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement wrote on X.

MORE THAN 100 HAITIAN IMMIGRANTS WITH VIOLENT OFFENSE AND SEX CRIME CONVICTIONS DEPORTED: DHS

ICE said Santana-Garcia will be deported to Mexico after completing his prison sentence.

“This criminal illegal alien should have stayed in his own nation, because under @POTUS Trump, the United States has ZERO tolerance for child predators or illegal aliens who sneak across our borders,” the agency said.

The Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife recently shared body camera footage of an officer confronting Connor Seifert, 27, in June in Pierce County, Washington.

“You know your shark rules,” the officer could be heard on the video telling Seifert. “You can’t fully or partially remove sixgill from the water. 

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“When you wrestle a sixgill to shore like that, you hop on its back, you expose its gills to the air,” the officer continued. “You know as well as anybody else does that Puget Sound is a nursery for these sharks. There has been a direct correlation between catching these sharks in this stage in their lives and the mortality of the pups inside the moms.”

He added, “Once they exhaust themselves being fought to shore, then all of their babies die. And then, sooner than you know it, you’re not going to have sixgill and sevengill returning to Puget Sound anymore.”

This came after months of following Seifert’s movements and his online posts, with officers finally setting up surveillance so they could catch him making an illegal catch.

SUSPECT IN VIRAL MONK SEAL HARASSMENT VIDEO SAYS HE WAS DOXXED AS FEDERAL COURT FIGHT BEGINS

He has been charged in Pierce County with nine counts of unlawful recreational fishing in the second degree and one count of making a false or misleading statement to a public servant. The first is a misdemeanor and the second is a gross misdemeanor.

Misdemeanors carry up to a $1,000 fine and 90 days in jail if found guilty and gross demeanors carry up to a $5,000 fine and a year in jail.

“Fishing for sixgill and sevengill sharks is unlawful, and unfortunately, officers are seeing a growing number of online posts showing these sharks targeted and then unlawfully removed from or partially removed from the water,” the department said in a post about Seifert’s charges.

MASSACHUSETTS HOMEOWNERS STUNNED AFTER TOWN WARNS JULY 4 FLAGS THREATEN ENDANGERED BIRDS

Seifert claimed that he hadn’t been targeting the sharks and that he had accidentally caught them, but videos he posted to social media that allegedly showed him holding a shark’s mouth open, while sitting on its back and holding it by its tail on the shore while it attempted to get away paint another picture.

The department said it has gotten 14 complaints about Seifert, mainly connected to his allegedly targeting the sharks.

“Puget Sound acts like a nursey for sixgill and sevengill sharks before they head out to the ocean, the department said.

The department added, “This is one of the primary reasons why it is unlawful to target these sharks locally, as the anglers fishing for these creatures are targeting them during a highly volatile era in the animals’ lives.”

Both shark species are listed as “Species of Greatest Conservation Need” in Washington State.

Bluntnose sixgills are categorized as “near threatened” and broadnose sevengills are “vulnerable,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.