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The District of Columbia has sued Amazon, accusing the online retail giant of anticompetitive practices in its treatment of sellers on its platform. The practices have raised prices for consumers and stifled innovation and choice in the online retail market, the DC attorney general alleges in an antitrust suit. The suit filed this week in the District of Columbia court maintains that Amazon has fixed online retail prices through contract provisions and policies it applies to third-party sellers. It alleges these provisions and policies prevent sellers that offer products on Amazon. com from offering their products at lower prices or on better terms on any other online platform, including their own websites. “We filed this antitrust lawsuit to put an end to Amazon’s illegal control of prices across the online…

The CEO of America’s second-largest auto company is calling for the federal government to set standards for fully or partially automated vehicles to tighten the safety of electronic driving systems. In urging federal regulation, Ford CEO Jim Farley becomes the highest-profile auto executive to publicly recognize a need to more closely monitor the emerging technology, which is becoming more prevalent on America’s roadways just as questions are being raised about the potential risks to motorists. In limited areas, companies are beginning to deploy fully autonomous ride-hailing services. Farley’s statements, in an interview, follow increased scrutiny by regulators of Tesla’s partially automated “Autopilot” driver-assist system, which has been involved in a series of high-profile crashes. Tesla also is using selected owners to test its “Full Self-Driving” software on public roads. “Absolutely,”…

Virgin Galactic made its first rocket-powered flight from New Mexico to the fringe of space in a manned shuttle, as the company forges toward offering tourist flights to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. High above the desert in a cloudless sky, the VSS Unity ignited its rocket to hurtle the ship and two pilots toward space. A live feed by NASASpaceFlight.com showed the ship accelerating upward and confirmed a landing later via radar. Virgin Galactic announced that its VSS Unity shuttle accelerated to three times the speed of sound and reached an altitude of just over 55 miles (89 kilometers) above sea level before making its gliding return through the atmosphere. British billionaire and Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said the flight and landing bring the roughly…

Godzilla vs. Kong Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), an anthropological linguist for the secret organization Monarch, is persuaded by geologist and cartographer Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård) to lure the ape Kong into the Hollow Earth, where it is hoped he will find a power source for a weapon to wield against Godzilla. FIVE FACTS: 1. This film is a sequel to both 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. 2. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is itself the direct follow-up to 2014’s Godzilla. 3. While the 2014 film was directed by Gareth Edwards, King of the Monsters was directed by Michael Dougherty and Godzilla vs. Kong by Adam Wingard. 4. Wingard said he gave this movie a runtime of just under two hours because he…

Online shopping giant Amazon is buying MGM, the movie and TV studio behind James Bond, “Legally Blonde” and “Shark Tank,” with the hopes of filling its video streaming service with more stuff to watch. Amazon is paying $8.45 billion for MGM, making it the company’s second-largest acquisition after it bought grocer Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017. The deal is the latest in the media industry that’s aimed at boosting streaming services to compete against Netflix and Disney+. AT&T and Discovery announced last week that they would combine media companies, creating a powerhouse that includes HGTV, CNN, Food Network and HBO. Amazon doesn’t say how many people watch its Prime Video streaming service, but more than 200 million people have access to it because they pay for Prime…

A growing number of public schools are using mascots, food trucks and prize giveaways to create a pep-rally atmosphere aimed at encouraging students to get vaccinated against the coronavirus before summer vacation. Districts from California to Michigan are offering free prom tickets and deploying mobile vaccination teams to schools to inoculate students 12 and up so everyone can return to classrooms in the fall. They are also enlisting students who have gotten shots to press their friends to do the same. Officials are concerned that once school lets out, it will be even tougher to get enough teens vaccinated in time to guarantee widespread immunity on campuses. The massive effort has just gotten underway because it was only two weeks ago that federal regulators authorized the Pfizer vaccine for children…

A Russian man was sentenced to what amounted to time already served and will be deported after pleading guilty to trying to pay a Tesla employee $500,000 to install computer malware at the company’s Nevada electric battery plant in a bid to steal company secrets for ransom. Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, appearing by videoconference from jail, apologized after U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno acknowledged the attempted hack was not successful and the company network was not compromised. “I’m sorry for my decision. I regret it,” the 27-year-old Kriuchkov said through a Russian-language court interpreter. Chris Frey, his court-appointed attorney, said Kriuchkov speaks fluent English, but the judge provided the interpreter anyway. Kriuchkov said the nine months he has been in U.S. custody made him reflect on the pain he…

If you post a photo to social media and you don’t know how many people liked it, did you really post it? Instagram and Facebook users can now find out. Those on both services will be able to hide the numbers that show how many people liked their posts and photos. Instagram began hiding likes in 2019 as part of an effort to make people’s time on the app less stressful and depressing. While many users welcomed the feature, others, including some influencers, worried it might take away from the social media experience. At the time, the platform didn’t give users a choice to hide or unhide the like counts, which didn’t sit well with some users. Now, after a test the company announced last month, users will be able…

General Motors now says it will support efforts by the United Auto Workers union to organize employees at two U.S. electric vehicle battery factories that it’s building in Ohio and Tennessee with a joint-venture partner. The company’s statement this week about the plants departs from its past stance that the joint venture, called Ultium LLC, would decide on a bargaining strategy. But it falls into line with President Joe Biden’s promise to create good-paying union jobs in the transition from combustion vehicles to electric. It also comes after the UAW has made strong statements that Detroit-based GM and crosstown rival Ford have a “moral obligation” to pay top union wages at joint-venture battery plants. Experts say the union’s future could be imperiled if it can’t represent workers at the plants…

As more companies start selling tickets to space, a question looms: Who gets to call themselves an astronaut? It’s already a complicated issue and about to get more so as the wealthy snap up spacecraft seats and even entire flights for themselves and their entourages. Astronauts? Amateur astronauts? Space tourists? Space sightseers? Rocket riders? Or as the Russians have said for decades, spaceflight participants? NASA’s new boss Bill Nelson doesn’t consider himself an astronaut even though he spent six days orbiting Earth in 1986 aboard space shuttle Columbia — as a congressman. “I reserve that term for my professional colleagues,” Nelson recently told The Associated Press. Computer game developer Richard Garriott — who paid his way to the International Space Station in 2008 with the Russians — hates the space…

All I Know So Far: Setlist P!nk For this companion album tying in with a new documentary film telling her life story, Pink belts out live renditions of various hits from the pop-rock singer’s back catalog. The setlist includes longstanding favorites like “Just Like a Pill” and “Who Knew”, as well as the title track. FIVE FACTS: 1. The album includes “Cover Me in Sunshine”, a duet with Pink’s daughter Willow Sage Hart. 2. This was the first single released from the album, with the title track serving as its second single. 3. The documentary Pink: All I Know So Far was released on Amazon Prime Video on May 21, 2021. 4. The documentary largely comprises footage of Pink on her Beautiful World Trauma Tour, which ran from March 2018…

Many hospital beds are full. Waiting lists for outpatient treatment are bulging. And teens and adults seeking help for eating disorders are often finding it takes months to get an appointment. The pandemic created treacherous conditions for eating disorders, leading to a surge of new cases and relapses that is not abating as restrictions are loosened and COVID-19 cases subside in many places, doctors and other specialists say. “We are absolutely seeing massive increases,” said Jennifer Wildes, an associate psychiatry professor and director of an outpatient eating disorders program at the University of Chicago Medicine. Some patients are waiting four to five months to get treatment such as psychotherapy and sometimes medication. Waits usually lasted only a few weeks pre-pandemic, Wildes said. Her program is treating about 100 patients, a…

Europe’s top human rights court ruled this week that British mass surveillance and intelligence-gathering practices breached human rights laws, in a partial victory for civil rights groups that had challenged the practices exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights upheld a 2018 ruling by the court’s lower chamber that found some aspects of British surveillance activities violated provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights aimed at safeguarding Europeans’ rights to privacy. The court’s 17 judges unanimously agreed that wasn’t enough independent scrutiny of processes used by British intelligence services to sift through billions of calls, emails, text messages and other data and digital communications intercepted in bulk, resulting in violations of the right to privacy and freedom…

The messaging app WhatsApp has sued the Indian government seeking to defend its users’ privacy and stop new rules that would require it to make messages “traceable” to external parties. WhatsApp filed the lawsuit Wednesday in the Delhi High Court. It is arguing that government rules regarding the traceability of messages are unconstitutional and undermine the fundamental right to privacy. The company currently uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging service, which encrypts messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and receiver are able to read the messages sent between them. The lawsuit follows sweeping regulations for technology companies announced in February that hold them more accountable for content shared on their platforms. A 90-day grace period for complying with the rules ended Wednesday. “Civil society…

The judge who will decide a case challenging Apple’s stranglehold on its iPhone app store indicated on Monday she would like to promote more competition but without dismantling a commission system that reaps billions of dollars for the technology powerhouse. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers isn’t likely to issue a decision until this summer. But she opened a window into her thoughts during a three-hour session with lawyers for Apple and its adversary, Epic Games, during the final day of a three-week trial in Oakland, California. Gonzalez Rogers’ line of questioning suggested she sides with much of the defense that Apple has mounted to justify the 15% to 30% commissions it collects for in-app transactions on the iPhone to help pay for the technology powering its devices. Epic Games,…

A REVOLUTION THAT WILL HAVE IMPLICATIONS FOR ALL OF OUR LIVES It won’t exactly be news to many of our readers that the coronavirus crisis has truly upended our world – and in the process, threatened to bring about not only significant changes in many areas, but outright revolution. One of those areas is our relationship with technology, as anyone who has attended work meetings or yoga classes via Zoom since the onset of the pandemic can attest. But has the COVID-19 era been a story of dramatic digital transformation for all of us, or just some of us? And what’s next? Certainly, if your experience of the pandemic has largely been one of being confined at home hammering away at a laptop many miles from your employer’s brick-and-mortar office,…

The White House is pushing a new reason to swipe right: vaccination badges and “super swipes” for people who’ve gotten their coronavirus shots. The Biden administration said it’s teaming up with dating apps to showcase the benefits of getting a shot. Apps like Hinge, Tinder, Match and Bumble are offering special incentives to people who roll up their sleeves, including badges showing vaccination status and free access to premium content. BLK and Chispa will boost profiles of those who are vaccinated, to make them more visible to potential matches. And OKCupid will even let users filter out potential partners based on whether they’ve gotten a vaccine. The White House says the apps will also direct users to learn how to get vaccinated, including connecting them with educational materials and information…

A headline and a letter draw a big city federal agent, Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), back to his hometown of Kiewarra after 20 years away in the compelling Australian crime drama “ The Dry.” His childhood friend Luke (Martin Dingle Wall) is presumed to have murdered his wife and young son before killing himself. Only the infant was spared. A note from Luke’s father, Gerry (Bruce Spence) implores Aaron to come to the funeral, alluding to a lie he knows they told. Luke’s parents want Aaron to look into it: The mother doesn’t believe that he could have done it; The father worries that he did. And Aaron is reluctant to stay. Twenty years ago, when he was just a teenager, he left the town after one of his and…

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill this week that seeks to punish social media platforms that remove “conservative ideas” from their sites, though it is not clear if it would pass constitutional muster because it might violate the First Amendment. The new law will enable the state to fine large social media companies $250,000 a day if they remove an account of a statewide political candidate, and $25,000 a day if they remove an account of someone running for a local office. It takes effect July 1. “Some of these massive, massive companies in Silicon Valley are exerting a power over our population that really has no precedent in American history,” DeSantis said during a bill-signing ceremony at Florida International University in Miami. “One of their major missions…

German regulators have launched an investigation into Google’s position in the market, and how the search engine and advertising giant handles user data. The Federal Cartel Office, or Bundeskartellamt, said this week that it has started proceedings against Google entities in Germany, Ireland and California based on new provisions in German competition law that apply to large digital companies. Similar probes were launched into the activities of Facebook and Amazon in recent months. Google denied that its practices breach German competition rules. Under provisions which came into force in January, the Federal Cartel Office can ban companies that are of “paramount significance for competition across markets” from engaging in practices deemed to be anti-competitive. “Due to the large number of digital services offered by Google, such as the Google search…

The Biden administration’s solar power ambitions are colliding with complaints the global industry depends on Chinese raw materials that might be produced by forced labor. A big hurdle is polysilicon, used to make photovoltaic cells for solar panels. The global industry gets 45% of its supply from Xinjiang, the northwestern region where the ruling Communist Party is accused of mass incarceration of minorities and other abuses. Other parts of China supply 35%. Only 20% comes from U.S. and other producers. Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, says Washington is deciding whether to keep solar products from Xinjiang out of U.S. markets. That sets up a conflict with President Joe Biden’s plans to cut climate-changing carbon emissions by promoting solar and other renewable energy while also reducing costs. In Xinjiang, more than…