The US Court of Federal Claims on Thursday ruled against Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin in a lawsuit contesting NASA’s decision to award a lucrative contract to rival SpaceX. NASA awarded SpaceX the contract to develop the agency’s Human Landing System in April. The contract, worth $2.9 billion, engages SpaceX to transport NASA astronauts to the [...]

Judge Carl J. Nichols of the US District Court for the District of Columbia has dismissed claims against prominent technology companies Apple, Google, Tesla, Dell and Microsoft related to child labor. The lawsuit concerned the role of these companies in cobalt mining operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A class of child laborers [...]

Facebook announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its facial recognition program. As part of the closure, it will delete more than one billion users’ biometric data. This constitutes more than one-third of Facebook’s user base. Although the company will delete user data, it intends to keep Deep Face, the facial recognition software it developed. [...]

China’s new law protecting online user data privacy took effect on Monday. The law was passed by the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body, in mid-August. The new law, called the Personal Protection Information Law, carries the strongest consumer protection requirements globally to date. Fines can reach 50 million Chinese yuan (about $7.8 million U.S. [...]

A German steelmaker argued before the US Court of International Trade (CIT), a specialized trial court, that the US had improperly classified an EU and German climate change program as an illegal subsidy. The US Department of Commerce (DOC) placed duties on German forged steel fluid end blocks in May 2020. The steel products are imported [...]

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Thursday sanctioned three Lebanese individuals for involvement in corruption in Lebanon. The designated individuals are two businessmen, Jihad al-Arab and Dany Khoury, and a member of parliament, Jamil Sayyed. The individuals named by OFAC were added to the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, which bars US [...]

White House Counsel Dana Remus rejected Monday a second attempt by former President Donald Trump to block the release of certain records requested by the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The former president sought to use the power of executive privilege to block the release [...]

The State Council of the People’s Republic of China announced it will expand property taxation to unnamed regions around the nation. Currently, only residential property in Shanghai and Chongqing is subject to a property tax, since 2011. Historically, China has eschewed the property tax to raise funds. However, President Xi Jinping has sought to implement a [...]

New Zealand passed the Financial Sector (Climate-related Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Bill on Thursday, which requires financial institutions holding more than NZ $1 billion (about US $715 million) to make mandatory disclosures regarding the climate risks and opportunities of their businesses. The goal of the legislation, according to Climate Change Minister James Shaw, is [...]

The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) released an interim final rule on Thursday adding cybersecurity technologies to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The EAR limits export and reexport of listed technology, products, and raw material, typically for national security reasons. In this case, the cybersecurity technologies in question are being [...]