In an announcement Tuesday, the US Department of Energy reversed a last-minute ban on the import of certain electrical equipment from China. This announcement comes as part of a push to increase electrical grid security. China is one of the world’s major manufacturers of electrical grid equipment, and energy regulators cite the need to modernize [...]

Ten Democratic Senators have delivered a letter to US President Joe Biden urging him to support temporarily waiving intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19 vaccines. The letter, delivered Thursday, claims that granting the temporary patent waiver would allow for countries to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines locally and increase vaccination rates in poorer nations, as well as [...]

German regulators in Hamburg announced on Tuesday that they are seeking an order preventing Facebook from enforcing its new terms of service. In January, Facebook announced that WhatsApp users in Europe must consent to data sharing between WhatsApp and other Facebook companies by mid-May. This change would expand the use of customers’ data to marketing [...]

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) fined Alibaba 18 billion yuan, or approximately 4 percent of the company’s 2019 revenues Friday, after a months-long investigation. This fine, the largest in the history of Chinese antitrust law, follows the unexpected interruption of Ant Group’s IPO in November. Ant Group is an affiliate company of Alibaba. [...]

The US Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in favor of Google on Monday in Google v. Oracle, holding that Google’s use of Oracle’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) was fair use. Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement after Google used portions of Oracle’s Java API code in the development of their Android operating system. APIs allow for [...]

The US Supreme Court granted certiorari Monday in a case challenging the Kentucky attorney general’s ability to defend the state’s restrictive abortion law in court. The law was originally defended at the trial and appellate courts by Kentucky’s health secretary. However, the health secretary stopped defending the law in court after the law was struck [...]

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced new sanctions against UK institutions and individuals on Friday, following criticism of China’s behavior in the northwestern Xinjiang province and Western sanctions against party officials in the province. Earlier last week, the US, UK, Canada, and European Union sanctioned Wang Junzheng, the Secretary of the Party Committee of [...]

Caesars Entertainment, one of the largest gaming companies in the United States owning more than 50 properties globally, sued more than 36 of its insurers on Monday in US federal court in the District of Nevada. The complaint alleges that each of the named insurers provided “all risk” coverage to Caesars Entertainment but have not [...]

The US Supreme Court granted certiorari Monday in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. In August 2020 the First Circuit reversed Tsarnaev’s convictions on three charges of carrying a firearm during crimes of violence and remanded the case on the question of whether [...]

The Georgia House of Representatives approved a bill Monday, HB 531, restricting access to absentee ballots, early voting and ballot drop boxes. These new restrictions follow Joe Biden’s upset win of Georgia in November, as well as the wins of Senators Warnock and Ossof in January. Many have attributed the recent success of Democrats in [...]