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      Google Makes History With Rapid-Fire Antitrust Losses

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      Within a year, two federal judges declared the tech giant a monopoly in search and ad technology. The tide may be turning for antitrust.Silicon Valley’s tech giants have long regarded antitrust scrutiny as an irritating cost of doing business. There will be investigations, filings, depositions and even lawsuits.Yet courts move slowly, while technology rushes ahead. Time works to the companies’ advantage, as the political winds shift and presidential administrations change. That dynamic often opens the door to light-touch settlements.But the stakes rose sharply for Google on Thursday, when a federal judge ruled that the company had acted to illegally to build a monopoly in some of its online advertising technology. In August, another federal judge found that Google had engaged in anticompetitive behavior to protect its monopoly in online search.Antitrust experts said two big antitrust wins for the government against a single company in such a short time appeared to have no precedent.“Two courts have reached similar conclusions in product markets that go to the heart of Google’s business,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “That has to be seen as a real threat.”The Google decisions are part of a wave of current antitrust cases challenging the power of the biggest tech companies. This week, the trial began in a suit by the F.T.C. claiming that Meta, formerly Facebook, cemented an illegal monopoly in social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Blames Boasberg for Escalating Tensions Between Courts and White House

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      After attacking judges and repeatedly sidestepping their orders, the Trump administration has accused a federal judge in Washington of escalating tensions between the judicial and executive branches by seeking to hold the White House accountable for its courtroom behavior.The accusation against the judge, James E. Boasberg, came in a court filing early Friday morning by the Justice Department. In it, department lawyers asked the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg to prevent him from opening an expansive contempt inquiry into whether the White House violated an order he issued in March to stop flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under the authority of a powerful wartime statute.Much of the filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia read like a normal legal brief, laying out the government’s challenge to a judicial order it did not like. But in its opening line, department lawyers made clear that they believed Judge Boasberg’s recent threat to open criminal contempt proceedings in the deportation case represented another salvo in an increasingly bitter battle between the White House and the courts.“‘Occasions for constitutional confrontation between the two branches should be avoided whenever possible,’” the department lawyers wrote, failing to mention their own role in fostering such confrontations. “The district court’s criminal contempt order instead escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core executive prerogatives.”The Justice Department’s attempt to blame Judge Boasberg for raising the temperature came as another federal judge, in another deportation case, has opened her own high-stakes inquiry into whether the administration has violated court orders.In that case, Judge Paula Xinis announced on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Maryland that the administration in the next two weeks would have to answer questions about why it had so far apparently failed to comply with directions from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from the same Salvadoran prison to which the Venezuelan migrants had been sent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the FSU Shooting

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      Two people were killed and six others were injured when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire near the student union building, the police said.Two people died and six others were injured at Florida State University in Tallahassee on Thursday when a 20-year-old gunman armed with a handgun opened fire near the student union, law enforcement officials said.The suspect was shot and wounded by police officers after he disregarded their commands, the authorities said. He was taken to the hospital and identified as a student and the son of a local sheriff’s deputy.Officials were working on “multiple crime scenes” at the Florida State campus and dealing with at least “hundreds” of witnesses, said Chief Lawrence E. Revell of the Tallahassee Police Department, the lead investigative agency.Here is what we know.The shooting happened near the student union building.At around 11:50 a.m., gunfire erupted near the student union building at Florida State, a public university with an enrollment of more than 43,000, eight days before the last day of classes for the spring semester. The gunman used a handgun, law enforcement officials said during an afternoon news conference.Officers from the university’s Police Department responded. When the gunman did not comply with their commands, they shot and wounded him. He was taken into custody and to the hospital, where he invoked his right to remain silent, Chief Revell said.The chief said the suspect was also armed with a shotgun but added that it was unclear whether he had used it in the attack. The police believe that he acted alone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NYT Crossword Answers for April 18, 2025

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      Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis open our solving weekend with a spirited themeless puzzle.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — This is Greg Snitkin’s third crossword in The New York Times, and Glenn Davis’s debut.Mr. Snitkin and Mr. Davis offer a puzzle packed with lively entries that gave me a real run for my money. Their long, stacked entries are all fairly crunchy, especially at 1A, which is also a debut.One thing that solvers may notice is a dupe in the grid. I won’t mention which entries duplicate a word, but if you are just joining us, that is usually a no-no in construction. I asked the puzzle editors about it, and they said that it was a duplicate, but that the two phrases were compelling enough to leave them as is in the grid.Tricky Clues15A. This is a good example of how a crossword clue is not a definition. Someone can be [Solitary] without being ANTISOCIAL, but being ANTISOCIAL means that the person prefers to be alone. Remember, this is a Friday puzzle, where most of the clues are not straightforward.17A. Adding the cultural suffix “-core” suggests a vibe or a trend. Crosswordcore, which I just made up, means that someone enjoys black and white squares in their wardrobe and décor. The [Trend that involves pink accessories and décor] is BARBIECORE.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mass Layoffs Hit Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

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      The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Thursday to a large swath of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just days after a federal appeals court pared back an injunction that had prevented the agency’s leaders from carrying out plans to fire nearly all of the bureau’s workers.The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear, but by late afternoon, hundreds of workers across all of the agency’s major divisions had received reduction-in-force notices. Fired employees were told they would lose access to their email accounts and the agency’s work systems on Friday evening.A legal filing Thursday evening by the consumer bureau’s staff union estimated that the terminations could hit as many as 1,500 of the bureau’s 1,700 employees. “Entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the union said in its filing to the Federal District Court in Washington.Representatives of the consumer bureau did not respond to a request for comment.The bureau, which was created by Congress in 2011, monitors banks and other lenders. Since it was established, the watchdog agency has returned $21 billion to defrauded consumers through refunds and debt cancellation, according to government figures.On Wednesday, Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer, sent an all-staff memo laying out new priorities. The bureau will significantly reduce its enforcement and compliance examination work, and “deprioritize” oversight of student loans, medical debt, digital payments and peer-to-peer lending, he wrote.Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office leader who is also the consumer bureau’s acting director, has frozen nearly all of the agency’s activity and sought to eliminate almost all of its staff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the Gunman in the Florida State Shooting

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      The gunman accused of killing at least two people and injuring six others on Thursday in a shooting at Florida State University is a current student at the school and his mother is a Leon County sheriff’s deputy, officials said.The shooter was identified by the police as Phoenix Ikner, 20. Chief Lawrence E. Revell of the Tallahassee, Fla., Police Department said the man accused used his mother’s personal handgun in the shooting.The authorities said the attacker appeared to have been acting alone. He was in the hospital on Thursday, after being shot and wounded by responding officers for failing to obey their commands.Few details about the gunman emerged in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Calls to his family and friends on Thursday mostly went unanswered.The man accused of the shooting graduated in 2022 from Lincoln High School, a public school in Tallahassee. He was a member of the Leon County Sheriff’s Office Youth Advisory Council in 2021-2022.According to the sheriff’s office website, the program is an opportunity for members to help address issues facing young people in their communities. Eligible students must be a rising sophomore, junior or senior at a high school in Leon County, have limited unexcused absences and a minimum grade point average of 2.0.Jacob West, 18, was part of the same youth advisory council with the suspect. Mr. West said he was shocked to hear the suspect’s name on the news and double-checked his phone to confirm it was the same person. He described the man accused as always “in good spirits,” helpful and always proposing “really good ideas to help Leon County.”“To hear what had happened was absolutely just heartbreaking,” said Mr. West.When they were in the youth advisory council together, the suspect was interested in car-racing video games and Minecraft, and he was passionate about vehicles, Mr. West said. The two would talk about the program, as well as pickup trucks and school, Mr. West said.“He never spoke about guns or anything,” Mr. West said.The suspect had told Mr. West that he was considering a career in law enforcement, but toward the end of their time with the youth advisory council, he said his interest in the profession had waned, Mr. West recalled. Mr. West said he left the program early, and that the two texted briefly afterward but had not been in touch since.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Pride and Dread in Harvard Yard as Trump Wars With the University

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      Students on Thursday protested the president’s attacks on Harvard, but at town hall meetings, defiance mixed with uncertainty as faculty members examined the toll of the White House’s actions.For four days, Harvard University’s name had been in the headlines, heroic to some, villainous to others — after the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning stood up and said no to the demands of President Trump, and then suffered his wrath.But when leaders of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health convened a town hall meeting on Thursday morning, resistance or acquiescence was not the question of the moment, nor was defiance the prevailing mood. The school’s leaders laid out their dire financial circumstances to a stunned and overwhelmed audience of about 1,000 students and faculty and staff members, near the end of a week of unprecedented federal aggression.They had no good news to share.“It’s like you’re hunkering down for the beginning of a war, where you think you’re going to be losing a lot of your freedoms and a lot of your resources,” said Steve Gortmaker, director of the school’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity, who attended the meeting.With Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, standing toe-to-toe with the president of the United States, faculty members and students on the Cambridge campus on Thursday said they were struggling to make sense of the rapid escalation this week of Mr. Trump’s campaign to bend the university to his will. After Mr. Garber rejected Mr. Trump’s demands, the White House moved swiftly to inflict punishment, freezing $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard on Monday, suggesting on Wednesday it would revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, and then threatening to block the university from enrolling international students.In Harvard Yard, students still hurried to class; tourists still lined up under flowering trees to take photos of a statue of John Harvard. But behind the scenes, professors and researchers acknowledged a rising tide of angst, anger and uncertainty, their pride in the university’s stand against federal intervention mingling with their dread of the painful consequences.Since Harvard University leadership stood up to the Trump administration, many were rushing to sort out what the loss of funding would really mean below the surface.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      DOGE Guts AmeriCorps, Agency That Organizes Community Service Programs

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      The independent federal agency that organizes community service work in the United States has placed on administrative leave almost all of its federal staff at the direction of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, according to people familiar with developments at the agency.Those on leave include all of the employees of a national disaster response program, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information they provided.A majority of federal employees at the agency, which is known as AmeriCorps, received emails on Wednesday with an attached memo, dated April 16, from the interim head of the agency, Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi. The memo told them they were placed on administrative leave with pay, effective immediately, according to two copies reviewed by The New York Times.It also directed them not to return to AmeriCorps property or access its systems.The changes at AmeriCorps come as Mr. Musk’s team, called the Department of Government Efficiency, has moved to shutter agencies, including those with missions cast into law by Congress, in a bid to cut what it calls excess federal spending.As with other agencies affected as part of Mr. Musk’s effort, only a small fraction of AmeriCorps employees remained at the headquarters in Washington on Thursday. The expected cuts could gut the agency’s response work in regions decimated by recent natural disasters, including areas in the Southeastern United States that were wiped out by Hurricane Helene. An official with the Trump administration confirmed on Thursday that roughly 75 percent of full-time AmeriCorps employees were placed on administrative leave, and noted that the agency’s $1 billion budget, which the official suggested was mismanaged, was appropriately targeted in President Trump’s bid to eliminate waste.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More