Judge rules Donald Trump defrauded banks, Dianne Feinstein dies, and more of the week's top stories

NEW YORK (AP) — A judge has ruled that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House.

Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling Tuesday in a civil lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general, found that the former president and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing.

The decision, days before the start of a non-jury trial in Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit, is the strongest repudiation yet of Trump’s carefully coiffed image as a wealthy and shrewd real estate mogul turned political powerhouse.

Beyond mere bragging about his riches, Trump, his company and key executives repeatedly lied about them on his annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favorable loan terms and lower insurance premiums, Engoron found.

Those tactics crossed a line and violated the law, the judge said, rejecting Trump’s contention that a disclaimer on the financial statements absolved him of any wrongdoing.

Manhattan prosecutors had looked into bringing a criminal case over the same conduct but declined to do so, leaving James to sue Trump and seek penalties that could disrupt his and his family’s ability to do business in the state.

Get the full story, with updates, here:

Photos: Trump fans gather outside Georgia jail to show support ahead of his surrender

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a centrist Democrat who was elected to the Senate in 1992 in the "Year of the Woman" and broke gender barriers throughout her long career in local and national politics, has died. She was 90.

Three people familiar with the situation confirmed her death to The Associated Press on Friday.

Feinstein, the oldest sitting U.S. senator, was a passionate advocate for liberal priorities important to her state -- including environmental protection, reproductive rights and gun control -- but was also known as a pragmatic lawmaker who reached out to Republicans and sought middle ground.

She was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 and became its first female president in 1978, the same year Mayor George Moscone was gunned down alongside Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor. Feinstein found Milk's body.

After Moscone's death, Feinstein became San Francisco's first female mayor. In the Senate, she was one of California's first two female senators, the first woman to head the Senate Intelligence Committee and the first woman to serve as the Judiciary committee's top Democrat.

Photos: Sen. Dianne Feinstein through the years

Although Feinstein was not always embraced by the feminist movement, her experiences colored her outlook through her five decades in politics.

"I recognize that women have had to fight for everything they have gotten, every right," she told The Associated Press in 2005, as the Judiciary Committee prepared to hold hearings on President George W. Bush's nomination of John Roberts to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court.

"So I must tell you, I try to look out for women's rights. I also try to solve problems as I perceive them, with legislation, and reaching out where I can, and working across the aisle," she said.

Her tendency for bipartisanship helped her notch legislative wins throughout her career. But it also proved to be a liability in her later years in Congress, as her state became more liberal and as the Senate and the electorate became increasingly polarized.

A fierce debater who did not suffer fools, the California senator was long known for her verbal zingers and sharp comebacks when challenged on the issues about which she was most fervent. But she lost that edge in her later years in the Senate, as her health visibly declined and she often became confused when answering questions or speaking publicly. In February 2023, she said she would not run for a sixth term the next year. And within weeks of that announcement, she was absent for the Senate for more than two months as she recovered from a bout of shingles.

Amid the concerns about her health, Feinstein stepped down as the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel after the 2020 elections, just as her party was about to take the majority. In 2023, she said she would not serve as the Senate president pro tempore, or the most senior member of the majority party, even though she was in line to do so. The president pro tempore opens the Senate every day and holds other ceremonial duties.

One of Feinstein's most significant legislative accomplishments was early in her career, when the Senate approved her amendment to ban manufacturing and sales of certain types of assault weapons as part of a crime bill that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. Though the assault weapons ban expired 10 years later and was never renewed or replaced, it was a poignant win after her career had been significantly shaped by gun violence.

Feinstein remembered finding Milk's body, her finger slipping into a bullet hole as she felt for a pulse. It was a story she would retell often in the years ahead as she pushed for stricter gun control measures.

She had little patience for Republicans and others who opposed her on that issue, though she was often challenged. In 1993, during debate on the assault weapons ban, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, accused her of having an insufficient knowledge of guns and the gun control issue.

Feinstein spoke fiercely of the violence she'd lived through in San Francisco and retorted: ''Senator, I know something about what firearms can do."

Two decades later, after 20 children and six educators were killed in a horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, first-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas similarly challenged Feinstein during debate on legislation that would have permanently banned the weapons.

"I'm not a sixth grader," Feinstein snapped back at the much younger Cruz -- a moment that later went viral. She added: "It's fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I've been here a long time."

Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco after the 1978 slayings of Moscone and Milk, leading the city during one of the most turbulent periods in its history. Even her critics credited Feinstein with a calming influence, and she won reelection on her own to two four-year terms.

With her success and growing recognition statewide came visibility on the national political stage.

In 1984, Feinstein was viewed as a vice presidential possibility for Walter Mondale but faced questions about the business dealings of her husband, Richard Blum. In 1990, she used news footage of her announcement of the assassinations of Moscone and Milk in a television ad that helped her win the Democratic nomination for California governor, making her the first female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the state's history.

Although she narrowly lost the general election to Republican Pete Wilson, the stage was set for her election to the Senate two years later to fill the Senate seat Wilson had vacated to run for governor.

Feinstein campaigned jointly with Barbara Boxer, who was running for the state's other U.S. Senate seat, and both won, benefiting from positive news coverage and excitement over their historic race. California had never had a female U.S. senator, and female candidates and voters had been galvanized by the Supreme Court hearings in which the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Anita Hill about her sexual harassment allegations against nominee Clarence Thomas.

Feinstein was appointed to the Judiciary panel and eventually the Senate Intelligence Committee, becoming the chairperson in 2009. She was the first woman to lead the intelligence panel, a high-profile perch that gave her a central oversight role over U.S. intelligence controversies, setbacks and triumphs, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to leaks about National Security Agency surveillance.

Under Feinstein's leadership, the intelligence committee conducted a wide-ranging, five-year investigation into CIA interrogation techniques during President George W. Bush's administration, including waterboarding of terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons. The resulting 6,300-page "torture report" concluded among other things that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not provide key evidence in the hunt for bin Laden. A 525-page executive summary was released in late 2014, but the rest of the report has remained classified.

The Senate investigation was full of intrigue at the time, including documents that mysteriously disappeared and accusations traded between the Senate and the CIA that the other was stealing information. The drama was captured in a 2019 movie about the investigation called "The Report," and actor Annette Bening was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Feinstein.

In the years since, Feinstein has continued to push aggressively for eventual declassification of the report.

"It's my very strong belief that one day this report should be declassified," Feinstein said. "This must be a lesson learned: that torture doesn't work."

Feinstein sometimes frustrated liberals by adopting moderate or hawkish positions that put her at odds with the left wing of the Democratic Party, as well as with the more liberal Boxer, who retired from the Senate in 2017. Feinstein defended the Obama administration's expansive collection of Americans' phone and email records as necessary for protecting the country, for example, even as other Democratic senators voiced protests. "It's called protecting America," Feinstein said then.

That tension escalated during Donald Trump's presidency, when many Democrats had little appetite for compromise. Feinstein become the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel in 2016 and led her party's messaging through three Supreme Court nominations -- a role that angered liberal advocacy groups that wanted to see a more aggressive partisan in charge.

Feinstein closed out confirmation hearings for Justice Amy Coney Barrett with an embrace of Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and a public thanks to him for a job well done. "This has been one of the best set of hearings that I've participated in," Feinstein said at the end of the hearing.

Liberal advocacy groups that had fiercely opposed Barrett's nomination to replace the late liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were furious and called for her to step down from the committee leadership.

A month later, Feinstein announced she would remain on the committee but step down as the top Democrat. The senator, then 87 years old, did not say why. In a statement, she said she would "continue to do my utmost to bring about positive change in the coming years."

Feinstein was born on June 22, 1933. Her father, Leon Goldman, was a prominent surgeon and medical school professor in San Francisco, but her mother was an abusive woman with a violent temper that was often directed at Feinstein and her two younger sisters.

Feinstein graduated from Stanford University in 1955, with a bachelor's degree in history. She married young and was a divorced single mother of her daughter, Katherine, in 1960, at a time when such a status was still unusual.

In 1961, Feinstein was appointed by then-Gov. Pat Brown to the women's parole board, on which she served before running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Typical of the era, much of the early coverage of her entrance into public life focused on her appearance, and she was invariably described as stunning, tall, slender and raven-haired.

Feinstein's second husband, Bert Feinstein, was 19 years older than she, but she described the marriage as "a 10" and kept his name even after his death from cancer in 1978. In 1980, she married investment banker Richard Blum, and thanks to his wealth, she was one of the richest members of the Senate. He died in February 2022.

In addition to her daughter, Feinstein has a granddaughter, Eileen, and three stepchildren.

Photos: Sen. Dianne Feinstein through the years

Photos: Notable Deaths in 2023

Jimmy Buffett

Tina Turner

Tony Bennett

Bob Barker

Raquel Welch

Lisa Marie Presley

Jim Brown

Harry Belafonte

Sinéad O’Connor

David Crosby

Paul Reubens

Lance Reddick

Richard Belzer

Mark Margolis

Angus Cloud

Clarence Avant

Cindy Williams

Alan Arkin

Gordon Lightfoot

Jeff Beck

Bobby Caldwell

Gary Rossington

Wayne Shorter

Jerry Springer

Jacklyn Zeman

John Beasley

Michael Lerner

Tom Sizemore

Charles Kimbrough

Julian Sands

Cynthia Weil

Sheldon Harnick

Barrett Strong

Willis Reed

Tim McCarver

Billy Packer

The Iron Sheik

Treat Williams

Bill Richardson

Daniel Ellsberg

Pat Robertson

Robert Blake

Ted Kaczynski

Lloyd Morrisett

Chaim Topol

Len Goodman

Burt Bacharach

Stella Stevens

Barry Humphries

Annie Wersching

Dave Hollis

Christine King Farris

David Jude Jolicoeur

Robbie Knievel

Gina Lollobrigida

Lynette Hardaway ("Diamond")

Adam Rich

Bobby Hull

Charles White

Robbie Robertson

Ron Cephas Jones

Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher

Mohamed Al Fayed

Jerry Richardson

Sister André

Tatjana Patitz

Russell Banks

Cardinal George Pell

Ken Block

Walter Cunningham

Anton Walkes

Pat Schroeder

Seymour Stein

Klaus Teuber

Ginnie Newhart

Vida Blue

Martin Amis

Doyle Brunson

Hodding Carter III

Ray Stevenson

Astrud Gilberto

Tori Bowie

Silvio Berlusconi

John Goodenough

Coco Lee

Jane Birkin

William Friedkin

Steve Harwell

Michael McGrath

Fernando Botero

David McCallum

Brooks Robinson

Michael Gambon

Dianne Feinstein

Tim Wakefield

Dick Butkus

Michael Chiarello

Louise Glück

Suzanne Somers

Piper Laurie

Neanderthals live on within us.

These ancient human cousins, and others called Denisovans, once lived alongside our early Homo sapiens ancestors. They mingled and had children. So some of who they were never went away — it's in our genes. And science is starting to reveal just how much that shapes us.

Using the new and rapidly improving ability to piece together fragments of ancient DNA, scientists are finding that traits inherited from our ancient cousins are still with us now, affecting our fertility, our immune systems, even how our bodies handled the COVID-19 virus. 

"We're now carrying the genetic legacies and learning about what that means for our bodies and our health," said Mary Prendergast, a Rice University archeologist.

In the past few months alone, researchers have linked Neanderthal DNA to a serious hand disease, the shape of people's noses and various other human traits. They even inserted a gene carried by Neanderthals and Denisovans into mice to investigate its effects on biology, and found it gave them larger heads and an extra rib.

Much of the human journey remains a mystery. But Dr. Hugo Zeberg of the Karolinska Insitute in Sweden said new technologies, research and collaborations are helping scientists begin to answer the basic but cosmic questions: "Who are we? Where did we come from?"

And the answers point to a profound reality: We have far more in common with our extinct cousins than we ever thought.

***

NEANDERTHALS WITHIN US

Until recently, the genetic legacy from ancient humans was invisible because scientists were limited to what they could glean from the shape and size of bones. But there has been a steady stream of discoveries from ancient DNA, an area of study pioneered by Nobel Prize winner Svante Paabo who first pieced together a Neanderthal genome.

Advances in finding and interpreting ancient DNA have allowed them to see things like genetic changes over time to better adapt to environments or through random chance.

It's even possible to figure out how much genetic material people from different regions carry from the ancient relatives our predecessors encountered.

Research shows some African populations have almost no Neanderthal DNA, while those from European or Asian backgrounds have 1% to 2%. Denisovan DNA is barely detectable in most parts of the world but makes up 4% to 6% of the DNA of people in Melanesia, which extends from New Guinea to the Fiji Islands.

That may not sound like much, but it adds up: Even though only 100,000 Neanderthals ever lived, "half of the Neanderthal genome is still around, in small pieces scattered around modern humans," said Zeberg, who collaborates closely with Paabo.

It's also enough to affect us in very real ways. Scientists don't yet know the full extent, but they're learning it can be both helpful and harmful.

For example, Neanderthal DNA has been linked to auto-immune diseases like Graves' disease and rheumatoid arthritis. When Homo sapiens came out of Africa, they had no immunity to diseases in Europe and Asia, but Neanderthals and Denisovans already living there did.

"By interbreeding with them, we got a quick fix to our immune systems, which was good news 50,000 years ago," said Chris Stringer, a human evolution researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. "The result today is, for some people, that our immune systems are oversensitive, and sometimes they turn on themselves."

Similarly, a gene associated with blood clotting believed to be passed down from Neanderthals in Eurasia may have been helpful in the "rough and tumble world of the Pleistocene," said Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution. But today it can raise the risk of stroke for older adults. "For every benefit," he said, "there are costs in evolution."

In 2020, research by Zeberg and Paabo found that a major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals. "We compared it to the Neanderthal genome and it was a perfect match," Zeberg said. "I kind of fell off my chair."

The next year, they found a set of DNA variants along a single chromosome inherited from Neanderthals had the opposite effect: protecting people from severe COVID.

The list goes on: Research has linked Neanderthal genetic variants to skin and hair color, behavioral traits, skull shape and Type 2 diabetes. One study found that people who report feeling more pain than others are likely to carry a Neanderthal pain receptor. Another found that a third of women in Europe inherited a Neanderthal receptor for the hormone progesterone, which is associated with increased fertility and fewer miscarriages.

Much less is known about our genetic legacy from Denisovans – although some research has linked genes from them to fat metabolism and better adaptation to high altitudes. Maanasa Raghavan, a human genetics expert at the University of Chicago, said a stretch of Denisovan DNA has been found in Tibetans, who continue to live and thrive in low-oxygen environments today.

Scientists have even found evidence of "ghost populations" — groups whose fossils have yet to be discovered — within modern humans' genetic code.

***

SO WHY DID WE SURVIVE?

In the past, the tale of modern humans' survival "was always told as some success story, almost like a hero's story," in which Homo sapiens rose above the rest of the natural world and overcame the "insufficiencies" of their cousins, Potts said.

"Well, that simply is just not the correct story."

Neanderthals and Denisovans had already existed for thousands of years by the time Homo sapiens left Africa. Scientists used to think we won out because we had more complex behavior and superior technology. But recent research shows that Neanderthals talked, cooked with fire, made art objects, had sophisticated tools and hunting behavior, and even wore makeup and jewelry.

Several theories now tie our survival to our ability to travel far and wide.

"We spread all over the world, much more than these other forms did," Zeberg said.

While Neanderthals were specially adapted to cold climates, Potts said, Homo sapiens were able to disperse to all different kinds of climates after emerging in tropical Africa. "We are so adaptable, culturally adaptable, to so many places in the world," he said.

Meanwhile, Neanderthals and Denisovans faced harsh conditions in the north, like repeated ice ages and ice sheets that likely trapped them in small areas, said Eleanor Scerri, an archeologist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology. They lived in smaller populations with a greater risk of genetic collapse.

Plus, we had nimble, efficient bodies, Prendergast said. It takes a lot more calories to feed stocky Neanderthals than comparatively skinny Homo sapiens, so Neanderthals had more trouble getting by, and moving around, especially when food got scarce.

Janet Young, curator of physical anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History, pointed to another intriguing hypothesis – which anthropologist Pat Shipman shared in one of her books –- that dogs played a big part in our survival. Researchers found the skulls of domesticated dogs in Homo sapiens sites much further back in time than anyone had found before. Scientists believe dogs made hunting easier.

By around 30,000 years ago, all the other kinds of hominins on Earth had died off, leaving Homo sapiens as the last humans standing.

***

'INTERACTION AND MIXTURE'

Still, every new scientific revelation points to how much we owe our ancient cousins.

Human evolution was not about "survival of the fittest and extinction," said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It's about "interaction and mixture."

Researchers expect to learn more as science continues to advance, allowing them to extract information from ever-tinier traces of ancient lives. Even when fossils aren't available, scientists today can capture DNA from soil and sediment where archaic humans once lived.

And there are less-explored places in the world where they hope to learn more. Zeberg said "biobanks" that collect biological samples will likely be established in more countries.

As they delve deeper into humanity's genetic legacy, scientists expect to find even more evidence of how much we mixed with our ancient cousins and all they left us.

"Perhaps," Zeberg said, "we should not see them as so different."

***

How weather has shaped human history

How weather has shaped human history

Climate change drives people out of Africa

541: Drought leads to first recorded bubonic plague

900: Drought spells the end for Mayan civilization

1274: Kublai Khan and the Kamikaze

1315: Extreme weather spawns the Great Famine of 1315-1317

1588: The wind flubs the Spanish Armada's attack on England

1601: Volcanic eruption in Peru causes famine during Russia's “Time of Troubles”

1692: Mini ice age instigates the Salem Witch Trials

1776: Fog saves the American Revolution

1789: The witch trials' 'little ice age' also spurs the French Revolution

1800: Slave revolt is squashed by storms

1812: Russian winter bests Napoleon

1813: Tecumseh killed in the fog in the Battle of the Thames

1816: 'The Year Without a Summer' creates America's Heartland

1876: Famines form the 'Third World'

1893: Weather inspires painting of 'The Scream'

1903: Wind leads to an undocumented first flight

1912: The Titanic sinks

1930s: The Dust Bowl

1937: The Hindenburg explosion changes air travel

1940: A storm cloud saves Allied soldiers trapped near Dunkirk

1941: Winter breaks apart Hitler's two-front war

1944: D-Day

1945: Kokura gets spared—twice

1948: Air inversion in Donora, Pennsylvania

1963: Sunny skies clear the way for JFK's assassination

1977: Tenerife Air Disaster

1980: Iranian 'haboob' thwarts hostage rescue, secures Reagan election

1986: The Challenger disaster

HOUSTON (AP) — The family of a Black high school student in Texas on Saturday filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state's governor and attorney general over his ongoing suspension by his school district for his hairstyle.

Darryl George, 17, a junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, has been serving an in-school suspension since Aug. 31 at the Houston-area school. School officials say his dreadlocks fall below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violate the district’s dress code.

George’s mother, Darresha George, and the family’s attorney deny the teenager’s hairstyle violates the dress code, saying his hair is neatly tied in twisted dreadlocks on top of his head.

The lawsuit accuses Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton of failing to enforce the CROWN Act, a new state law outlawing racial discrimination based on hairstyles. Darryl George's supporters allege the ongoing suspension by the Barbers Hill Independent School District violates the law, which took effect Sept. 1.

The lawsuit alleges Abbott and Paxton, in their official duties, have failed to protect Darryl George's constitutional rights against discrimination and against violations of his freedom of speech and expression. Darryl George “should be permitted to wear his hair in the manner in which he wears it ... because the so-called neutral grooming policy has no close association with learning or safety and when applied, disproportionately impacts Black males,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed in Houston federal court by Darryl George’s mother, is the latest legal action taken related to the suspension.

On Tuesday, Darresha George and her attorney filed a formal complaint with the Texas Education Agency, alleging Darryl George is being harassed and mistreated by school district officials over his hair and that his in-school suspension is in violation of the CROWN Act.

They allege that during his suspension, Darryl George is forced to sit for eight hours on a stool and that he’s being denied the hot free lunch he’s qualified to receive. The agency is investigating the complaint.

Darresha George said she was recently hospitalized after a series of panic and anxiety attacks brought on from stress related to her son’s suspension.

On Wednesday, the school district filed its own lawsuit in state court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act.

Barbers Hill Superintendent Greg Poole has said he believes the dress code is legal and that it teaches students to conform as a sacrifice benefiting everyone.

The school district said it would not enhance the current punishment against Darryl George while it waits for a ruling on its lawsuit.

The CROWN Act, an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination and bars employers and schools from penalizing people because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including Afros, braids, dreadlocks, twists or Bantu knots. Texas is one of 24 states that have enacted a version of the act.

A federal version of it passed in the U.S. House last year, but was not successful in the Senate.

Darryl George’s school previously clashed with two other Black male students over the dress code.

Barbers Hill officials told cousins De’Andre Arnold and Kaden Bradford they had to cut their dreadlocks in 2020. The two students’ families sued the school district in May 2020, and a federal judge later ruled the district’s hair policy was discriminatory. Their case, which garnered national attention and remains pending, helped spur Texas lawmakers to approve the state’s CROWN Act law. Both students withdrew from the school, with Bradford returning after the judge’s ruling.

Amazon is being sued by U.S. regulators and and 17 states over allegations that the company abuses its position in the marketplace to inflate prices on other platforms, overcharge sellers and stifle competition.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, is the result of a years-long investigation into Amazon's businesses and one of the most significant legal challenges brought against the company in its nearly 30-year history.

According to a news release sent by the agency, the Federal Trade Commission and states that joined the lawsuit are asking the court to issue a permanent injunction court that they say would prohibit Amazon from engaging in its unlawful conduct and loosen its "monopolistic control to restore competition."

They allege the company engages in anti-competitive practices through anti-discounting measures that deter sellers from offering lower prices for products on non-Amazon sites, mirroring allegations made in a separate lawsuit last year by the state of California. The complaint says Amazon can bury listings that are offered at lower prices on other sites.

The complaint also says the company degrades the customer experience by replacing relevant search results with paid advertisements, biasing its own brands over other products it knows to be of a better quality and charging heavy fees that forces sellers to pay nearly half of their total revenues to Amazon.

"The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them," FTC Chairman Lina Khan said in a prepared statement.

Many had wondered whether the agency would seek to a forced break-up of the retail giant, which is also dominant in cloud computing and has a growing presence in other sectors like groceries and health care. In a briefing with reporters, Khan dodged questions of whether that will happen.

"At this stage, the focus is more on liability," she said.

Some estimates show Amazon controls about 40% of the e-commerce market. A majority of the sales on its platform are facilitated by independent sellers consisting of small and medium-sized businesses and individuals. In return for the access it provides to its platform, Amazon rakes in billions through referral fees and other services like advertising, which makes products sold by sellers more visible on the platform.

The vast majority of third-party merchants also use the company's fulfillment service to store inventory and ship items to customers. Amazon has been consistently raising fees for those reliant on the program and more recently imposed - and then abandoned- another fee on some who don't, a move that was blasted by the company's critics.

Last quarter, Amazon reported $32.3 billion in revenue from third-party services. According to the anti-monopoly organization Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the fees cost U.S. sellers 45% of their revenue in the first half of this year - up from 35% in 2020 and 19% in 2014.

Amazon has also long faced allegations of undercutting businesses that sell on its platform by assessing merchant data and creating its own competing product that it then boosts on the site. In August, the company said it was eliminating some in-house brands that weren't resonating with customers and would relaunch some items under existing brands like Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials. Booksellers and authors have also been urging the Department of Justice to investigate what they've called Amazon's "monopoly power over the market for books and ideas."

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

If successful, a court case could be a big boost for the FTC's Khan, a Big Tech critic who gained prominence as a Yale law student in 2017 for her scholarly work "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." In 2021, Amazon had sought to get her recused from agency probes against the company because of her earlier criticism.

Under Khan's watch, the FTC has aggressively attempted to blunt Big Tech's influence but has been unsuccessful recently in some of the most high-profile cases, including its bid to block Microsoft's takeover of the video game maker Activision Blizzard and Meta's acquisition of the virtual reality startup Within Unlimited. The agency is currently in the middle of a protracted lawsuit against Facebook parent Meta, which it alleges to have engaged in monopolistic behavior. The Justice Department is also challenging Google's market power in court.

Some of the agency's allegations in the Amazon case mirrors those made in a separate lawsuit last year by the state of California. A similar case filed by the District of Columbia was thrown out by a federal judge earlier last year and is currently under appeal.

The federal complaint follows other actions the FTC has taken against Amazon in the past few months. In June, the agency sued the company, alleging it was using deceptive practices to enroll consumers into Amazon Prime and making it challenging for them to cancel their subscriptions. Amazon disputes the allegations.

In late May, the company agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle allegations that it violated a child privacy law and misled parents about data deletion practices on its popular voice assistant Alexa.

The Fastest Growing Industry in Every State

The Fastest Growing Industry in Every State

US GDP recovered quickly following the start of the pandemic

The information sector experienced the greatest change in economic output over the past five years

Western states saw the largest increase in GDP over the past five years

Alabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Florida

Georgia

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Mississippi

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

North Carolina

North Dakota

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

South Carolina

South Dakota

Tennessee

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Utah

Vermont

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Wyoming

WASHINGTON — U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said Wednesday she won’t recuse herself from Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case in Washington, rejecting the former president’s claims that her past comments raise doubts about whether she can be fair.

Chutkan, who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama and was randomly assigned to Trump’s case, said in her written decision that she sees no reason to step aside. The case, scheduled for trial in March, accuses the Republican of illegally scheming to overturn his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

There’s a high bar for recusal, and legal experts had widely considered Trump’s request to be a long shot aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the case publicly that could only sour the relationship between the judge and the defense in court.

Lawyers for Trump did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

In seeking Chutkan's recusal, defense lawyers cited statements she had made in two sentencing hearings of participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol in which they said she had appeared to suggest that Trump deserved to be prosecuted and held accountable. They said the comments suggested a bias against him that could taint the proceedings.

But Chutkan vigorously objected to the those characterizations of her comments.

"It bears noting that the court has never taken the position the defense ascribes to it: that former ‘President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned,’” Chutkan wrote. “And the defense does not cite any instance of the court ever uttering those words or anything similar.”

It’s the second time Trump has tried unsuccessfully to get a judge removed from one of the criminal cases against him. Judge Juan Manuel Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s New York hush money criminal case, rejected similar demands that he step aside, saying he is certain of his “ability to be fair and impartial.”

Chutkan has stood out as one of the toughest punishers of defendants charged in the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Trump, the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has personally assailed her on social media as he tries to make the case that the prosecution is politically motivated.

Federal special counsel Jack Smith’s team said there was no valid basis to have Chutkan removed from the case. Like Chutkan, they said she never said that Trump was legally or morally to blame for the events of Jan. 6 or that he deserved to be punished.

Chutkan wrote in her order that though recusal is a valid step when merited, judges should not step aside “without cause,” as she suggested the Trump lawyers were asking her to do.

Trump's team had pointed in their recusal bid to a sentencing hearing for a Jan. 6 defendant in which Chutkan said the rioters had "blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” Chutkan wrote in her decision Wednesday that she was merely stating an “undisputed fact,” – that Trump was free — “but it went no further.”

Chutkan is also considering a request by Smith’s team for a narrow gag order that would bar Trump from making “inflammatory” and “intimidating” comments about witnesses, lawyers and other people involved in the case. Trump's lawyers objected this week to that request.

Chutkan has scheduled trial to begin March 4, 2024, over the vigorous objections of defense lawyers who said that would not give them enough time to prepare. The case in Washington’s federal court is one of four criminal cases confronting the former president as he seeks to regain the White House.

Scene: Trump in DC for historic 2020 election charges

SEOUL, South Korea — The U.S. soldier who sprinted into North Korea across the heavily fortified border between the Koreas two months ago was released into American custody Wednesday, according to two officials.

Earlier, North Korea said it would expel Pvt. Travis King — an announcement that surprised some observers who had expected the North to drag out his detention in the hopes of squeezing concessions from Washington at a time of high tensions between the rivals.

King's expulsion almost certainly does not end his troubles or ensure the sort of celebratory homecoming that has accompanied the releases of other detained Americans.

And there remain unanswered questions about the episode, including why King went to North Korea in the first place. His fate also remains uncertain, having been declared AWOL by the U.S. government. That can mean punishment by time in military jail, forfeiture of pay or a dishonorable discharge.

King was transferred to American custody in China, according to one of the officials. The two U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss King's status ahead of an announcement.

King, who had served in South Korea, ran into North Korea while on a civilian tour of a border village on July 18, becoming the first American confirmed to be detained in the North in nearly five years.

At the time he crossed the border, King was supposed to be heading to Fort Bliss, Texas, following his release from prison in South Korea on an assault conviction.

On Wednesday, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported that authorities had finished their questioning of King. It said that he confessed to illegally entering the North because he harbored "ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination" within the U.S. Army and was "disillusioned about the unequal U.S. society."

It has attributed similar comments to King before, and verifying their authenticity is impossible.

In an interview last month with The Associated Press, King's mother, Claudine Gates, said her son had reason to want to come home.

"I just can't see him ever wanting to just stay in Korea when he has family in America. He has so many reasons to come home," she said.

King, who is from Wisconsin, was among about 28,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea as deterrence against potential aggression from North Korea. U.S. officials had expressed concern about King's well-being, citing the North's harsh treatment of some American detainees in the past.

Unauthorized crossings across the Demilitarized Zone separating the Koreas are extremely rare. The few Americans who crossed into North Korea in the past include soldiers, missionaries, human rights advocates or those simply curious about one of the world's most cloistered societies.

North Korea's decision to release King after 71 days appears relatively quick by the country's standards, especially considering the tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over the North's growing nuclear weapons and missile program and the United States' expanding military exercises with South Korea. Some had speculated that North Korea might treat King as a propaganda asset or bargaining chip.

In the end, the North apparently concluded that King simply wasn't worth keeping, possibly because of the cost of providing him food and accommodation and assigning him guards and translators when he was never to be a meaningful source of U.S. military intelligence, said Cheong Seong-Chang, an analyst at South Korea's Sejong Institute.

Captive Americans have been flown to China previously. In other cases, an envoy has been sent to retrieve them.

That happened in 2017 when North Korea deported Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was in a coma at the time of his release and later died.

Photos: Kim Jong Un's public appearances through the years