Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

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Utah passed one of the strictest bills related to books in public schools in 2024. House Bill 29 (HB 29) allows parents to challenge books they deem “sensitive material” and it also outright bans books from all public schools in the state if those books have been deemed “objective sensitive material” or “pornographic” per state code in at least three public school districts or two public school districts and five charter schools statewide. The bill went into effect July 1, 2024, and it started with 13 titles on it.

The bill is retroactive, meaning that titles which met the state’s guidelines prior to the bill’s start date were included on the list. Per HB 29, any time a public or charter school removes a book deemed “sensitive material,” they must notify the State Board of Education. If that book meets the threshold of removals, all schools will be notified and expected to dispose of it.

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There are now 22 books prohibited in any Utah public school. Of them, 16 are written by women, and their average publication date is 2011. This means that most of these books have been on shelves and available for many years and caused no issues until this manufactured crisis. The list is as follows:

What is important to understand about the law is that despite claims this is about “local control,” schools in the state are forced to follow the decisions made in other districts. There are 42 public school districts in Utah, but two districts account for nearly 80% of the books banned statewide: Davis School District and Washington School District.

The three latest book bans came exclusively because of bans at Davis, Toole, and Washington school districts. Again, two districts are doing nearly all of the dictating of what books are allowed at public schools throughout all of Utah.

We’re going to continue to see more books added to this list in Utah as the school year carries on. These are not, of course, the only books being banned in the state where book bans are happening, despite claims by the federal Department of Education. Individual school districts are allowed to ban any books they deem inappropriate–which, of course, helps add more titles to the state list as only three districts need to remove a book before the book must be removed everywhere.

Utah is not the only state with such a book list. South Carolina also retains a sanctioned list of books that must be removed in every public school district. Their list contains 21 titles, making them the most censorious state when it comes to state-sanctioned book bans. While Tennessee has the legal mechanisms for creating statewide school book bans, it has yet to add any titles to a list. Florida officials have also distributed a list of books the state deems inappropriate and necessary to be removed from school libraries, though theirs is not codified into law like in the other three states.

These laws do not apply to private or homeschool institutions. That’s intentional.

Book bans in Utah are coming in waves, so anticipate more titles to be added to the list in the coming weeks, especially as the state works its way backwards from the date of the law’s implementation.

The post Utah Begins 2026 by Banning Three Books at All Public Schools Statewide, Leads U.S. In Bans appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Northern & Shell and The New Lottery Company (TNLC), owned by Desmond, is suing the UK Gambling Commission for up to £1.3 billion in a battle over the license to run the National Lottery. The company claims that there were “manifest errors” in the process of deciding who runs the lottery.

This comes after Allwyn won the 10-year license to run the game in 2022, with its leadership beginning in 2024. Since then, Desmond has launched a series of legal challenges claiming that the bid competition itself was flawed (with the result pre-determined), and that Allwyn should have been disqualified because it breached strict rules to do with briefing the media during the process. The allegations also highlight that the commission was adjusted in the contract after Allwyn had been chosen, which Desmond’s team means should have initiated a rerun.

The claim is based on EU law and also highlights alleged conflicts of interest that affected the UKGC’s impartiality in making the decision. Desmond’s lawyers assert that Northern & Shell and TNLC wasted £17.5 million on the bid process to no avail, as well as losing out on up to £1.3 billion due to the commission changes.

Impact on the National Lottery

Any payout won from the legal battle would be a significant loss to the charities involved with the National Lottery, as the sum would need to be paid from the pot to fund charitable pursuits. In fact, the Guardian reports that if the payout is larger than the fund (which receives roughly £30 million a week from lottery sales), the cost would be passed onto the taxpayer.

Desmond has already rejected a settlement offer from the UKGC, thought to have been worth around £10 million.

Featured image: Flickr, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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The Federal Trade Commission on Monday accused Meta of creating a monopoly that squelched competition by buying start-ups that stood in its way, kicking off a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle a social media empire that has transformed how the world connects online.

In a packed courtroom in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the F.T.C. opened its first antitrust trial under the Trump administration by arguing that Meta illegally cemented a monopoly in social networking by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups. Those actions were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy,” the F.T.C. said.

Ultimately, the purchases coalesced Meta’s power, depriving consumers of other social networking options and edging out competition, the government said.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”

“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.

Meta’s lawyers denied the allegations in opening arguments, countering that the company faces plenty of competition from TikTok and other social media platforms. The F.T.C. approved the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago, and it would set a dangerous precedent for the business world to try to unwind the mergers, the lawyers added.

“This case is a grab bag of F.T.C. theories at war with fact and at war with the law,” said Mark Hansen, the company’s litigator and a partner at the law firm Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick. “The facts are going to prove that the F.T.C.’s theories are all wrong.”

The trial — Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms — poses the most consequential threat to the business empire of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder. If the government succeeds, the F.T.C. would most likely ask Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, potentially shifting the way that Silicon Valley does business and altering a long pattern of big tech companies snapping up younger rivals.

Still, legal experts cautioned that it might be challenging for the F.T.C. to win. That’s because the government must prove something unknowable: that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, wouldn’t have achieved the same success without the acquisitions. It is also extremely rare to try to unwind mergers approved years ago, legal experts said.

“One of the most difficult things for antitrust laws to deal with is when industry leaders purchase small potential competitors,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior official in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. Meta, he added, “bought many things that either didn’t pan out or were integrated. How are Instagram and WhatsApp different?”

The efforts continue a yearslong bipartisan pursuit to curtail the vast power that a handful of tech companies have over commerce, the exchange of ideas, entertainment and political discourse. Despite attempts by tech executives to court President Trump, his antitrust appointees have signaled that they will continue the course.

The F.T.C.’s case against Meta is the third major tech antitrust lawsuit to go to trial in the past two years. Last year, the D.O.J. won its antitrust case against Google for monopolizing internet search. A federal judge is set to hear arguments over remedies, including a potential breakup, next week. The D.O.J. also completed a separate trial against Google for monopolizing ad technology, which is still being decided by a federal judge.

The Justice Department has also sued Apple, and the F.T.C. has sued Amazon, accusing the companies of antitrust violations. Those trials are expected to begin next year.

The case against Meta could affect its 3.5 billion users, who on average log onto Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp multiple times a day for news, shopping and texting. Instagram and WhatsApp have attracted more users in recent years as Facebook, Meta’s flagship app, has stopped growing.

F.T.C. Chairman Andrew Ferguson was in the courtroom to listen to the government’s opening statement. Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, and Joel Kaplan, its chief global affairs officer, also attended. Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, sat at the litigator’s table and will serve as the company’s executive at the trial.

Presiding over the case is Judge James Boasberg, 62, the senior judge in the federal court. He is already in the national spotlight for rejecting the Trump administration’s effort to use a powerful wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants it deemed to be members of a violent street gang.

Judge Boasberg has said he had never been a user of Meta’s apps, but was familiar with Facebook Live, which has been featured in criminal trials. He took notes as Mr. Matheson explained the government’s definitions of social networking and methodology to determine Meta was a monopoly. He was equally focused on Meta’s rebuttal of those definitions.

The F.T.C. argued that Mr. Zuckerberg said in 2006 that Facebook was used to connect “actual friends.” The F.T.C. has argued that Meta has had a monopoly in social networking since 2011 and that SnapChat was among the only comparable platforms to Facebook and Instagram.

Meta rejected the F.T.C.’s definition of social networking, saying it faces competition from TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms. Mr. Hansen said it competed with messaging apps for sharing content between friends and family.

He said more than half of all engagement on Facebook and Instagram is of videos, which put Meta squarely in competition with TikTok, the fast-growing short-video app. When TikTok was momentarily shut down in January, Meta saw a surge of usage to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which shows the company has plenty of competition.

“Meta has no monopoly,” Mr. Hansen said.

During what is projected to be an eight-week trial, the government and Meta are expected to tell competing versions of the company’s 20-year growth story.

The F.T.C.’s argument hinges on Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which forbids a company from maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices.

The F.T.C. accused Facebook, as the company was previously known, of struggling to build a mobile app and fearing that Instagram would rapidly outpace it in popularity. The company overpaid when it purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, the F.T.C. argued.

In 2014, as WhatsApp grew, Meta offered to buy the company for $19 billion — also far above its market value, the government said.

The F.T.C. plans to highlight a paper trial of emails between Meta executives, alongside other evidence, to argue that the company bought the start-ups because they were threats.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Matheson mentioned documents, including what he described as a “smoking gun” February 2012 email by Mr. Zuckerberg, in which the chief executive discussed the rise of Instagram and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor.” In another email in November 2012 to the former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp, Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”

The F.T.C. lawyer said Meta bought WhatsApp to keep it from being acquired by competitors like Google, which were trying to use a messaging service to launch a competing social network. Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp was intended to build a “moat” around the company’s monopoly in social networking, Mr. Matheson said.

The government is set to call witnesses from Meta, as well as competitors, venture capitalists, economists and media industry executives. Mr. Zuckerberg was expected to be called as the first witness as soon as Monday. The F.T.C. said Ms. Sandberg, and Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, would testify this week.

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