The tribes behind the lawsuit are described as three “Southern Pomo Indian tribes with strong historical connections to Sonoma County, California.” They challenged how the Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs handled the approval process, arguing the government rushed to take land into trust for the casino project.

The Southern Pomo Indian tribe is a key part of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which already operates a major casino nearby and has been among those pushing back against the Koi Nation’s plans as construction edges closer.

Why the judge paused the Northern California casino tribal case

Nichols said it made more sense to wait, pointing to ongoing appeals in related cases in Northern California that could directly shape what happens next. One of those cases already delivered a significant setback for the federal government, when a judge vacated the Interior Department’s approval of the project.

In light of that ruling, the tribes indicated they may drop their lawsuit altogether if the appeals process leaves that decision intact. 

The federal government had argued against the delay, saying the request came too early and that a California court should decide whether to pause the case. Nichols disagreed, concluding that waiting would avoid duplicating legal work and potentially conflicting outcomes.

He pointed out that the Ninth Circuit’s upcoming decisions could influence nearly every major issue in the case, from whether it belongs in California to how the legal claims should ultimately be resolved. He also noted the government itself had recently asked for, and received, a similar pause in a related California case.

Nichols echoed that court’s reasoning, writing that “a stay would significantly advance the orderly course of justice.”

The dispute unfolds alongside political scrutiny over casino expansion in California. In July 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom faced criticism tied to tribal gaming decisions and campaign donations.

For now, the case remains frozen. Both sides must file joint updates every 90 days and outline next steps once the Ninth Circuit finishes weighing the related appeals. Until then, the legal fight over the casino project is effectively on hold.

Featured image: Koi Nation / Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria

The post Judge halts Northern California casino tribal case amid appeals appeared first on Our Story Insight.

The accused is part of the ongoing case and has her itinerary approved to visit South Korea, despite ongoing proceedings tied to illegal gambling and money-laundering allegations.

Judge approves travel for Hafa Adai Bingo defendant

Won Sun Min, one of several defendants charged in connection with the alleged illegal bingo operation, has been granted permission to travel to South Korea between January 6 and January 15, 2026, according to court documents.

Federal prosecutors have put forward an argument that says the actions of these individuals, including Min, generated millions of dollars in proceeds, violated U.S. laws governing illegal gambling businesses, and their actions involved money-laundering conspiracies to conceal or distribute proceeds.

Min has already pleaded guilty to some charges and agreed to forfeit $930,143.07 of the illegally gained proceeds.

Min’s travel green lit despite federal allegations

“The defendants operated Hafa Adai Bingo as an illegal gambling business by conducting bingo games, retaining and diverting bingo profits and proceeds,” read the court filing against the accused.

Magistrate Judge Michael Bordallo has approved the request on medical grounds, said the Pacific Daily News. The case centers around allegations that defendants operated an illegal gambling enterprise under the guise of a charitable bingo operation connected to the Guam Shrine Club (GSC).

“Instead, the GSC officers issued profit distribution and other checks to co-conspirator Won Sun Min (‘Min’) and defendant Marasigan. Min and Marasigan received over $2 million and $15 million of bingo proceeds, respectively, from GSC.”

Under federal law, an “illegal gambling business” is defined as one that violates state or territorial law, involves five or more persons, and remains in substantially continuous operation for more than 30 days or generates more than $2,000 in a single day.

If the federal argument is successful, Min could face up to five years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for the illegal gambling allegations.

On money-laundering conspiracy charges, there is a possible 20-year custodial term and a fine of up to $500,000, or twice the value of the laundered funds.

Featured image: Adobe Firefly

The post Judge approves overseas travel in Hafa Adai Bingo case appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Karen Cahall was suspended for keeping four LGBTQ+ books in her classroom library.

In (more) bad civil rights news, an Ohio third grade teacher lost a battle with the state last week when a district court dismissed her book ban lawsuit.

Karen Cahall, who’s taught in the New Richmond Exempted Village School District for 30 years, was suspended without pay for several days last fall when school authorities accused her of storing controversial materials in her classroom library. The materials in question? Four YA books “with LGBTQ+ characters.”

Last December, Cahall sued the district for her suspension on the grounds that her employer’s definition of “controversial” had been left deliberately vague. Citing the 14th and 15th amendments, she chided the state for big equal protection biffs. Though conservative Ohio courts always conspired to tilt her battle uphill, the initial suit made a splash. But on September 29, U.S. District Judge Douglas Cole ruled in favor of the system and dismissed Cahall’s case.

Judge Cole is a first term Trump appointee, nominated in 2019. In his ruling, he echoed the district’s definition of controversial—as “likely to arouse both support and opposition in the community.”

He also cited a precedent that limits a teacher’s civil rights. “Teachers do not have a First Amendment right to make their own ‘curricular and pedagogical choices’ in a public school,” he wrote. “The district pays her to instruct students, and as part of that, it has the right to specify the materials that she uses to accomplish that objective.”

Though the “controversial” books in Ms. Cahall’s classroom collection lived among more than 100 others—and, as her suit critically argued, none of the titles were “required reading or used in formal instruction”—the district court ruling will stand. Which makes this yet another blow for civil rights in the classroom, and queer children’s literature, writ-large.

Cahall’s initial suspension was set in motion off a parent’s complaint. But she’s defended her role in the classroom through every turn of the legal process, noting “sincerely held moral and religious beliefs that all children, including children who are LGBTQ+ or the children of parents who are LGBTQ+, deserve to be respected, accepted, and loved for who they are.”

Her ongoing suit has been supported in part by a personal GoFundMe, with surplus proceeds earmarked for LGBTQ+ advocacy efforts. And though the legal process has been a huge ordeal, Cahall’s nowhere near giving up the good fight. As she told The Buckeye Flame, “the good thing is when I’m in my classroom and I’m teaching, that really is my happy place.”

If you too love controversy and morally courageous educators, consider picking up one of the books excised from Cahall’s contested collection: A.J. Sass’ Ana On The Edge, Basil Sylvestor’s The Fabulous Zed Watson, Ashley Herring Blake’s Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea, and Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See.

Like this:

Like Loading…

The post » A federal judge just dismissed an Ohio teacher’s fight against book bans. appeared first on Our Story Insight.

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple must loosen its grip on its App Store and stop collecting a commission on some app sales, capping a five-year antitrust case brought by Epic Games that aimed to change the power that Apple wields over a large slice of the digital economy.

The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, rebuked Apple for thwarting a previous ruling in the lawsuit and said the company needed to be stopped from further disobeying the court. She criticized Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and accused other executives at the company of lying.

In her earlier ruling, Judge Gonzales Rogers ordered Apple to allow apps to provide users with external links to pay developers directly for services. The apps could then avoid the 30 percent commission that Apple charges in its App Store and potentially charge less for services.

Instead, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said on Wednesday, Apple created a new system that forced apps with external sales to pay a 27 percent commission to the company. Apple also created pop-up screens that discouraged customers from paying elsewhere, telling them that payments outside the App Store may not be secure.

“Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.

In response, she said Apple could no longer take commissions from sales outside the App Store. She also restricted the company from writing rules that would prevent developers from creating buttons or links to pay outside the store and said it could not create messages to discourage users from making purchases. In addition, Judge Gonzalez Rogers asked the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate the company for criminal contempt.

The ruling — a major victory for Epic and a stinging defeat for Apple — has the potential to change the app economy by increasing the money that developers collect while reducing the fees that flow to Apple. That strikes at one of Apple’s major businesses, with its App Store long the most prominent destination for people to download mobile games, productivity tools and other programs.

“There’s going to be a lot of latitude for developers to get better deals and for consumers to get better deals,” said Tim Sweeney, Epic’s chief executive. “This is a wonderful, wonderful day for everybody.”

An Apple spokeswoman, Olivia Dalton, said in a statement: “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order, and we will appeal.”

Apple’s shares sank 1.5 percent in after-hours trading.

Epic, the maker of the game Fortnite, brought the antitrust lawsuit against Apple in 2020. In the suit, Epic accused Apple of forcing app makers to use its payment system in exchange for access to the App Store, which is the only way to distribute apps on iPhones. The rules allowed Apple to collect as much as a 30 percent commission on many transactions.

The App Store makes up a large portion of the nearly $100 billion in annual services revenue that Apple collects.

In a ruling two years later, Judge Gonzalez Rogers stopped short of declaring that Apple had a monopoly in the market of mobile games, as Epic had argued. That meant Apple avoided the worst possible outcome of the case. But she found that the company had violated California laws against unfair competition by preventing developers from offering users alternative ways to pay for apps.

Last year, Epic complained to the court that Apple wasn’t complying with the ruling because it had created a new set of fees and rules for developers. The judge ordered Apple to provide the documents explaining how it had come up with its new system.

Apple’s documents showed that it tried to discourage alternative payments and keep as much of its traditional 30 percent commission as possible. At a July 2023 meeting, Phil Schiller, who oversees the App Store, advocated that Apple take no commission, but Luca Maestri, Apple’s finance chief at the time, championed a fee of 27 percent. Mr. Cook sided with Mr. Maestri, according to the documents.

Mr. Cook also asked that when people clicked on links to pay for apps outside the App Store they be shown a “scare” screen saying “that Apple’s privacy and security standards do not apply to purchases made on the web.”

“Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers said.

She said Apple executives had “outright lied under oath” and added, “Cook chose poorly.”

The post Judge Rebukes Apple and Orders It to Loosen Grip on App Store appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Last summer, a federal judge, Amit P. Mehta, delivered a landmark ruling that found Google had illegally dominated online search.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” he wrote.

Now, Judge Mehta has to figure out how to fix Google’s monopoly. His decision will be informed by a three-week hearing, which starts Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington, where the government and Google will argue over how to restore competition in online search.

The Justice Department wants Judge Mehta to break up Google by forcing the company to sell its Chrome browser, which could cut off a source of information it uses to improve its internet search. The department also wants to make the Silicon Valley giant hand over some of its most precious data to rivals, which could help their competing products.

In contrast, Google has asked the judge to only slightly restrict its ability to make deals to give its search engine prime placement on browsers and in smartphones.

The outcome could reshape the $1.86 trillion company, which has become synonymous with how people look for information online. Google faces mounting challenges, including the prospect of a breakup in a second antitrust case after a different federal judge ruled on Thursday that it had illegally maintained a monopoly in some ad technology. That puts Google in perhaps its most vulnerable position since Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the business in 1998.

Its fate could shake up Silicon Valley as the biggest companies fight to own a new technology era defined by artificial intelligence. Any restrictions on Google could hamper its ability to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and others as search is increasingly powered by A.I. tools that can summarize research and offer humanlike guidance.

“The D.O.J.’s been very aggressive in what they’ve asked for,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who studies antitrust. “They’ve essentially asked for the moon.”

A breakup of Google would be the most significant action taken by a court against a monopoly since a federal judge tried and failed to split Microsoft in half 25 years ago. It has been even longer since the federal government successfully divided up a company over its dominance. The last time was New Year’s Day 1984, when AT&T cleaved itself into eight companies as part of an antitrust settlement reached with the Justice Department two years earlier.

Judge Mehta’s decision could influence other tech antitrust cases. Since 2020, the Justice Department has twice accused Google of violating antitrust laws and sued Apple for making it difficult for users to ditch their iPhones. Meta is in the second week of an antitrust trial over whether it illegally stifled competition, while Amazon is grappling with a lawsuit that accuses it of squeezing the small merchants that use its site.

“At trial we will show how D.O.J.’s unprecedented proposals go miles beyond the court’s decision, and would hurt America’s consumers, economy and technological leadership,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

The Justice Department and a group of states filed the lawsuit over Google’s search business in 2020, during President Trump’s first term. The case went to trial in 2023 under the Biden administration, which demanded that Google be broken up. Mr. Trump’s administration has maintained that aggressive stance and continued to scrutinize the tech giants.

The case, U.S. v. Google, concerns payments that Google made to companies like Apple, Mozilla and Samsung to be the search engine that appeared automatically in web browsers and on the home screens of smartphones. Google paid those companies $26.3 billion in 2021, the court heard during the trial.

Government lawyers argued at the trial that the deals created a powerful cycle to benefit Google. The prime placement of the company’s search engine meant more people used it to find information, generating data that Google could then use to make its search engine better and further entrenching its dominance, they said.

Judge Mehta largely agreed with the government and ruled in August that Google had violated the law. He is expected to order the remedies in the case by the end of the summer.

Last year, the Justice Department asked Judge Mehta to stop Google from making the multibillion-dollar deals to be the default search engine.

The government’s proposal also went further. It argued that forcing Google to sell Chrome could deny the company a valuable source of traffic to its search engine. Any time a Chrome user enters a query directly into the browser’s search bar, it goes to Google. If the company spun off the browser, that prime placement would not be guaranteed.

The Justice Department also said it might want to force Google to spin off Android, the smartphone operating system, if the court’s actions failed to improve competition among search engines.

In addition, the government asked the judge to take steps that would give Google’s competitors a more direct boost. Under the proposal, search engines like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s Bing could take Google’s search results and ads and display them directly to their own users. Google would also have to hand over data about what terms people search for and what websites they click, which rivals could use to improve their own systems.

Google has argued that not much needs to change. It told Judge Mehta that it should still be allowed to pay Apple and others for its search engine to get top placement. But it also said browser makers should have the option to call off their deals with Google once a year. Those companies should be able to select different automatic search engines for different features, like a private browsing mode. Under Google’s proposal, smartphone manufacturers would have more freedom to decide what Google apps to install on their phones.

The hearing is expected to feature testimony from Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from Google’s partners, like Apple and Mozilla.

Rivals are watching. Kamyl Bazbaz, the senior vice president of public affairs for DuckDuckGo, said it was taking a wait-and-see approach, since Google has promised to appeal Judge Mehta’s ruling.

“There isn’t a single thing to do right now to actually prepare, besides getting ready to watch the case really closely,” Mr. Bazbaz said. What is decided, he added, could change “nothing less than how everybody uses the internet.”

The post Will a Federal Judge Break Up Google? appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.

“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Judge Brinkema said.

The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market: the tools used by online publishers, like news sites, to host open ad space; the tools advertisers use to buy that ad space; and the software that facilitates those transactions.

Judge Brinkema ruled in the government’s favor in two of those, finding that Google illegally built a monopoly over the publisher tools and the software system. She dismissed the third, the tools used by advertisers, saying the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market.

Google has increasingly faced a reckoning over the dominant role its products play in how people get information and conduct business online. Another federal judge ruled in August that the company had a monopoly in online search. He is now considering a request by the Justice Department to break up the company, with a three-week hearing on the matter scheduled to begin on Monday.

Judge Brinkema, too, will have an opportunity to force changes to Google’s business. On Thursday, she gave both sides seven days to propose a schedule for the next phase of the case.

In its lawsuit, the Justice Department pre-emptively asked the court to force Google to sell some pieces of the ad technology business it had acquired over the years. The government will now assess the ruling to determine what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly.

Together, the two rulings and their remedies could check Google’s influence and result in a major restructuring of the company.

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a “landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”

“This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies,” she said.

The cases against Google are part of a growing push by regulators to rein in the power of the biggest tech companies, which shape commerce, information and communication online. The Justice Department has sued Apple, arguing that the company made it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software. The Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon, accusing it of squeezing small businesses, and Meta, for killing rivals when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp. The trial against Meta started this week.

President Trump has signaled that his administration will continue taking a tough stance on antitrust for the tech industry, despite efforts by tech executives to court his favor. His choices for the F.T.C. chair and the Justice Department’s top antitrust role have said they intend to look closely at the power that tech companies have over online discourse. The Google search case was brought under his first administration.

The ad tech case — U.S. et al. v. Google — was filed in 2023 and concerns an intricate web of programs that sell ad space around the web, like on a news site or a recipes page. The suite of software, which includes Google Ad Manager, conducts split-second auctions to place ads each time a user loads a page. That business generated $31 billion in 2023, or about a 10th of the overall revenue for Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Part of that business stems from the acquisition of DoubleClick, an advertising software company, for $3.1 billion in 2008. Google now has an 87 percent market share in ad-selling technology, according to the government.

The government argued during a three-week trial in September that Google had a monopoly over multiple pieces of technology that are used to conduct these transactions. The company locked publishers into using its software, and was able to take more money off the top of each transaction because of its dominance, the government said.

That hurt websites that produce content and make it available online for no charge, the government said.

For years, groups representing news organizations, including The New York Times, have argued that the dominance of major tech platforms undermines the media industry. During the trial, the government called witnesses who had worked for publishers including Gannett and News Corp and for ad agencies that buy space online.

“These are the markets that make the free and open internet possible,” said Aaron Teitelbaum, a Justice Department lawyer, during closing arguments in November.

Google countered that it faced competition not just from other ad tech companies but from social networks like TikTok and streaming platforms. In response to the government’s arguments that it had built its ad tech products to work better together, Google’s lawyers argued that its case was bolstered by a 2004 Supreme Court decision that protects a company’s right to choose with whom it does and does not work.

“Google’s conduct is a story of innovation in response to competition,” Karen Dunn, Google’s lead lawyer, said in her closing argument.

Judge Brinkema disagreed. She said that Google had broken the law by effectively forcing publishers that used the company’s tools to manage ad space to also use their products to facilitate transactions with advertisers.

The company had changed its policies and practices in ways that “decreased product quality and harmed competition by further entrenching Google as the dominant company in open-web display advertising,” she said in her ruling.

But the government failed to prove its case on how Google’s acquisitions of ad technology companies was anticompetitive, Judge Brinkema said in her ruling.

Among the suits filed against big tech companies, antitrust experts have viewed the Google ad technology suit as one of the strongest for the government. It is generally legal for a business to grow because it is the best at innovating. But, the government argued, Google entrenched its monopolies and tied them together — a classic antitrust violation.

“The court is applying very traditional antitrust principles,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at Carey Law School of the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m not surprised the government won.”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

The post Google Is Illegally Monopolizing Online Advertising Tech, Judge Rules appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Jerome Dewald sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap in front of an appellate panel of New York State judges, ready to argue for a reversal of a lower court’s decision in his dispute with a former employer.

The court had allowed Mr. Dewald, who is not a lawyer and was representing himself, to accompany his argument with a prerecorded video presentation.

As the video began to play, it showed a man seemingly younger than Mr. Dewald’s 74 years wearing a blue, collared shirt and a beige sweater and standing in front of what appeared to be a blurred virtual background.

A few seconds into the video, one of the judges, confused by the image on the screen, asked Mr. Dewald if the man was his lawyer.

“I generated that,” Mr. Dewald responded. “That is not a real person.”

The judge, Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels of the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, paused for a moment. It was clear she was displeased with his answer.

“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application,” she snapped at him.

“I don’t appreciate being misled,” she added before yelling for someone to turn off the video.

What Mr. Dewald failed to disclose was that he had created the digital avatar using artificial intelligence software, the latest example of A.I. creeping into the U.S. legal system in potentially troubling ways.

The hearing at which Mr. Dewald made his presentation, on March 26, was filmed by court system cameras and reported earlier by The Associated Press.

Reached on Friday, Mr. Dewald, the plaintiff in the case, said he had been overwhelmed by embarrassment at the hearing. He said he had sent the judges a letter of apology shortly afterward, expressing his deep regret and acknowledging that his actions had “inadvertently misled” the court.

He said he had resorted to using the software after stumbling over his words in previous legal proceedings. Using A.I. for the presentation, he thought, might ease the pressure he felt in the courtroom.

He said he had planned to make a digital version of himself but had encountered “technical difficulties” in doing so, which prompted him to create a fake person for the recording instead.

“My intent was never to deceive but rather to present my arguments in the most efficient manner possible,” he said in his letter to the judges. “However, I recognize that proper disclosure and transparency must always take precedence.”

A self-described entrepreneur, Mr. Dewald was appealing an earlier ruling in a contract dispute with a former employer. He eventually presented an oral argument at the appellate hearing, stammering and taking frequent pauses to regroup and read prepared remarks from his cellphone.

As embarrassed as he might be, Mr. Dewald could take some comfort in the fact that actual lawyers have gotten into trouble for using A.I. in court.

In 2023, a New York lawyer faced severe repercussions after he used ChatGPT to create a legal brief riddled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations. The case showcased the flaws in relying on artificial intelligence and reverberated throughout the legal trade.

The same year, Michael Cohen, a former lawyer and fixer for President Trump, provided his lawyer with phony legal citations he had gotten from Google Bard, an artificial intelligence program. Mr. Cohen ultimately pleaded for mercy from the federal judge presiding over his case, emphasizing that he had not known the generative text service could provide false information.

Some experts say that artificial intelligence and large language models can be helpful to people who have legal matters to deal with but cannot afford lawyers. Still, the technology’s risks remain.

“They can still hallucinate — produce very compelling looking information” that is actually “either fake or nonsensical,” said Daniel Shin, the assistant director of research at the Center for Legal and Court Technology at the William & Mary Law School. “That risk has to be addressed.”

The post Man Employs A.I. Avatar in Legal Appeal, and Judge Isn’t Amused appeared first on Our Story Insight.