SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Antitrust Regulators Should Reject the Kroger/Albertsons Merger
Kroger announced it is merging with Albertsons in a $24.6 billion deal, creating one of the largest grocery store chains in the U.S. with nearly 5,000 stores. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, released the following statement:
"With food prices rising, the last thing Americans need is a supermarket merger that will spike food prices even further. Rejecting this merger proposal should be a no-brainer for federal antitrust officials."
WASHINGTON
Kroger announced it is merging with Albertsons in a $24.6 billion deal, creating one of the largest grocery store chains in the U.S. with nearly 5,000 stores. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, released the following statement:
"With food prices rising, the last thing Americans need is a supermarket merger that will spike food prices even further. Rejecting this merger proposal should be a no-brainer for federal antitrust officials."
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
(202) 588-1000LATEST NEWS
Journalists, Audiobook Narrators Sue AI Giants Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law for 'Stealing Their Voices'
"They've built a billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
May 14, 2026
In yet another display of how Illinois' pioneering biometric privacy law can be used to protect Americans, state residents who work as audio storytellers, broadcast journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and more filed class-action lawsuits against Big Tech this week for "stealing their voices" to develop artificial intelligence products.
Since Illinois legislators passed the groundbreaking Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in 2008—regulating the collection, use, safeguarding, handling, storage, retention, and destruction of biometric identifiers, including fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans of a retina, iris, hand, or face geometry—there have been thousands of lawsuits filed and major settlements with Clearview AI, Facebook, and Six Flags.
Represented by the award-winning civil rights firm Loevy + Loevy, the Illinoisans are suing Adobe, Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Apple, Amazon, ElevenLabs, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Samsung under BIPA.
The plaintiffs are audiobook narrators Lindsay Dorcus and Victoria Nassif as well as journalists Robin Amer, Yohance Lacour, Carol Marin, and Phil Rogers. Journalist Alison Flowers is part of all lawsuits except those against Amazon and Apple. Their lawyers noted that "between them, they have multiple Emmy and Peabody awards, several Pulitzer Prizes, several Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, an Edward R. Murrow award, a James Beard award, a SOVAS award, and many, many other honors."
Their cases focus on the voiceprint of each plaintiff, which is "a digital fingerprint of the human voice," as the complaints explain. "It is a mathematical capture of the acoustic features—pitch, timbre, resonance—that emerge from a person's distinctive physiology, combined with the speech patterns that person develops over a lifetime: accent, cadence, articulation. Like a fingerprint, a voiceprint identifies the individual. Like a fingerprint, it cannot be changed."
The Adobe case targets Firefly, the company's family of generative AI models. The complaint states that the company "treated the human voices that built Firefly as ownerless—ignoring the speakers' rights, taking their voiceprints without asking, paying them nothing, and giving them no notice that their voices were being used at all, and "built a mirage of commercial safety around products whose construction violated the one thing Illinois law requires before collecting a voiceprint: consent from the person."
The Google filing points out that the company "has been a repeat defendant in BIPA cases" and even "paid approximately $100
million to settle BIPA claims arising from Google Photos' face grouping feature," among other high-profile settlements.
The Meta suit highlights that "no defendant in any biometric-privacy matter pending in the United States has had more direct, more sustained, or more financially consequential notice of BIPA than Meta," given that the company "has paid the three largest biometric-privacy settlements in American history," including $650 million to resolve claims under the Illinois law regarding Facebook's photo tag suggestions.
"By the time Meta released Voicebox in June 2023, MMS in May 2023, and SeamlessM4T in August 2023, Meta had been a BIPA defendant for nearly a decade and had paid more than $2 billion in biometric-privacy settlements," the complaint continues. "The technology Meta built using plaintiffs' voices now competes with plaintiffs in the markets where they earn their living."
The Amazon filing details similar harm to plaintiffs:
Amazon extracted plaintiffs' voiceprints without notice or consent, depriving them of the right BIPA guarantees to make an informed decision about the collection and use of their biometric data. Amazon retains those voiceprints in its commercial models and continues to profit from them. Amazon has further disseminated those voiceprints, encoded in model parameters, through its cross-affiliate, subprocessor, and integration-partner networks. The technology built on those voiceprints now displaces plaintiffs in the markets where they earn their living—the broadcast journalism, investigative podcast, audiobook narration, voiceover, and voice performance markets that the voice products are designed and sold to serve.
"What we are seeing is an illegal and unethical exploitation of talent on a massive scale, and one of the largest violations of biometric privacy ever committed," said Loevy + Loevy attorney Ross Kimbarovsky in a Thursday statement.
"The legislators who wrote and passed BIPA had the foresight to realize that biometric privacy was going to be a major civil rights issue in the 21st century," the attorney continued. "Social security numbers can be changed, passwords can be reset, and credit cards can be canceled, but once your biometric data is compromised, there's nothing you can do about it."
"These companies know the law, know their liability, and know exactly how to build consent systems that comply with BIPA," Kimbarovsky added. "They've built a billion-dollar industry on stolen voices because they thought no one would make them pay for it."
In addition to Illinois, Texas and Washington state have enacted biometric privacy laws, while California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia have comprehensive consumer protection policies that apply to such information, according to Bloomberg Law. However, efforts in Congress to enact federal legislation—such as the National Biometric Information Privacy Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act—have been unsuccessful.
Keep ReadingShow Less
UNICEF Decries 'Intolerable' Israeli Killing of Lebanese, Palestinian Children
Despite promised ceasefires, ongoing Israeli attacks "are killing and injuring children, deepening their exposure to trauma, and leaving devastating consequences that could last a lifetime."
May 14, 2026
Officials at the United Nations Children's Fund this week condemned Israel's killing, maiming, and traumatization of children in Lebanon—where there is ostensibly a ceasefire in effect—the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine, and Gaza.
UNICEF said Wednesday that at least 59 children in Lebanon have reportedly been killed or wounded by Israeli forces over the past week, despite a nearly monthlong truce between Israel and the militant resistance group Hezbollah.
“Children are being killed and injured when they should be returning to classrooms, playing with friends, and recovering from months of fear and upheaval,” UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Edouard Beigbeder said in a statement.
“Nearly a month ago, an agreement was reached to silence the weapons and stop the violence," Beigbeder added. "Reality is proving to be very different. Continued attacks are killing and injuring children, deepening their exposure to trauma, and leaving devastating consequences that could last a lifetime.”
According to Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health, at least 23 children have been killed and 93 wounded during the ceasefire. Since March 2—when Israel renewed attacks on its northern neighbor amid the nascent US-Israeli war on Iran—at least 200 children have been killed and over 800 others injured.
The ministry said six people—including two women and a child—were killed and 12 people wounded Wednesday evening when Israel bombed the village of Arab Salim in Nabatieh district. Separately on Wednesday, Israeli strikes on the village of Harouf killed one child, while two children were among three people killed by an Israeli strike on Roumine.
Lebanese officials say at least 2,896 people have been killed and 8,824 others wounded by Israeli attacks in Lebanon since March 2.
UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said Monday in Geneva that “children are paying an intolerable price for escalating militarized operations and settler attacks across the occupied West Bank of Palestine, including East Jerusalem," as part of Israel's accelerating ethnic cleansing and colonization of the Palestinian territory.
“We're seeing attacks become increasingly coordinated,” Elder noted. "Documented incidents include children shot, stabbed, children beaten, and children pepper-sprayed.”
Elder continued:
Between January 2025 and today, at least one Palestinian child has been killed, on average, every week. That is, 70 Palestinian children killed in this timeframe. Ninety-three percent of these were killed by Israeli forces. A further 850 children were injured. Most of those children killed or wounded were by live ammunition. All this comes amid historic levels of settler attacks. [The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] said last month that March 2026 saw the highest number of Palestinians injured by settler attacks in the past 20 years.
“These are not isolated incidents—they point to a sustained pattern of the worst kinds of violations of children’s rights, as well as attacks on children’s homes, on their schools, and on the water they rely on," Elder stressed. "What is unfolding is not only an escalation in violence against Palestinian children; it is the steady dismantling of the conditions children need to survive and grow."
On Wednesday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that Israeli occupation forces fatally shot 16-year-old Youssef Ali Youssef Kaabneh near Jaljulia, north of Ramallah, amid sweeping raids across the West Bank.
Elder said that in Gaza, at least 229 children have been killed and 260 others wounded by Israeli forces since the October 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack—took effect. Since October 2023, more than 64,000 children and 250,000 Palestinians of all ages have been killed or wounded by Israel's Gaza onslaught, which a panel of UN experts last year called a genocide. UNICEF has called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child."
Dr. Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the UN World Health Organization representative for the occupied Palestinian territory, drew attention this week to the 10,000 Gazan children "with life-changing injuries." Treatment for these wounds is often difficult to impossible due to Israel's ongoing siege of the coastal strip.
"Every day that rehabilitation services in Gaza remain underresourced is a day that preventable disability risks becoming permanent," said Van de Weerdt. "Gaza does not need stopgap measures, it needs sustained investment in the health workforce, in equipment, and in the systems and environment that allow people to recover, rebuild, and return to life."
Thousands of Gazan children have lost at least one limb, tens of thousands have lost their parents, and hundreds of thousands have lost their homes due to mass forced displacement.
All that trauma and more is fueling a mental health crisis among children in Palestine and Lebanon.
“The impact of repeated exposure to conflict on children’s mental health can be profound and long-lasting,” said Beigbeder. “Children in Lebanon have endured waves of violence, displacement, and uncertainty, often with little or no time to recover. Without urgent support, the psychological scars of this compounded crisis may stay with them for years, affecting not only their well-being, but their future and the future of the country.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
DOJ Reportedly Set to Drop Fraud Charges Against Billionaire After He Hired Trump Attorney
"The way to avoid fraud charges under the Trump administration is to hire Trump's personal lawyer and engage in bribery," said one critic.
May 14, 2026
The US Department of Justice is reportedly preparing to drop charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani shortly after he hired one of President Donald Trump's personal lawyers to represent him.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that the DOJ—now headed by former Trump attorney Todd Blanche—is working on ending its case against Adani, who was indicted in November 2024 along with two colleagues for alleged conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud, among other charges.
The Times noted that the DOJ's reversal came after Adani hired a legal team headed by attorney Robert Giuffra Jr., who is currently leading efforts to overturn Trump's 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records.
According to the Times, Giuffra's work for Adani "culminated in a previously unreported meeting last month at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington" that included an offer that "if prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs."
Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the DOJ could announce it's dropping charges against Adani "as soon as this week," and added that the Securities and Exchange Commission "is also moving to settle a parallel civil fraud case it brought against Adani and others in November 2024."
The DOJ alleged that Adani, whom Forbes estimates is worth at least $82 billion, "orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars," and then subsequently lied about the scheme to secure funding from US investors.
Given Trump's past pardons of white-collar criminals—including a cryptocurrency magnate who helped boost the value of the president's personal meme coin—some observers were quick to label the DOJ's move to drop charges against Adani an act of corruption.
University of Arkansas economist Jeremy Horpedahl commented that the Adani case shows that "the way to avoid fraud charges under the Trump administration is to hire Trump's personal lawyer and engage in bribery."
Manish Sharma, leader of the Indian Youth Congress, suggested Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also involved in the effort to get charges dropped for Adani, a longtime political ally.
"Perfect timing, just months after Modi signed that one-sided trade deal with Trump," wrote Sharma. "Quid pro quo delivered: Compromised PM sells out Indian interests, Trump admin returns the favor to Modi’s favorite billionaire."
Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation, criticized the New York Times for describing the quid pro quo proposed by Giuffra on behalf of his client as an "unusual offer."
"'UNUSUAL OFFER??' No, headline writers," wrote Mystal, who then suggested a more accurate headline: "Charges Dropped Against Indian Billionaire Accused of Bribery, After Offering Trump A Bribe."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular