FTC asks judge to delay Amazon trial

The Federal Trade Commission asked a federal judge on Wednesday to delay a trial in a case accusing Amazon of using deceptive practices in its Prime subscription program, citing staffing and budgetary challenges at the government agency.

Jonathan Cohen, a lawyer for the FTC, made the request before U.S. District Judge John Chun, who is overseeing the legal proceedings from a 2023 lawsuit the commission filed against the e-commerce giant in Washington state.

“Our resource constraints are severe and really unique to this moment,” Cohen said during a status hearing on Wednesday. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on the case team.”

When the judge asked if the agency’s challenges were due to recent cuts in the federal government, Cohen said it was.

The Amazon trial had been scheduled to start in September. The FTC is seeking to relax some of the deadlines in the case and a delay akin to a two-month continuance. The agency does not want to “move the trial back more than a couple of months,” Cohen said.

The agency’s legal team is “racing at considerable cost” to meet a late April deadline for discovery while at the same time dealing with restrictive rules on purchasing court documents and travel, Cohen explained.

Wall Street rises on inflation report

U.S. stock indexes rose Wednesday after Wall Street got some relief from an encouraging inflation update. But even on a rare up day for the market, President Donald Trump’s trade war still knocked stocks around.

The S&P 500 gained 0.5% after skidding between an early gain of 1.3% and a later loss. The unsettled trading came a day after the index briefly fell more than 10% below its all-time high set last month.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average also pinballed sharply, careening between a rise of 287 points and a drop of 423. It ended with a loss of 82 points, or 0.2%, while the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.2%.

The inflation report helped companies in the artificial-intelligence industry lead the way. It’s a bounce back after AI stocks got crushed recently by worries their prices had gone too stratospheric in the market’s run to record after record in recent years.

Nvidia climbed 6.4% to trim its loss for the year so far to 13.8%. Server-maker Super Micro Computer rose 4%, and GE Vernova, which is helping to power AI data centers, gained 5.1%.

Elon Musk’s Tesla, whose price had more than halved since mid-December, rallied 7.6% for its first back-to-back gain in nearly a month.

Tesla fights to save Musk’s pay package

Tesla urged Delaware’s highest court to salvage Elon Musk’s record-setting pay package after a lower-court judge rejected it twice, taking his epic legal battle over tens of billions of dollars in stock options to the next level.

Tesla’s lawyers wrote in an appeals brief Tuesday that the state’s Chancery Court disregarded the will of shareholders who signed off on the compensation plan for Tesla’s chief executive officer after Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick spiked it the first time.

Tesla, Musk and a group of shareholders are appealing a December ruling that struck down the billionaire’s compensation award for the second time.

Compiled from Associated Press and Bloomberg reports.