Page 7 - Greg Lamm News Today

A Washington federal judge on Monday gave Amazon.com until Friday to turn over data related to ergonomic reports the U.S. Department of Labor is seeking as part of its probe of worker safety issues at e-commerce giant warehouses.

The Washington Supreme Court on Tuesday ended a temporary block on Albertsons Cos.' $4 billion shareholder dividend ahead of its merger with Kroger Co. and declined to review a lower court's ruling that the payout didn't violate anti-competitive laws.

A Washington appellate panel on Tuesday considered whether a jury should be told that the contractor for a highway tunnel project committed spoliation of a critical piece of evidence in a disputed insurance claim, with one judge questioning if it even mattered since there was another theory of causation that would be covered by the insurance policy.

An attorney for a natural gas processing plant seeking a $15 million insurance claim told a Seattle jury on Monday that unforeseeable harmonic vibrations, much like an opera singer's voice shattering a wine glass, caused a critical part of the plant to fail.

Alaska Airlines' dress code policy requiring public-facing employees to present as either male or female discriminates against a nonbinary and gender-fluid flight attendant, according to a complaint from the Washington State Human Rights Commission.

A Washington state judge on Friday ruled that Albertsons' $4 billion shareholder dividend ahead of its merger with Kroger wasn't anti-competitive and that, like Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins, Albertsons has a right to decide what to do with its money.

A Ninth Circuit panel seemed to cast doubt Thursday over parents' claims that Valve Corp. didn't do enough to highlight the gambling risks of buying "loot boxes," suggesting they had trouble linking the claims to their children' game playing.

Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.'s bill-review practice violated Washington's consumer-protection law because it relied on a database calculation rather than an individualized assessment to determine whether medical bills were reasonable, a Washington state appeals court ruled Monday.

Washington's labor department said Friday that a federal court should throw out Amazon's lawsuit challenging a workplace hazard enforcement action, arguing the e-commerce giant made things worse by refusing to notify workers it was appealing a safety citation from the state.

A Washington state court has added three weeks to a temporary block of Albertsons' $4 billion shareholder dividend ahead of a merger with Kroger, after the state attorney general's office complained it was working under an "unnecessarily rushed" timeline to build its case alleging the dividend would violate antitrust and consumer-protection laws.