Supreme Court Obamacare case - Amazon antitrust investigation - Peru’s president impeached

Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh indicated skepticism during two hours of arguments in the case toward the stance by the Republican challengers that the entire law must fall if a single key provision, called the individual mandate, is deemed unconstitutional. President Trump signed a law in 2017 that erased the penalty, a change that Republicans then argued eliminated the constitutional justification for the provision as permissible under the power of Congress to levy taxes.
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If Roberts and Kavanaugh join the court’s three liberals in the court’s eventual ruling due by the end of June, the bulk of Obamacare would survive. “It’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire act to fall if the mandate was struck down,” said Roberts, who authored 2012 and 2015 rulings that upheld Obamacare in previous Republican legal challenges.
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The justices - conservatives and liberals alike - raised questions over whether Texas and the other challengers had the proper legal standing to bring the case, worrying about similar scenarios in which someone might be able to sue over some other government mandate when no penalty exists. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s most recent appointee, asked skeptical questions about legal standing.

Peru has been tipped into political uncertainty after its Congress voted to oust President Martín Vizcarra from office, as the country battles one of the world’s worst outbreaks of Covid-19. Opposition lawmakers from nine parties in the unicameral congress banded together to impeach the 57-year-old. They cited accusations of corruption and his handling of the pandemic.
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In total 105 of Peru’s 130 lawmakers voted to remove him. According to Peru’s constitution, the president of congress, Manuel Merino, is next in line to replace Vizcarra as interim president. Merino, an opposition lawmaker, is due to be sworn in on Wednesday just months ahead of scheduled elections in April.
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[Vizcarra's] fight against corruption made him popular with Peruvians but won him enemies in congress and his impeachment is the climax of an acrimonious stand-off with opposition lawmakers who he had tried to bring into line with anti-graft reforms. Peruvians took to the streets to voice their opposition to the vote to impeach Vizcarra over corruption allegations.

As part of the investigation, EU regulators obtained a massive data set from Amazon to analyse how its business uses merchant data. [Competition chief Margrethe Vestager] said its preliminary concern is thus that third party sellers are unable to compete on the merits as a result of the big data advantage Amazon gleans from its access to third party sellers’ data.
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Also today, the commissioner announced a second competition investigation into Amazon — this one focused on the Buy Box and Prime loyalty program. "Amazon may have set certain rules on its platform that artificially favors both its own retail offers as well as the offers of sellers that use Amazon’s logistics and delivery services. For this reason we have decided to open a second investigation into these business practices.” [Vestager said].
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Amazon will now have a chance to respond to the charges, after which the Commission will assess the evidence and take a decision on whether it believes there has been an infringement of EU competition law. If it believes there has it has the power to order an end to infringing conduct and impose a fine of up to 10% of a company’s annual worldwide turnover.

[Apple's new M1 processor] is based on 5-nanometer technology, the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology in the world. It's twice as powerful as a rival laptop chip (likely one from Intel) while consuming a quarter of the battery life, [Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies] said.
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Apple silicon for Macs is the latest effort by the company to control all of the hardware and software on its products. Apple has used Intel chips in its computers for over a decade, when it moved away from its previous partner, IBM. That decision changed the PC industry and helped Intel become the world's dominant computer chipmaker.
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Apple's newest Macs come as millions of people around the globe upgrade their computers for working or learning from home. Laptops have been selling well across the board. In the third quarter, global notebook and mobile workstation shipments soared 28% from the previous year, helping push overall PC shipments up 13% to 79.2 million units, according to Canalys. Shipments reached levels not seen since 2011, the firm said.

The report, a result of an internal investigation, details the misdeeds of ex-Cardinal McCarrick, whose downfall in 2018 set off a chain reaction of sexual abuse allegations within the Catholic Church. McCarrick successfully evaded scrutiny during the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. The report concludes that both John Paul II and Benedict were aware of allegations made over the decades, but without consequence.
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The report adds that John Paul II, when made aware of the allegations made against McCarrick while bishop in Newark, decided on three occasions against elevating him to positions in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. John Paul II eventually relented and moved McCarrick to D.C. after an inquiry in which several fellow bishops falsely stated there was no certainty that McCarrick had engaged in sexual misconduct, even though he "shared a bed with young men."
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McCarrick's downfall affected many people close to him, a fact which the report relates. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who in 2006 succeeded McCarrick as Archbishop of Washington, resigned in late 2018 after a New York Times investigation revealed a pattern of sexual abuse cover-ups while he was a bishop in Pennsylvania. McCarrick retired in 2006, although he remained active in some church roles.