For years, the maker of the TurboTax software claimed that people could file their tax returns online for free.
Ms. James announced on Wednesday that Intuit, the company creating the software, would pay back $141 million to more than four million Americans who were unfairly charged for tax services that were falsely advertised as free.
But the company deliberately employed “several deceptive and unfair trade practices” to drive customers away from participating in the federal program, Ms. James said.
Preliminary estimates from the settlement document show that Texas had the highest number of consumers who were misled and unfairly charged, about 460,000.
The lawsuit, filed in Delaware state court, says that the New York groups are asking whether Activision did a disservice to its shareholders by agreeing to sell the company to Microsoft for about $70 billion, or about $95 per share, which the pension groups say is undervalued.
Last summer, a California employment agency sued Activision, accusing it of fostering a toxic and sexist work environment in which women were routinely harassed.
The company reported $6.9 billion in revenue for the first three months of 2022, outstripping analysts’ expectations and skyrocketing 136 percent from the same time last year, when Covid-19 vaccines were scarce and people were not traveling as much.
Of its nearly $6 billion in losses, $5.6 billion came from changes in the valuation of other companies in which it has a stake.
Though Uber’s business continues to lose money, it said it was drawing closer to profitability.
Drivers, who power Uber’s business — as well as the business of other gig economy companies like Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart — have said high gas prices in recent months, stemming in part from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have made it more difficult to make a living driving for Uber.
Uber, which had already been spending heavily to lure back drivers who left early in the pandemic, responded in March by charging riders a small fuel fee for each trip, which went to drivers.
That confidence — and its rosy outlook for the next quarter — differed starkly from its rival Lyft, which reported financial results on Tuesday.
Uber’s shares fell along with Lyft’s, and Uber said shortly after that it would release its financial results hours earlier than initially planned on Wednesday, seemingly in an attempt to differentiate its results from Lyft’s and pre-empt a drop in its stock when the market opened later that morning.
On a call with investors on Wednesday, Mr. Khosrowshahi acknowledged that Uber also needed to continue to increase the number of drivers on its platform.
Lyft reported better-than-expected revenue, $876 million, a 44 percent increase from the first quarter of 2021, and $197 million in net loss, a 54 percent decrease.
Starbucks announced Tuesday that it was raising pay and expanding training at corporate-owned locations in the United States.
Mr. Bodie said the pay increases could also amount to a violation of the company’s obligation to bargain in good faith because they suggest an intention to give unionized employees a worse deal than nonunionized employees.
Starbucks also said it planned to post leaflets in stores to keep employees informed, in which the company says that the outcome of collective bargaining is uncertain and risky.
Stocks on Wall Street jumped on Wednesday, after Jerome H.
The S&P 500 jumped more than 2.3 percent in afternoon trading, spiking after Mr. Powell’s comment.
Inflation is at its highest in four decades, and the Fed is quickly withdrawing monetary support as it looks to cool the economy down.
The S&P 500 was down more than 12 percent for the year at the end of trading on Tuesday, including an 8.8 percent plunge in April that was triggered by a sudden shift in views on what the Fed will do next.
Mr. Musk has commented before about Twitter’s revenue model, which is based on advertising dollars, and suggested changes.
Mr. Musk also suggested getting rid of advertisements on the site, in a tweet he has since deleted.
German exports to Russia plunged 62.3 percent in March from the previous month, government statistics showed Wednesday, as sanctions aimed at starving the Russian economy as punishment for President Vladimir V.
The European Union and the United States have imposed increasingly severe economic sanctions on Russia since the Feb.
The sharp decline in exports to Russia reflects the close economic ties built up between the two countries in recent decades.
But German companies nevertheless sold goods worth 1 billion euros to Russia in March, as some firms not affected by the sanctions have been reluctant to sever ties with the country.
Bayer, the chemical and health products giant, has ceased all spending in Russia and Belarus but continues to sell essential products in both countries.
Overall, German exports for the month were down by 3.3 percent from February, the Federal Statistics Office said.
Germany is the world’s third-biggest exporting country, after China and the United States, according to the World Trade Organization.
While the jump gets The Times closer to its stated goal of 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027, The Athletic is eating into the company’s profits.
At the end of 2021, the company said it had about 7.6 million subscribers with 8.8 million subscriptions.
The company made a distinction between subscribers and subscriptions — a subscriber may have more than one subscription — in its earnings report for the first time on Wednesday.
Adjusted operating costs for The New York Times Group, which does not include The Athletic, are expected to increase 12 to 15 percent in the quarter and then slow in the second half of the year, the company said.
New I bonds — low-risk federal savings bonds indexed to inflation — issued through the end of October will earn an annualized rate of 9.62 percent for six months, the Treasury Department announced this week.
That represents the highest inflation rate the bonds have earned since they were introduced in 1998, said Ken Tumin, the founder of the financial website DepositAccounts.com.
An I bond rate has two parts: a fixed rate, set when the bond is issued, which stays the same for its 30-year life, and a variable rate, which is based on the six-month change of the Consumer Price Index and can reset twice a year, in May and November.
The fixed-rate component is currently zero — but it has been 3 percent or higher in the past.
The Treasury Department doesn’t disclose its formula for setting the fixed rate, Mr. Tumin said.
I bonds are considered quite safe.
You can acquire up to $10,000 in I bonds per person, per year, on TreasuryDirect.gov.
Abortion is a business issue: Women make up more than half of the work force, and those who were unable to get abortions were less likely to be employed full time six months after denial of care, according to a 2018 paper.
Companies that choose to offer new policies to support employees seeking abortions — or that choose not to — risk dividing customers, employees and clients.
Although Apple, Amazon, Citigroup and Yelp are among those offering to cover some costs for employees who need to travel out of state for an abortion, other companies had no comment yesterday about the Supreme Court draft opinion leak.
Some companies, like Levi’s and OkCupid, and executives have spoken out.
A Texas state legislator warned in March that he would seek to prevent Citigroup from underwriting municipal bonds in the state unless it rescinded its policy of covering employees’ travel expenses for abortions.
Restrictive abortion laws have the biggest effects on low-wage workers, who cannot as easily afford to travel out of state for an abortion, and many of their employers, such as at Walmart and Kroger, are based in Republican-led states.
“Let us be clear, it will not be easy,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president, told European deputies at a parliament meeting in Strasbourg, France.
Analysts say it will be possible to sever Europe’s oil ties to Russia, but the effort will take time and may lead to shortages and higher prices for gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products.
But another part will focus on the E.U.
Much of Russia’s oil is transported by European-owned tankers, in particular Greek-owned ones.