Meta and Google’s reckoning, Israel’s Lebanon plan and Maduro in court

Hi, I'm Kim Vannell, in Wanganui, New Zealand.

It's Thursday, March 26th.

Today, a landmark verdict for Metta and Google

as a jury finds them guilty of designing

harmful, addictive products.

Israel outlines its plan to occupy Lebanon

using Gaza as its blueprint.

And Maduro gets ready for court

with a question mark over who puts the bill for the lawyers.

This is Royce's World News, bringing you everything

you need to know from the front lines

in 10 minutes, seven days a week.

An LA jury has found Metta and Google negligent

for the way they've designed their platforms,

an verdict that could redefine the legal responsibilities

of social media companies.

A 20-year-old woman brought the case,

saying she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube

at a young age because of features designed

to keep users hooked.

The jury found both companies had failed

to properly warn users about the risks of their platforms,

and that was a large factor in harming the young woman.

The court has ordered Metta to pay $4.2 million

at Google $1.8 million in damages,

relatively small sums given the size of the companies.

But as Royce's legal correspondent Courtney Rosen

explains, the case is being watched closely

as a test with thousands of similar lawsuits

going through the courts.

There is a federal law that companies

like Metta and Google have relied on for decades

and defend themselves in court against similar lawsuits.

And that law says that these companies are not responsible

for the content that users post on their platform.

The attorneys for the plaintiffs

came up with a novel theory to argue in court

where they focused on the platform's features

or the products as opposed to the content

that was posted on the platform.

For example, they talked about endless scroll,

which is if you go on Instagram, for example,

and content keeps loading at the bottom

as you scroll down the page.

Or they've talked about auto play

where videos start automatically after you finish one.

They focused on what these platforms are, how they're built

as opposed to the content that users are seeing on them.

Courtney says beyond the verdict,

even just the way the trial played out marks a shift.

We've had parents and teachers and school officials say

for years now that these apps,

Instagram, YouTube, other social media apps,

are designed to be drawing in their students,

drawing in their kids and keeping them hooked.

This is the first time that the CEO of Metta Mark Zuckerberg

had to answer questions about his products in front of a jury.

And this is the first time that those issues

were mitigated in front of a jury.

So we're moving now from parents and schools

and teachers having these discussions to courtrooms.

Metta and Google have both pushed back against the decision

and both say they will appeal.

And they are negotiating, by the way,

and they want to make a deal so badly,

but they're afraid to say it

because they figure they'll be killed by their own people.

President Donald Trump speaking at a Republican fundraising

dinner in Washington, D.C.,

doubling down on his position that negotiations

with Iran to end the war are underway.

Iran's Foreign Minister confirms Tehran

is reviewing a US plan to end the war.

Although he says, messages relayed through mediators

do not count as negotiations.

One message Tehran has sent through intermediaries

that Lebanon must be included in any ceasefire deal

with the U.S. and Israel.

That's according to six sources.

Israel says it's attacking Hezbollah

and it plans to occupy the country's south,

comparing its approach in Lebanon

to what it did in Gaza.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announcing plans

to create a defensive buffer from the border

up to the Lattani River, 20 miles deep inside Lebanon.

Much like the defensive buffer,

Israel created in Gaza.

Katz also says Israel's occupation of Lebanon

will outlast the war in Iran.

Our Lebanon bureau chief, Maya Jabali, is in Beirut.

It's the first time they spelled out their intentions

as clearly and it's the first time

they actually spelled out intentions

so deep into the country that's much, much more land

where hundreds of thousands of people live

that would seem to then fall under Israeli control.

More than a million people already displaced

by hunkering down in makeshift shelters.

And for them, hearing that Israel is using Gaza

as its playbook is terrifying.

I think for many Lebanese hearing those words,

it's just the worst case scenario.

What that immediately evoked among Lebanese

was wholesale demolition of homes

and that's something that the Israeli Defense Minister

has also brought up.

He's described a lot of these homes as terrorist outposts

but really they are populated villages

in the southern border strip.

So what people are thinking about is the possibility

that the villages will be entirely demolished, erased.

Hezbollah says it will fight to stop Israeli troops

from occupying southern Lebanon,

calling the move an existential threat to the country.

For a deeper dive on how possible talks

on a Middle East ceasefire is shifting stock portfolios

tune into our system markets podcast morning bid.

It's available wherever you get your podcasts.

Travelers around the U.S. are now facing the longest lines

in the history of the TSA.

At the top of the wait time list,

Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport

where traveler Jared Rivers says he doesn't blame TSA agents

for the delays.

I'm not going to work for free.

I don't expect them to,

but I mean the politicians need to get their head out of their ass.

Lawmakers still haven't agreed on a deal

to restart funding to the TSA

with 50,000 workers still going without pay.

Alstad Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro

and his wife are back in a New York courtroom today.

They're facing narco terrorism and drug trafficking charges

all stemming from the dramatic U.S. military raid

that brought them from Caracas into U.S. custody earlier this year.

Now the judge is weighing a pretty unusual dispute

whether Venezuela's government

should be allowed to pay for their legal team.

U.S. sanctions block that money from moving.

Maduro and his wife say those restrictions violate their right

to choose their own lawyers.

Prosecutors counter that if they don't like it,

they can use public defenders.

Legal reporter Luc Cohen has more.

Without payment from the Venezuelan government,

according to Maduro's lawyers,

he can't afford to pay them with his own money.

And now they say that if he's unable to pay them,

then they would not be able to represent him in court.

They call that a violation of Maduro's right

to the council of his choice under the Sixth Amendment

to the U.S. Constitution.

And so Maduro's lawyers say the remedy for this

is dismissing the entire case.

While we don't know if the judge will rule on that,

Maduro's lawyers are saying they want permission to withdraw

if they can't get paid.

I'm curious to see if Maduro's lawyer, Barry Pollack,

truly does seek to withdraw from the case.

This is a successful, high-profile lawyer

who previously represented Julie and Assange,

the WikiLeaks founder.

So he's specialized in these kinds of cases involving

U.S. national security and U.S. adversaries.

And so if he were to be replaced by a public defender,

I think that could change the tanner of the case.

Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky

in a sit-down interview with lawyers,

saying Russia tried to blackmail the United States

by offering to stop sharing military intelligence with Iran

if Washington cut off intelligence support

to Ukraine.

And Zelensky says Ukraine has irrefutable evidence

that Moscow is still doing it.

In the same interview, Zelensky also says

the U.S. is making security guarantees

for a Ukraine peace deal conditional on Kiev

withdrawing from the eastern Donbass region,

something he wants would undermine Ukraine's security

as well as Europe's.

The United Nations has voted to recognize transatlantic slavery

as the gravest crime against humanity.

That vote coming despite opposition

from the United States and resistance from Europe.

Some Western governments say they oppose

the wording of the resolution adopted

because of legal concerns that it could retroactively

apply international law.

Here's UN Secretary-General Antonio Gateteish.

This was not simply forced labor.

It was a machinery of mass exploitation

and deliberate humanization of man, women, and children.

The resolution, which is not legally binding,

also calls for dialogue on reparations.

And finally today, a Florida woman has pleaded not guilty

in LA to the attempted murder of its singer Rihanna.

Prosecutors say Ivana Lizette Ortiz drove to the front

of Rihanna's house earlier this month

and fired some 20 rounds from a semi-automatic rifle.

They say Rihanna and her partner Aset Rocky

and their three kids were there at the time,

but no one was shot.

The judge has barred Ortiz from her work

as a licensed speech therapist while the case proceeds.

For more on any of the stories from today,

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We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.