Nintendo urged a court to dismiss a lawsuit demanding that it pass tariff refunds on to customers, saying that people who bought a Switch console or other products have no legal right to refunds that Nintendo is due to receive from the government.

Nintendo said in a motion to dismiss yesterday that plaintiffs are “ask[ing] this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-price completed sales simply because the legal landscape has changed.” Nintendo said the plaintiffs “have no legal entitlement to the tariff refunds Nintendo stands to receive.”

The lawsuit was filed in April by two customers who seek to represent a class of all US residents who bought Nintendo products from February 2025 to February 2026. California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan filed the class action complaint in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging unjust enrichment and a violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act’s prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts.

“Nintendo engaged in unfair acts by: (i) raising prices due to tariffs; (ii) failing to disclose that it intended to seek tariff refunds; and (iii) retaining tariff refunds despite having passed the costs to its customers,” the lawsuit alleged. In their unjust-enrichment claim, plaintiffs said Nintendo profits were “unjustly obtained as a result of its price increases on goods subject to unlawful tariffs.” Nintendo raised prices for the original Switch console by $30 to $50 and added $5 to $10 to the prices of various Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo told the court that “the doctrine of unjust enrichment does not apply when a party voluntarily pays a purchase price and receives a product in return.” Nintendo said plaintiffs “received exactly what they paid for: Nintendo products that Plaintiffs knowingly and voluntarily purchased at the advertised price. Nor is there anything ‘unjust’ about Nintendo retaining money that it may receive from the government as tariff refunds. The fact that Nintendo stands to receive tariff refunds does not give Plaintiffs any legal entitlement to those funds.”

People always suspected big tech was greedy, but not quite like this. Patrons of Amazon Web Services have been landed with panic-inducing monthly bills running as high as $1.5tn for subscriptions that usually cost less than the price of a cup of coffee.

From Bangalore to Bolsover, the bills have been causing alarm after a computer glitch resulted in the astronomical invoices being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, which provides data and cloud services to millions of customers, from students and small charities to big businesses.

“I almost had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with the billing for our charity’s school grounds audit app, which usually costs us less than a pound per month,” Dan Harvey, the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes told the Guardian. It was not even the end of the month and Harvey’s bill was standing at $7.8bn (£5.8bn), somewhat more than the previous month’s 43 cents.

In a dark way, this is the best possible kind of billing fuckup; unlike a 10x bump that would be noticed but not universally, this heads off into the land of the absurd.

From the who-could’ve-seen-this-coming dept:

Dozens of Meta employees have sued the social media company over claims that it used artificial intelligence tools to tag workers for mass layoffs. The workers allege that those AI tools targeted them after they asked for protected or maternity leave or disability accommodation.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in the northern district of California, points to Meta’s workforce reduction of about 8,000 employees earlier this year. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The suit alleges that Meta used a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems”, including AI performance ratings and keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, to pinpoint who to lay off.

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” reads the 71-page complaint. Instead, the 26 workers listed in the lawsuit allege the company used AI systems “to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list”.

The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary court ruling to stop Meta from finalizing the layoffs while they pursue their ​claims, along with relief that could include reinstatement, back pay, lost equity, benefits and other damages.

Given the grip it exerts on the drag world in the US and beyond, it’s almost quaint to remember the janky beginnings of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which debuted in 2009 with cheap plywood sets, a “lounge” sponsored by Absolut Vodka and special guests including Michelle Williams (the less famous one). Now, it’s a high-gloss spectacle that has won 14 Emmy awards, is credited for bringing pageant-style drag fully into the mainstream and is a magnet for star guest judges including Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga.

There’s a sense that latter-day Drag Race is running on fumes, with 29 seasons including All Stars spinoffs and finale viewing figures that peaked in 2016. But the cottage industry that has grown up around it has never been bigger: former contestants like Trixie Mattel and Katya host a wildly popular podcast, while Bob the Drag Queen toured with Madonna and Jinkx Monsoon is the toast of Broadway with roles in Oh, Mary! and Chicago. Meanwhile, the show’s production company World of Wonder cannily keeps access to Drag Race’s 14 current international spin-offs exclusive to their own streaming platform, Wow Presents Plus.

Praise be to the drag gods (or, more accurately, World of Wonder founders Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato) for saving Stop! That! Train! from the straight-to-streaming kiss of death. Directed by Adam Shankman (2007’s Hairspray, The Wedding Planner), it’s a 90-minute madcap riot that deserves a spot in drag comedy herstory alongside White Chicks and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, stuffed full of mostly welcome celebrity cameos and sharp innuendoes, with every frame chock-full of a 30 Rock episode’s worth of visual gags.

His name is Barry, he is a showman – as we all know. But late last year, after more than 50 years of constant performing, it began to look like the Manilow show was coming to an end. In December, the 82-year-old singer announced he was about to undergo surgery for lung cancer, and postponed his planned live shows. Thankfully, the cancer had not spread and the treatment was successful. But around the same time he released a new single, ominously titled Once Before I Go. The accompanying video showed him saying goodbye to his palatial quarters at the Las Vegas Westgate resort, where he has had a residency for the past eight years, and wistfully reminiscing over old costumes, intercut with footage of him in his 80s prime. It sure looked as if he was shutting up shop.

But no: “That was just an accident,” says Manilow of the video. Really? “Yeah, we didn’t do that on purpose.” The song was actually written in the early 80s by veteran songwriter Peter Allen, he explains, but he felt he was too young to sing it when he first heard it. “It’s a beautiful song and it’s got nothing to do with me. It’s saying goodbye to a romance, you know. But it just so happened that it sounds like I’m talking about myself.” Far from going anywhere, Manilow’s got a new album out next week, and a string of new tour dates lined up.

Doing Copacabana at karaoke was really good for my early-20s sex life.

All the best science fiction movies eventually get overtaken by reality. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report predicted personalised advertising and biometric identification. Spike Jonze’s Her correctly guessed that AI would probably arrive as emotionally responsive digital companions that sound like Scarlett Johansson, rather than rampaging killer machines. RoboCop imagined militarised law enforcement on the streets of America long before the Pentagon decided to get in on the action.

Could Westworld become the latest science fiction franchise to catch up to the future? Deadline reports this week that a new film based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie about rich thrill-seekers heading to a techno-pleasure park for violence, fantasy and consequence-free debauchery is in the works at Warner Bros, with David Koepp attached to write. It will reportedly bypass the more recent TV reboot from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, which ran for four seasons between 2016 and 2022.

Am I alone in thinking this could be perfect timing? In an AI age in which humans increasingly seem to prefer artificial experiences to real ones, Westworld suddenly seems a lot more intriguing than it did in either of its previous iterations. This time out the resort might market itself as the first place in the world where your digital partner can finally receive a physical body, causing lonely people who have spent three years sexting a chatbot named Dakota-7 to flock there in their millions. The great thing about Westworld 3.0 is that the director who ends up shooting this thing – Deadline reports that a “major film-maker” is circling, with the internet already convinced that this means Steven Spielberg – might not even have to delve into the old robot uprising toolkit.