By CLAIRE SAVAGE

The federal agency charged with protecting workers’ civil rights has terminated a New York administrative judge who opposed White House directives, including President Donald Trump’s executive order decreeing male and female as two “immutable” sexes.

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In February, Administrative Judge Karen Ortiz, who worked in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s New York office, called Trump’s order “unethical” and criticized Acting Chair Andrea Lucas — Trump’s pick to lead the agency — for complying with it by pausing work on legal cases involving discrimination claims from transgender workers. In an email copied to more than 1,000 colleagues, Ortiz pressed Lucas to resign.

Ortiz was fired on Tuesday after being placed on administrative leave last month. The EEOC declined Wednesday to comment on the termination, saying it does not comment on personnel matters.

In response to the president’s order declaring two unchangeable sexes, the EEOC moved to drop at least seven of its pending legal cases on behalf of transgender workers who filed discrimination complaints. The agency, which enforces U.S. workplace anti-discrimination laws, also is classifying all new gender identity-related cases as its lowest priority.

The actions signaled a major departure from the EEOC’s prior interpretation of civil rights law.

In her mass February email criticizing the agency’s efforts to comply with Trump’s order, Ortiz told Lucas, “You are not fit to be our chair much less hold a license to practice law.” The letter was leaked on Reddit, where it gained more than 10,000 “upvotes.” Many users cheered its author.

The EEOC subsequently revoked her email privileges for about a week and issued her a written reprimand for “discourteous conduct.”

Ortiz said she continued to “raise the alarm” about the agency’s treatment of transgender and gender nonconforming complainants, and convey her opposition to the agency’s actions. She sent an April 24 email to Lucas and several other internal email groups with the subject line, “If You’re Seeking Power, Here’s Power” and a link to Tears for Fears’ 1985 hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

She contested her proposed termination earlier this month, arguing in a document submitted by a union representative that she was adhering to her oath of office by calling out behavior she believes is illegal.

Ortiz “views the Agency’s actions regarding LGBTQIA+ complainants to have made the EEOC a hostile environment for LGBTQIA+ workers,” and believes that leadership has “abandoned the EEOC’s core mission,” the document says.

The judge was hired to work at the EEOC during the first Trump administration, and while she disagreed with some policies then, “she did not take any action because there was no ostensible illegality which compelled her to do so,” the document stated. “What is happening under the current administration is unprecedented.”

The letter requested the withdrawal of Ortiz’s proposed termination, the removal of all disciplinary documents from her personnel file, and that Ortiz be allowed “to continue doing her job.”

The six-page termination notice came anyway. In it, Chief Administrative Judge Regina Stephens called Ortiz’ actions “distasteful and unprofessional,” and concluded that Ortiz’s “work performance is affected” by her disagreements with the current executive orders and direction of EEOC leadership.

The notice also alleged that media circulation of Ortiz’s emails had “affected the reputation and credibility of the Agency.” It cited an Associated Press article that quoted Ortiz saying she stood by her email statements as evidence that her behavior would not change with ”rehabilitation.”

In a Wednesday phone interview with The Associated Press, Ortiz said the news of her termination is “very sad,” although not surprising. “I think the agency has now become something that, I don’t know if I’d even really want to work there anymore. They’ve lost their way,” she said.

Lucas defended her decision to drop lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers during her confirmation hearing before a Senate committee last week. She acknowledged that transgender workers are protected under civil rights laws but said her agency is not independent and must comply with presidential orders.

Ortiz said she traveled from New York to Washington “on my own dime, on my own time” to attend the hearing. “I needed to be there,” she said, adding that she left thank-you notes for Senators who “put Andrea Lucas’ feet to the fire.”

Ortiz said she isn’t sure what comes next for her, only that it will involve fighting for civil rights. And in the short-term, picking up more volunteer dog walking shifts. “I will keep fighting for the LGBTQ community in whatever way I can,” she told AP.

She added: “It takes courage to take a stand, and be willing to be fired, and lose a six-figure job, and health insurance, and the prestige of the title of ‘judge,’ but I think it’ll also serve an example to future lawyers and young lawyers out there that a job title isn’t everything, and it’s more important to stay true to your values.”

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

After watching his pitchers give up a combined 46 runs in the past four games, Twins pitching coach Pete Maki convened a meeting of the group before Tuesday night’s game. It seemed like the right time for it.

The Twins entered Wednesday night’s game against Seattle losers of 11 of their past 12 games. They had a league-worst 6.73 earned-run average in the month of June — by almost a run and a half. They’re searching for answers.

Sure, they lost their ace Pablo López to a shoulder injury early in the month; that certainly has not helped matters. But the issues run far deeper than just López’s absence.

“We have very talented guys in the bullpen and rotation. This is part of any season,” Maki said. “Has it been bad? Yeah, it’s been bad, man. The run getting to fourth base has been a little insane. The way to really evaluate is each outing. What led to it today? What do you want back?”

It’s been a little different on a nightly basis, but a big culprit has been free bases. Jhoan Duran, for example, hit a pair of batters on Tuesday night in the ninth inning of a tied game, leading to a Mariners run in the Twins’ one-run loss.

And the Twins’ strikeout-to-walk ratio, once tops in the majors, has plummeted. Heading into Wednesday, the 76 walks the pitching staff has issued in June was tied for sixth in the majors. In May, a month during which they had a collective 3.11 earned-run average, they walked just 60 batters, tied for first in the majors.

“The past month we’re kind of the opposite of No. 1,” Maki said. “So, what’s leading to that? We’re walking a few too many guys.”

Yes, walks have been a problem, but really there is no easy answer to what has ailed the pitching staff as a whole, which carried the team earlier in the season, considering it varies pitcher to pitcher, day to day.

The pitchers meeting on Tuesday focused heavily on checking back in on the goals they had set for themselves as a group during spring training and assessing where they were at with those, starter Chris Paddack said. Manager Rocco Baldelli said another focus was on controlling what they could control and starting from there, calling it a “good reminder for everyone in the room.”

Paddack, Baldelli said, was one of the guys who stepped up to address the group and “spoke from the heart,” delivering what the manager described as an emotional message to the pitching staff.

“Obviously, whenever you’re going through a tough stretch, you need to have each other’s backs and try to support one another whenever we’re going through hard times like we have been the last couple weeks,” starter Bailey Ober said. “Just being able to come together as a group and support each other, it always means a lot. It was a good, successful meeting. I thought it was well needed, and hopefully we come out of that and kind of turn the script.”

Briefly

The Twins have Friday’s starter against Detroit listed as TBA. That would be David Festa’s day to start. Baldelli said it’s possible that Festa starts that game or it’s possible they use an opener, as they did during Festa’s last turn through the rotation. … Simeon Woods Richardson is scheduled to start the series finale against the Seattle Mariners on Thursday afternoon.

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By MARC LEVY

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — President Donald Trump will control the so-called “golden share” that’s part of the national security agreement under which he allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to buy out iconic American steelmaker U.S. Steel, according to disclosures with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

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The provision gives the president the power to appoint a board member and have a say in company decisions that affect domestic steel production and competition with overseas producers.

Under the provision, Trump — or someone he designates — controls that decision-making power while he is president. However, control over those powers reverts to the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department when anyone else is president, according to the filings.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to questions Wednesday about why Trump will directly control the decision-making and why it goes to the Treasury and Commerce departments under future presidents.

Nippon Steel’s nearly $15 billion buyout of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel became final last week, making U.S. Steel a wholly owned subsidiary.

Trump has sought to characterize the acquisition as a “partnership” between the two companies after he at first vowed to block the deal — as former President Joe Biden did on his way out of the White House — before changing his mind after he became president.

The national security agreement became effective June 13 and is between Nippon Steel, as well as its American subsidiary, and the federal government, represented by the departments of Commerce and Treasury, according to the disclosures.

The complete national security agreement hasn’t been published publicly, although aspects of it have been outlined in statements and securities filings made by the companies, U.S. Steel said Wednesday.

The pursuit by Nippon Steel dragged on for a year and-a-half, weighed down by national security concerns, opposition by the United Steelworkers and presidential politics in the premier battleground state of Pennsylvania, where U.S. Steel is headquartered.

The combined company will become the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker in an industry dominated by Chinese companies, and bring what analysts say is Nippon Steel’s top-notch technology to U.S. Steel’s antiquated steelmaking processes, plus a commitment to invest $11 billion to upgrade U.S. Steel facilities.

The potential that the deal could be permanently blocked forced Nippon Steel to sweeten the deal.

That included upping its capital commitments in U.S. Steel facilities and adding the golden share provision, giving Trump the right to appoint an independent director and veto power on specific matters.

Those matters include reductions in Nippon Steel’s capital commitments in the national security agreement; changing U.S. Steel’s name and headquarters; closing or idling U.S. Steel’s plants; transferring production or jobs outside of the U.S.; buying competing businesses in the U.S.; and certain decisions on trade, labor and sourcing outside the U.S.

Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter.

By MATT O’BRIEN and BARBARA ORTUTAY

A federal judge on Wednesday sided with Facebook parent Meta Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology.

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The ruling from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabri was the second in a week from San Francisco’s federal court to dismiss major copyright claims from book authors against the rapidly developing AI industry.

Chhabri found that 13 authors who sued Meta “made the wrong arguments” and tossed the case. But the judge also said that the ruling is limited to the authors in the case and does not mean that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials is lawful.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs — a group of well-known writers that includes comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates — didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Meta also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabri wrote. “It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”

On Monday, from the same courthouse, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company must still go to trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate websites instead of buying them.

But the actual process of an AI system distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote.

Chhabria, in his Meta ruling, criticized Alsup’s reasoning on the Anthropic case, arguing that “Alsup focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on.”

Chhabria suggested that a case for such harm can be made.

In the Meta case, the authors had argued in court filings that Meta is “liable for massive copyright infringement” by taking their books from online repositories of pirated works and feeding them into Meta’s flagship generative AI system Llama.

Lengthy and distinctively written passages of text — such as those found in books — are highly useful for teaching generative AI chatbots the patterns of human language. “Meta could and should have paid” to buy and license those literary works, the authors’ attorneys argued.

Meta countered in court filings that U.S. copyright law “allows the unauthorized copying of a work to transform it into something new” and that the new, AI-generated expression that comes out of its chatbots is fundamentally different from the books it was trained on.

“After nearly two years of litigation, there still is no evidence that anyone has ever used Llama as a substitute for reading Plaintiffs’ books, or that they even could,” Meta’s attorneys argued.

Meta says Llama won’t output the actual works it has copied, even when asked to do so.

“No one can use Llama to read Sarah Silverman’s description of her childhood, or Junot Diaz’s story of a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey,” its attorneys wrote.

Accused of pulling those books from online “shadow libraries,” Meta has also argued that the methods it used have “no bearing on the nature and purpose of its use” and it would have been the same result if the company instead struck a deal with real libraries.

Such deals are how Google built its online Google Books repository of more than 20 million books, though it also fought a decade of legal challenges before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims.

The authors’ case against Meta forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be deposed, and has disclosed internal conversations at the company over the ethics of tapping into pirated databases that have long attracted scrutiny.

“Authorities regularly shut down their domains and even prosecute the perpetrators,” the authors’ attorneys argued in a court filing. “That Meta knew taking copyrighted works from pirated databases could expose the company to enormous risk is beyond dispute: it triggered an escalation to Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives for approval. Their gamble should not pay off.”

“Whatever the merits of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, stealing copyrighted works off the Internet for one’s own benefit has always been unlawful,” they argued.

The named plaintiffs are Jacqueline Woodson, Richard Kadrey, Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Louise Snyder, David Henry Hwang, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Laura Lippman, Matthew Klam, Junot Diaz, Sarah Silverman, Lysa TerKeurst, Christopher Golden and Christopher Farnsworth.

Most of the plaintiffs had asked Chhabria to rule now, rather than wait for a jury trial, on the basic claim of whether Meta infringed on their copyrights. Two of the plaintiffs, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christopher Golden, did not seek such summary judgment.

Chhabri said in the ruling that while he had “no choice” but to grant Meta’s summary judgment tossing the case, “in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors — not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models.”