By PHILIP MARCELO

NEW YORK (AP) — New York’s attorney general has sued video game developer Valve, claiming the “loot boxes” found in Counter-Strike and other popular video game franchises illegally promote gambling.

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State Attorney General Letitia James said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York state court that games such as Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 illegally charge users for the chance to win rare items held in the virtual containers.

In Counter-Strike, the process even resembles a slot machine, with an animated spinning wheel that eventually rests on a selected item, James’ office said.

“Valve has made billions of dollars by letting children and adults alike illegally gamble for the chance to win valuable virtual prizes,” James said in a statement. “These features are addictive, harmful, and illegal.”

Messages seeking comment were left Wednesday for the Bellevue, Washington-based company.

“Loot box” items are generally cosmetic, such as a hat for a player’s character or an artistic skin for weapons. They usually don’t serve any vital function in the games, but James’ office said the items can still be sold online for significant sums.

Some of the rarest items can go for thousands of dollars online, according to James’ office. One item, an AK-47 Counter-Strike skin, recently sold for more than $1 million.

James’ suit says Valve is violating New York’s constitution by promoting gambling in its games. It wants the company to stop the practice and pay restitution and damages to users, as well as a fine worth three times the amount of its profits from the features.

The attorney general argues that research has found children introduced to gambling are four times more likely to develop a gambling problem later in life than those who are not.

“Loot boxes, like other forms of gambling, can lead to addiction and result in real harm,” the suit reads. “But Valve’s loot boxes are particularly pernicious because they are popular among children and adolescents, who are lured into opening loot boxes by the prospect of winning expensive virtual items that convey status in the gaming world.”

James’ office said demand for “loot box” prizes has drawn interest not just from online speculators and investors that have helped values soar, but also thieves targeting third-party, online marketplaces where the virtual items can be sold for cash.

Valve facilitates those third-party marketplaces, as well as operating its own, the Steam Community Market, where players can sell their items and use the proceeds to buy other video games, gaming hardware or other virtual items.

By JOSHUA GOODMAN

The Trump administration is blocking Venezuela’s government from paying for the cost of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s defense against drug trafficking charges in New York, a move that potentially interferes with his constitutional right to counsel, his lawyer says.

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Attorney Barry Pollack told a Manhattan federal judge in an email last week that the U.S. Treasury Department had blocked the authorization of legal fees that the government of Venezuela is required to pay for Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores under its law and custom. The email was entered into the public court record on Wednesday.

Maduro and his wife have been jailed in New York without bail since they were seized from their Venezuelan home Jan. 3 in a stealth nighttime raid by U.S. military forces. They have both pleaded not guilty.

The stunning capture following a monthslong military buildup in the Caribbean has paved the way for the Trump administration to assert enormous influence over Maduro’s replacement, his vice president and now acting President Delcy Rodriguez. Under pressure from the U.S., Rodriguez has moved swiftly to open up Venezuela’s oil industry to American investment, free political prisoners and reestablish direct communications with Washington — something unseen since the first Trump administration shuttered the U.S. embassy in Caracas in 2019.

In the email, Pollack said that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers sanctions against Venezuela, had granted permission on Jan. 9 approving the payment of legal fees by the Venezuelan government.

Less than three hours later, though, the Trump administration snatched back the authorization “without explanation,” though it left in place a license granting permission for Maduro’s wife’s lawyers to be paid, Pollack said.

The dispute over Maduro’s legal fees is intimately linked to U.S. foreign policy. The first Trump administration cut ties with Maduro in 2019, recognizing the then opposition head of the National Assembly as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. The Biden administration hewed closely to the same policy.

However, allowing Rodriguez’s government to pay for the cost of Maduro’s defense could complicate prosecutors’ efforts in court to counter the deposed leader’s argument that his capture was illegal and that as the foreign head of a state he is immune from prosecution under U.S. and international law.

A 25-page indictment against Maduro accused him and others of working with drug cartels and members of the military to facilitate the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. Both he and his wife face life in prison if convicted.

As part of the purported conspiracy, Maduro and his wife allegedly ordering kidnappings, beatings and murders of those who owed them drug money, according to the indictment. It said that included the killing of a local drug boss in Caracas.

Messages seeking comment from the Treasury Department, White House and the Justice Department were not immediately returned.

Pollack said he asked the Office of Foreign Assets Control on Feb. 11 to reinstate the original license and clear the way for Venezuela to meet its obligation to pay Maduro’s defense costs.

The lawyer added that Maduro “cannot otherwise afford counsel” and will request help from the judge to pay for his defense.

Pollack said the United States was “interfering with Mr. Maduro’s ability to retain counsel and, therefore, his right under the Sixth Amendment to counsel of his choice.”

Goodman reported from Miami. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Fatima Hussein in Washington and Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report.

By REBECCA BOONE

Researchers say seven seal pups have tested positive for an avian flu virus at California’s Año Nuevo State Park and several more are showing signs of the illness. The outbreak has prompted park officials to cancel the park’s popular seal-watching tours for the remainder of the seal breeding season.

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Researchers with University of California-Santa Cruz and University of California-Davis made the announcement Wednesday, calling it the first detected outbreak of the virus among marine mammals in California.

The worldwide bird flu outbreak that began in 2020 has led to the deaths of millions of domesticated birds and spread to wildlife around the world, and seals and sea lions appear to be particularly vulnerable to the disease. The virus has led to the deaths of thousands of sea lions in Chile and Peru, thousands of elephant seals in Argentina, and hundreds of seals in New England in recent years.

The virus is considered to be a low risk to humans, but officials said people should avoid approaching the seals and keep pets away from the animals.

Thousands of elephant seals come to Año Nuevo State Park, about 90 minutes south of San Francisco, every winter to fight, mate and give birth. The annual spectacle draws tourists and wildlife watchers eager to see the largest seals on the planet, some watching from public viewing areas and others signing up for docent-led guided walks through the breeding grounds, known as rookeries.

But for now, the viewing area is closed, and tours at Año Nuevo have been canceled “out of an abundance of caution,” said Jordan Burgess, the deputy district superintendent of the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Officials hope the move will help prevent any spread of the disease that might be caused by people tracking through the areas where the elephant seals are living, she said.

“We’re definitely not panicking about human exposure at this point,” but rather trying to ensure the health of the seals and people in general, Burgess said.

Christine Johnson, the director of the Institute for Pandemic Insights at UC Davis’ Weill School of Veterinary Medicine, said the outbreak was spotted quickly because researchers have been on high alert in recent years, watching for any sign of the arrival of the disease. After sick and dead animals were spotted on Feb. 19 and 20, researchers collected samples for testing at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System. The screening showed the animals were infected with HPAI H5N1 virus.

Tests on samples from about 30 more animals are still pending, Johnson said.

The university researchers are working with state and federal wildlife managers and The West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network to monitor the animals.

By ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Wednesday that it was looking into whether it improperly withheld documents from the Jeffrey Epstein files after several news organizations reported that some records involving uncorroborated accusations made by a woman against President Donald Trump were not among those released to the public.

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The announcement followed news reports saying that a massive tranche of records released by the Justice Department did not include several summaries of interviews that the FBI conducted with an unidentified woman who came forward after Epstein’s 2019 arrest and claimed to have been sexually assaulted by both Trump and Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s.

“Several individuals and news outlets have recently flagged files related to documents produced to Ghislaine Maxwell in discovery of her criminal case that they claim appear to be missing,” the Justice Department said in a post on X. “As with all documents that have been flagged by the public, the Department is currently reviewing files within that category of the production.” Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime confidant, is serving a 20-year prison sentence on a sex trafficking conviction.

It said that if any document is found to have been improperly withheld and is responsive to the federally enacted law mandating the files’ release, “the Department will of course publish it, consistent with the law.”

At issue is a series of interviews said to have been conducted in 2019 with a woman who made an allegation against Trump, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. News reports from recent days say the accuser was interviewed four times but a summary of only one of those interviews was included in the publicly released files.

The missing records were earlier reported by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and NPR, and have since been documented by other news organizations, including The New York Times, MS Now and CNN.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement that his panel would investigate the withheld records. He said he had reviewed unredacted evidence logs and “can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews” with the accuser.

The Justice Department last month said it was releasing more than 3 million pages of records related to Epstein, who took his own life in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The department said at the time that, though it was attempting to be transparent, it was also entitled to withhold records that exposed potential abuse victims, were duplicates or protected by legal privileges, or related to an ongoing criminal investigation.

“Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already,” the department said in a statement last month as it released the records.

The redaction process was quickly revealed to have been flawed, with the department withdrawing some materials identified by victims or their lawyers, along with a “substantial number” of documents identified independently by the government.

Lawyers for Epstein accusers told a New York judge last month that the lives of nearly 100 victims had been “turned upside down” by sloppy redactions in the government’s latest release of records. The exposed materials include nude photos showing the faces of potential victims as well as names, email addresses and other identifying information that was either unredacted or not fully obscured.

Other uncorroborated claims against Trump and other public figures were included in the publicly available files. The department did not say in its social media post Wednesday why records related to this specific accusation might have been withheld.