The U.S. Department of Justice said it obtained a court order blocking two firearms companies from imperiling public safety by illegally selling devices to convert AR-15-type rifles into machine guns.

U.S. District Judge Nina Morrison in Brooklyn on Wednesday issued a temporary restraining order against Florida-based Rare Breed Triggers LLC and Rare Breed Firearms LLC, and their owners.

The Justice Department said the defendants have sold thousands of devices known as FRT-15s, that are designed and intended to convert AR-15-style semiautomatic firearms into machine guns.

It said those devices are therefore classified as machine guns under federal law, and did not qualify for the limited exceptions permitting their sale.

The defendants were not immediately available for comment.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department will do “everything in its power to protect the American people from gun violence and to hold accountable those that flood our communities with illegal guns.”

A federal civil complaint made public on Thursday accused the Rare Breed defendants of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiring to defraud the United States.

It seeks to ban FRT-15 sales, and recover previously sold devices with refunds going to buyers.

Home Depot Inc’s (HD.N) Canadian arm was found to be sharing details from e-receipts related to in-store purchases with Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) without the knowledge or consent of its customers, according to Canada’s privacy regulator.

An investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) found that by participating in Meta’s offline conversions program Home Depot shared the e-receipts that included encoded email addresses and purchase information.

The regulator added that the home goods chain stopped sharing customer information with Meta in October 2022, which was among the recommendations made by OPC, until the company is able to implement measures to ensure valid consent.

Home Depot and Meta did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

President Joe Biden used a speech at a steamfitters union hall in Virginia on Thursday to launch an attack against Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives, saying some of their proposals are dangerous for the U.S. economy.

In his first major economic speech of the year, Biden promoted his record on the U.S. economy, including the creation of more manufacturing jobs, a low unemployment rate and better-than-expected economic growth figures, and lay into the new policies proposed by some Republicans.

“They want to raise your gas prices. They want to cut taxes for billionaires,” Biden said. “They want to impose a 30 percent national sales tax,” he added.

Biden, who is laying the groundwork for a bid for re-election in 2024, told union members in Springfield, Virginia that he would veto any such bills. “Not on my watch, I will veto everything they send us,” he said.

Republicans seized control of the House by a narrow margin in last November’s midterm elections and in the weeks since have threatened to refuse to raise the U.S. debt ceiling limit and planned investigations of the Democratic president’s Cabinet and family.

The House passed a bill to slash the Internal Revenue Service budget, and some Republicans propose cutting Social Security and Medicare, retirement and healthcare spending programs for senior citizens.

Biden has sought to portray them as out of step with the concerns of Americans.

“We’ve got to protect those gains that our policies have generated, protect them from the MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives who are threatening to destroy this progress,” Biden said.

The economy under Biden has been gripped by inflation that is now ebbing, as are fears that a recession is imminent. U.S. gross domestic product grew at a 2.9% annualized rate in last year’s fourth quarter, exceeding expectations, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted as Biden started his speech: “If President Biden is so eager to speak on the economy, then he should set a date to discuss a responsible debt ceiling increase.”

“We must finally address Washington’s irresponsible government spending if we want to put America on a better fiscal path,” he wrote.

Biden has also warned he would veto Republican proposals on the strategic petroleum reserves, cutting taxes on corporations and a national sales tax should they reach his desk. Biden’s Democrats control the Senate.

The bill on the strategic petroleum reserve was one a series of political messaging measures that the House passed in its first week of business, and it is seen as having little to no chance of being taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The national sales tax proposal is included in the Fair Tax Act of 2023, introduced on Jan. 9 by Republican Representative Earl “Buddy” Carter of Georgia, would replace the U.S. income, payroll, estate and gift taxes with a 23% sales tax and stop funding the Internal Revenue Service after 2027.

McCarthy responded “no” this week when asked by reporters if he supported the bill, which Georgia Republicans have been introducing without success since 1999.

Related Galleries:

The United States is entering a third phase of talks with countries to reform the World Trade Organization (WTO’s) hobbled trade dispute arbitration system and aims for it to be “fully functioning” by the end of 2024, the U.S. ambassador to the WTO told Reuters on Thursday.

The WTO’s appeals bench, which rules on top disputes, has been mothballed for over two years due to Trump-era blockages of adjudicator appointments. Under President Joe Biden, Washington has resisted calls by WTO members to approve appointments and has instead been leading negotiations on how to reboot the WTO’s dispute system.

“Our goal is a fully functioning (dispute system) by 2024,” Deputy United States Trade Representative Maria Pagan told Reuters in her first public comments on the closed-door talks, saying Washington was “very committed” to reforms.

Asked whether it was possible to revive the Appellate Body, Pagan did not rule it out. “I think it needs a lot of revamping,” she said. The United States has criticized the WTO’s alleged overreach and lengthy processes and it has strongly contested some of its recent rulings against the United States.

The U.S.-led consultations with more than 70 countries over the past year have involved 12 reform themes expected to result in concrete proposals, Pagan said.

She declined to give details but suggested they would include alternatives to formal disputes such as mediation.

The appeals bench freeze means 24 WTO cases are stuck in legal purgatory because the losing party has appealed into a void.

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has previously said the global trade body can reach deals on difficult topics like reform by its next major meeting (MC13) in early 2024, although Pagan said that might be too soon.

“We don’t view this as work that has to be done by MC13. But that does not mean that we’re not committed to working as quickly as we can on this because we are,” she said.

U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair on Thursday said Republicans will not grant a waiver to allow President Joe Biden’s pick to head the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Republicans have said Biden’s nominee Phil Washington needs a waiver because he does not qualify as a civilian under the law. Washington, the Denver International Airport chief executive, was nominated in July but the Senate Commerce Committee has yet to hold a hearing.

“The FAA is running on autopilot. You can only run on autopilot so long before you run out of gas, you wake up and your over Utah,” said Representative Sam Graves, a Republican who heads the committee overseeing the FAA.

Republicans have harshly criticized the FAA after the Notice to Air Missions pilot messaging database failed, which led to a more than 90-minute nationwide grounding of planes on Jan. 11 that disrupted more than 11,000 flights, the first such halt since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“You want to talk about crippling the country and showing our enemies just how vulnerable we are,” Graves said of the NOTAM outage. “They’ve got to get their act together, they’ve really do, they’ve got to modernize their processes and their system.”

The NOTAM system provides pilots, flight crews and other users of U.S. airspace with critical safety notices.

Graves said the FAA needs to fill key leadership positions and said Washington does not have enough aviation experience to serve as FAA administrator. Before being named to run the Denver Airport in 2021 did not have any significant aviation experience, Republicans complain. The FAA has been without a permanent administrator since March 31, 2022.

Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, who earlier expressed “skepticism” about Washington due to his “lack of experience in aviation,” told Reuters in December that he thought the nomination should not be approved.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this month urged speedy action on Washington’s nomination. “With recent events, including airline troubles and (the NOTAM outage), this agency needs a leader confirmed by the Senate immediately.”

Congress plans to take up the issue and whether the FAA needs more money to modernize various computer systems this year. Congress must reauthorize the FAA by Sept. 30.