Booze tax: Louisiana’s Supreme Court has upheld a tax imposed by the city of New Orleans on dealers of alcoholic beverages, City Business reports. Wednesday’s ruling reverses a lower court ruling in what had been a victory for a liquor-industry lobbying group and the Louisiana Restaurant Association. They had argued that the city exceeded its authority by imposing alcohol taxes in excess of what was allowed by state law. Read the full story.
PillPack purchase: Amazon.com Inc. is buying online pharmacy PillPack Inc. for roughly $1 billion in cash, giving the e-commerce giant the ability to ship prescriptions around the country, and overnight, making it a direct threat to the more than $400 billion pharmacy business, The Wall Street Journal reports. PillPack presorts medications and ships them to customers’ homes in 49 U.S. states, excluding Hawaii. Amazon beat out Walmart Inc., which also was in talks for PillPack, one of the people said. Walmart had no immediate comment. Read the full story.
Transparency: Twitter announced that it will show detailed information about advertisers on the social-media service, addressing concerns from lawmakers that the company let foreign meddlers run rampant during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Bloomberg reports that starting today anyone will be able to search for a Twitter account and see all the ads it has run in the past seven days. For U.S. political advertisers, users will be able to see billing information, ad spending, demographic targeting data and the number of times tweets have been viewed. Read the full story.
