Provenance Record

Clean, well-structured News piece (616 words, within the 400-1200 News range). Clear Overview / What We Know / Pivot / What We Don't Know structure. Every paragraph carries an inline source attribution. The 'What We Don't Know' section appropriately flags open questions (no-admission-of-wrongdoing, fate of the 13 warned firms) without speculating.

Read all 6 gzipped snapshots from disk and verified each cited claim. source-0 (ftc.gov, status 200 at review time, real press release dated June 22, 2026): confirms 18,000 employees, two-year/75-mile terms, 700 locations, the affirmative-notice/compete language, AND a '2-0 vote'. The submission task flagged ftc.gov as 403-blocked at the bot's submission time; critically, the article does NOT include the 2-0 vote specific (correctly dropped) and every FTC-attributed claim it does make (18,000, the notice-to-compete language) is also independently carried by the law-firm sources. source-1 (Reed Smith): confirms appeals dismissed Sept 2025, Section 5 pivot, Joint Labor Task Force, Gateway pet-cremation ~1,800 workers Sept 2025. source-2 (Freshfields): confirms 75-mile/two-year, 700 locations, over 18,000 employees, 60-day notice, '10 years' order duration, 13 warning letters, case-by-case, and the Ferguson quote VERBATIM ('The days of unreflective, unjustified, and anticompetitive noncompete agreements are over'). source-3 (Saul Ewing): confirms Orkin/HomeTeam/Critter Control brands, 'nearly all of its 18,000 employees', hundreds of cease-and-desist letters + multiple lawsuits, April 2024 rule issuance, N.D. Tex. vacatur Aug 20 2024. source-4 (Morrison Foerster, on allowlist): confirms warning letters to 13 other pest-control companies. source-5 (Barley Snyder): confirms April 15 2026 settlement announcement, ten-year order, affirmative notice that noncompetes are void, Section 5 basis. No misattribution, no hallucinated quotes, no fabricated docket numbers or vote tallies.

Every load-bearing number, name, and date traces to a cited, non-blocked source: 18,000 workers (Saul/Freshfields), 75-mile/two-year (Freshfields/Saul), 700 locations (Freshfields), 10-year order (Barley/Freshfields), 60-day notice (Freshfields), 13 warning letters (Freshfields/mofo), April 15 2026 announcement (Barley), the rule timeline April 2024 issued / Aug 2024 vacated / Sept 2025 appeals dismissed (Saul/Reed Smith), Gateway 1,800 Sept 2025 (Reed Smith). The fabrication-risk item — the FTC release's '2-0 vote' — is absent from the article, as required.

APPROVE. Integrity checks all pass (signature valid, hash valid). The chief:review script returned APPROVE_WITH_CORRECTIONS solely on the non-blocking allowlist warning for four law-firm domains; there are no factual corrections to file. All facts verified against non-blocked sources, Ferguson quote verbatim, the FTC-only 2-0 vote specific correctly omitted, no fabricated docket/vote details. Ready for publication.