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Google’s search dominance challenged in the biggest antitrust trial in decades

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Google has exploited its dominance of the internet search market to lock out competitors and smother innovation, the Department of Justice charged Tuesday at the opening of the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century.“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,″ said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead litigator.Over the next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys general will try to prove Google rigged the market in its favor by locking its search engine in as the default choice in a plethora of places and devices. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta likely won’t issue a ruling until early next year. If he decides Google broke the law, another trial will decide what steps should be taken to rein in the Mountain View, California-based company. Top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc., as well as those from other powerful technology compani...

Poland calls on the EU to extend the embargo on Ukraine grain to prevent glut and protect farmers

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s government on Tuesday called on the European Union to extend the embargo on imports of Ukrainian grain beyond an end-of-week deadline to protect Polish farmers.Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said he has requested that the European Commission, the EU’s executive, extend the ban on the entry of Ukraine corn, wheat, sunflower and rapeseed or else “we will do it ourselves because we cannot allow for a deregulation of the market.”Speaking to farmers in Kosow Lacki, in Poland’s farming east region, Morawiecki said that the Oct. 15 parliamentary elections will be key for the future of Poland’s agriculture. The ruling conservative Law and Justice party is seeking to attract farmer voters in its campaign. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania — acting on a decision by the European Union — imposed an embargo on the four Ukrainian grains from April until Sept. 15 to prevent a glut in their home markets that would hurt their farmers....

Beleaguered Armenian region in Azerbaijan accepts urgent aid shipment

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Authorities in an isolated ethnic Armenian region of Azerbaijan on Tuesday allowed entry of a humanitarian aid shipment in a step toward easing a dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan that has blocked transport to the region since late last year.The region, called Nagorno-Karabakh, has been under the control of ethnic Armenians since the 1994 end of a separatist war. That war had left much of the surrounding territory under Armenian control as well, but Azerbaijan regained that territory in a six-week-long war with Armenia in 2020; Nagorno-Karabakh itself remained outside Azerbaijani control.Under the armistice that ended the war, Russia deployed some 3,000 peacekeeping troops in Nagorno-Karabakh and were to ensure that the sole road connecting the enclave to Armenia would remain open. However, Azerbaijan began blocking the road in December, alleging Armenians were using it to ship weapons and smuggle minerals. The blockage caused serious food shortages in N...

Book Review: Novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow pens a manual for destroying Big Tech

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

As a leading blogger in the pre-Substack era, novelist and public-interest technologist Cory Doctorow often warned that Big Tech was rendering of cyberspace a polluted, dystopian, crassly commercial and often hostile world of limited options.Now it’s happened. Facebook, Instagram and other walled fiefdoms of surveillance capitalism distract discourse with scrolls of targeted ads and trending video reels. More genteel competitors were long ago muscled out. Hateful trolls, violent speech and addictive algorithms thrive. And when a user account is mistakenly or unjustly shuttered, platform automation means the aggrieved will encounter callous indifference. It’s gotten to where anti-Big Tech initiatives enjoy bipartisan backing in an otherwise teetering U.S. democracy.“There is no fixing Big Tech,” Doctorow, who blogged for years on the website “Boing Boing,” writes in his new book “The Internet Con: How To Seize The Means of Computation.” The breezily written 173-page manifesto i...

A rhino at an Austrian zoo kills a zookeeper and seriously injures her husband

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

BERLIN (AP) — A rhino at a zoo in Austria attacked a married couple working as zookeepers Tuesday, killing the woman and seriously injuring the man, authorities said. The fatal attack happened at the Hellbrunn zoo in the western Austrian city of Salzburg.Zoo director, Sabine Grebner, told reporters later on Tuesday that the 33-year-old woman, a German citizen from Bavaria, was assigned that day to put an insect deterrent on the rhino.It was then that 30-year-old female rhino, Jeti, attacked the keeper though it was not clear why, Austria’s APA news agency cited Grebner as saying.Salzburg police said that “the woman succumbed to her injuries at the scene of the accident.”The other zoo keeper, a 34-year-old Austrian citizen, was also attacked and injured when he tried to chase the rhino away from his wife. The woman suffered severe chest trauma because of the attack and died in the enclosure while her her husband had a fractured leg and was taken to the hospital, APA reported.The name...

Police round up migrants in Serbia and report finding weapons in raid of a border area with Hungary

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Police in Serbia said they rounded up hundreds of migrants and found automatic weapons during a raid Tuesday along the border with Hungary, the location of frequently reported clashes between groups of smugglers exploiting the hardship of people trying to reach Western Europe.Thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia travel along the land route that leads west from Turkey and through the Balkans. Serbia lies at the heart of the migration route.Serbian police said officers found 371 migrants during a sweep near the border towns of Subotica, Kikinda and Sombor, along with three automatic riles, one semi-automatic rifle and a hand gun. The migrants were taken to state-run reception centers, a police statement said.Earlier Tuesday, Serbian state TV network RTS reported that one person died and three were wounded during an armed clash near the border with Hungary. Serbian Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic said police are focus...

Stock market today: Wall Street edges lower at the open ahead of inflation reports

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks are drifting lower as Wall Street waits to see what reports coming up this week on the economy and Big Tech companies say. The S&P 500 slipped 0.2% early Tuesday. The Dow fell 28 points and the Nasdaq composite fell 0.3%. Oracle weighed on tech stocks after the software giant reported revenue that fell just short of what analysts expected. Oracle’s forecast for how much revenue it will make in the current quarter wasn’t as strong as some analysts expected. Stocks have see-sawed in recent weeks amid uncertainty about whether the Federal Reserve is done with hiking interest rates. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.Wall Street drifted modestly lower early Tuesday ahead of a highly anticipated update on U.S. consumer prices later this week. Futures for the Dow Jones industrials fell 0.2% before the bell, while the S&P 500 slipped 0.3%.The Federal Reserve is weighing whether to keep raising interest rates steady in its effort ...

Bosnian police arrest 5 ex-Serb troops suspected of participating in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Bosnian police on Tuesday arrested five people suspected of participating in a July 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, a town where Bosnian Serb troops killed over 8,000 men and boys during the Balkan country’s interethnic war.Officers also conducted searches and confiscations during their operation in several towns in Republika Srpska, a Serb-run entity comprising roughly one-half of Bosnia’s territory, said a statement by Bosnia’s State Investigation and Protection Agency. The statement gave no other details. Bosnian news portal Klix said the people arrested were former Bosnian Serb army officers and soldiers who allegedly helped capture and kill around 70 men and boys and one women during the Srebrenica massacre. Most of the slaughter’s thousands of victims were Bosniaks, a majority Muslim ethnic group. Two U.N. courts have declared the brutal executions in the late days of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war as an act of genocide. Bos...

Hurricane Lee could arrive in Canada as weak hurricane or strong tropical storm

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

HALIFAX — The Canadian Hurricane Centre says hurricane Lee could make landfall this weekend anywhere from Maine to southeastern Nova Scotia.The centre in Halifax says Lee will likely approach the Atlantic region as a weak hurricane or strong tropical storm that could dump heavy rain over the area during the latter part of the week.Environment Canada meteorologists say that as the hurricane moves north, it will grow in size but is not expected to gain strength by merging with other weather systems.As of this morning, the Category 3 hurricane was about 900 kilometres south of Bermuda, churning out winds at 185 kilometres per hour.Lee was forecast to make a turn to the north on Wednesday, which will likely slow its progress and weaken the storm as it lingers over cooler waters.Meanwhile, meteorologists with U.S.-based AccuWeather say they expect a “high risk to lives and property” from damaging winds and flooding across much of Nova Scotia.This report by The Canadian Press ...

Body recovered near Promontory Point identified as missing boater Bryan Jackson

Published Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:35:14 GMT

CHICAGO — A body recovered from Lake Michigan over the weekend has been identified as missing boater Bryan Jackson.Jackson's body was found around 10:15 a.m. Saturday near Promontory Point on the 5400 block of South Lake Shore Drive.Witnesses said Jackson boarded a boat with a group of people around 3 a.m. last Tuesday. The 38-year-old went missing after jumping off the boat into Lake Michigan about a mile from 31st Street Harbor, and never resurfaced. Man remains missing after jumping off boat into Lake Michigan Jackson is a former college football player and one-time athletic trainer for the Chicago Bulls.He is survived by two daughters.