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Google warned of 'last opportunity' to settle European antitrust case

Charles Arthur
The Guardian
Wed, 15 Jan 2014 18:30 UTC
Image
© Francois Lenoir/Reuters
European Union Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia speaks during a news conference at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels.

Europe's antitrust chief says Google has one "last opportunity" to settle allegations it is abusing its dominant position in web search before he pursues legal action.

Joaquin Almunia, the head of the European Commission's competition unit, has been pursuing an antitrust complaint against the US search giant since 2010. Google has provided two proposals to settle the complaint, but seen both rejected. It is now believed to be preparing another proposal.

Almunia told reporters on Wednesday: "let's see if Google can improve their proposal or we go the traditional route." That route would involve a formal Statement of Objections which could then see a protracted court case, and potentially fines of up to 10% of Google's global revenues - which would amount to billions of dollars. The EC has previously pursued and won such cases against Microsoft and chipmaker Intel.

"We need more, not during the next year but during the next weeks," Almunia said. Google's next proposal is its "last opportunity" for reaching a negotiated settlement, he said.

Feedback from rivals and complainants to the two proposals from Google had been clearly negative, Almunia added. Google declined on Wednesday evening to comment on Almunia's remarks.

The EC's antitrust unit began investigating Google in 2010 following complaints from a number of smaller companies, which alleged that it was demoting them in search results while displaying similar services of its own prominently on its first search results page.
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Eye 2

How butcher Sharon massacred my relatives

Jamal Kanj
Sott.net
Tue, 14 Jan 2014 08:38 UTC
Image
© Latuff
My friend and I were on a cross-country flight from San Diego to Washington, DC on Saturday, September 18, 1982.

We arrived at our friends' home with gleaming smiles, but were received with dejected expressions.

"Haven't you heard the news?" they asked. "What news?" we replied.

"The massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in and around Sabra and Shatila camps," was their wretched response.

Needless to say we were glued to the TV listening to trickling reports from inside the camps and watching bloated bodies of women and children paraded on TV screens.

Starting at 6pm on September 16 until 8am on September 18, the Israeli-armed Lebanese Phalange militia went on a killing spree while the Israeli army besieged the camps - stopping anyone from fleeing the massacre.
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Snakes in Suits

UK banks searching for loopholes to pay out big bonuses in defiance of EU cap

Jill Treanor
Guardian
Wed, 15 Jan 2014 05:34 UTC
Image
© Murdo Macleod
Royal Bank of Scotland said it was consulting shareholders about pay, but had made no decisions yet
RBS risk fuelling pay row as it considers how to avoid EU bonus cap

Bank which is 81% owned by taxpayers is keen to keep pace with Barclays and HSBC, which plan to hand out 'allowances'

Royal Bank of Scotland risks fuelling the row over pay as it considers how to follow rivals that have devised ways to avoid the EU bonus cap and maintain their bankers' multimillion-pound pay cheques.

The 81%-taxpayer-owned bank is keen to keep pace with rivals such as Barclays and HSBC, which are both planning to hand out new allowances, which are not classed as salary and therefore do not get included in the calculations used in the bonus cap. They have been introduced to ensure bankers do suffer any reduction in pay as a result of the bonus cap being imposed by Brussels.

Data published by the European Banking Authority last year showed that the average banker based in London received a bonus of 370% times their salary - indicating the impact that the bonus cap would have on pay.

Labour on Wednesday blew open the debate on the bonus cap, which came into effect at the beginning of this year and which George Osborne opposes. The cap limits the bonuses of the most senior bankers to 100% of their salary, unless the bank that employs them wins specific approval from its shareholders to pay bonuses of 200%. Labour called on the government to clamp down on bonuses at the loss-making, bailed-out bank and use its 81% stake to ensure that none of the RBS bankers will get 200% bonuses.

RBS admitted on Wednesday night it was consulting shareholders about pay, but insisted no decisions had yet been made.
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Eye 1

Psychopath Robert Gates warns UK: cutting back on your military will diminish your global presence


Guardian
Thu, 16 Jan 2014 05:04 UTC
Image
© Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty
Britain will be unable to fight as a full partner alongside the US if military cuts continue, psychopath Robert Gates has said.
Former US defence secretary warns cuts will leave British forces seriously compromised and lacking 'full-spectrum capabilities'

Cuts to Britain's armed forces would mean the UK could no longer be a full military partner to the United States, a former American defence secretary has warned.

Robert Gates told the BBC that cuts in the number of military staff would limit the UK's global position.

The government is planning major cuts to the military. The army is being cut from 102,000 to 82,000 over a number of years, with the 20,000 posts expected to be gone by 2020.

Navy numbers are expected to fall by 6,000 while the RAF will lose 5,000 staff.

Gates, who served under Barack Obama and George Bush, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that naval cuts were particularly damaging, noting that for the first time since the first world war Britain lacked an operational aircraft carrier.
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Dollars

Nothing to see here: Bank of England governor plays down UK housing bubble threat

Angela Monaghan
The Guardian
Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:38 UTC
Mark Carney tells MPs at Treasury committee that current house prices and mortgage approvals are not threat to financial stability

Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney

Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney said mortgage approvals and transactions were running at around three-quarters of pre-crisis levels. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The Bank of England governor Mark Carney played down the threat of a UK housing bubble on Wednesday, arguing the housing market was playing catchup after the lows of the downturn.

Carney told MPs on the Treasury committee that at current levels rises in house prices and mortgage approvals were not a threat to financial stability.

"We've had an acceleration from quite a low level. Any time we see a sharp increase in credit growth we take an interest. We do have to put in some context though that it is still running below historic averages."
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Bad Guys

Psychopathic GOP Congressional candidate: Spousal rape shouldn't be a crime

Molly Redden
Mother Jones
Wed, 15 Jan 2014 03:00 UTC
Republican attorney general Ken Cuccinelli
© Unknown
Republican attorney general Ken Cuccinelli introduces Richard H. Black at a 2011 rally.
Virginia state Sen. Dick Black fought to block a statue of Lincoln and invited a reporter to watch him viewing violent rape porn on a library computer. Now he's looking for a promotion.

After taking a drubbing in last year's state elections, Virginia Republicans are debating whether their party has come to be defined by its extremists. But in a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state's main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. "Dick" Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf, who is retiring. And he's guaranteed to ignite wedge-issue passion. Exhibit A: As a state legislator, Black opposed making spousal rape a crime, citing the impossibility of convicting a husband accused of raping his wife "when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth."

Black has referred to emergency contraception, which does not cause abortions, as "baby pesticide." Black also fought to block a statue of Abraham Lincoln at a former Confederate site in Richmond. He wasn't sure, he explained at the time, that statues of Lincoln belonged in Virginia. He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.

In 1998, Black was elected a delegate to the Virginia House. He sparked multiple battles over social issues until he was voted out of office in 2005. But Black wasn't done. In 2011, after moving several times around Northern Virginia in search of a friendly district, Black was voted back into the Legislature, this time to the state Senate.
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Take 2

Reform EU or Britain quits - UK Chancellor George Osborne lays down ultimatum

Nicholas Watt
Guardian
Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:29 UTC
Image
© KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex/
The chancellor, George Osborne, at a EU finance ministers' meeting, in Brussels, three years ago.
Membership withdrawal threat after Tory MPs sign letter calling for dismantling of Europe's core principles via veto powers

George Osborne will today deliver a stark warning to Britain's European partners that the UK will leave the EU unless it embarks on whole-scale economic and political reform.

The chancellor's comments come as the Tory leadership tries to regain the initiative on Europe, after 95 MPs signed a letter calling for the dismantling of the core principles of the EU.

In a speech to a conference organised by the pro-reform Open Europe thinktank and the Fresh Start group of Tory MPs, Osborne will say: "There is a simple choice for Europe: reform or decline. Our determination is clear: to deliver the reform, and then let the people decide."

Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin won the support of about 100 MPs for a letter to David Cameron calling for the British parliament to be given a veto over all EU laws.

Such a move would dismantle the rules of the European single market which were drawn up by Margaret Thatcher's ally, Lord Cockfield, to prevent France imposing protectionist measures by denying member states a national veto.

Jenkin suffered a blow when Andrew Tyrie, the chairman of the Commons Treasury select committee, said he had been wrongly listed as a supporter. But Osborne will make clear that Cameron will push for wide-ranging reforms if he wins the general election next year with a mandate to renegotiate the terms of British membership.
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Star of David

The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal

Julian Borger
The Guardian
Wed, 15 Jan 2014 15:26 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona.
Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal - now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan - and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.
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War Whore

Obama the killer: 74% of U.S. Afghan casualties came after troops increased

Ali Meyer
CNS News
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 15:10 UTC
killer of the year
Seventy-four percent of the U.S. military personnel who have given their lives serving in the Afghan War died after Feb. 17, 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his first increase in the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, according to CNSNews.com's database of U.S. casualties in the war.

In the more than twelve years that have passed since U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan with the aim of removing al Qaeda from its sanctuary there, 2,162 U.S. service personnel have given their lives in and around Afghanistan in support of U.S. military activities in that country.

1,593 of those 2,162 U.S. casualties - or 73.7 percent - have occurred since Feb. 17, 2009, when Obama announced the first of his multiple increases in U.S. military personnel deployed to Afghanistan.

Comment: The following, from Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology describes why Obama the pathocrat is killing America's children:
[...] the biological, psychological, moral, and economic destruction of the majority of normal people becomes, for the pathocrats, a "biological" necessity. Many means serve this end, starting with concentration camps and including warfare with an obstinate, well-armed foe who will devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats rule: the sons of normal man sent out to fight for an illusionary "noble cause." Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans,useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy and ever willing to go to their deaths to protect it.


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Passport

Russia expels U.S. propagandist David Satter without explanation

Luke Harding
Guardian
Mon, 13 Jan 2014 14:18 UTC
Image
© Guardian
Moscow authorities ban writer from the country in first expulsion of US journalist since the cold war

Russia has expelled a US journalist living in Moscow for the first time since the cold war, in a move that is likely to strain relations with Washington on the eve of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

David Satter - a distinguished former correspondent with the Financial Times and the author of three well-received books on Russia and the Soviet Union - was told on Christmas Day that he had been banned from the country.

Satter had been based in the Russian capital since September. Last month, he travelled to the Ukrainian capital Kiev to renew his visa where Alexy Gruby, a diplomat at the Russian embassy, read him a prepared statement that said: "The competent organs have decided that your presence on the territory of the Russian Federation is not desirable. You are banned from entering Russia."

The "competent organs" are the Federal Security Service (FSB), President Vladimir Putin's powerful domestic spy and counter-intelligence agency. Such language is usually used in spy cases.

Comment: Bear in mind that the above author has also been expelled from Russia in the past.

As for Satter, does his Hudson Institute bio not spell out 'CIA' or what?!

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