Society's ChildS


Laptop

EU competition regulators hit Google with $1.7 billion fine for blocking ads sourced from rivals

David Reid
CNBC
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:50 UTC
Margrethe Vestager EU google
© Emmanuel Dunand/Getty ImagesMargrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition
The European Union on Wednesday ordered Google to pay 1.49 billion euros ($1.69 billion) for stifling competition in the online advertisement sector.

The European Commission said Google had placed exclusivity contracts on website owners, stopping them from including search results from Google's rivals. It said these clauses were replaced in 2009 by premium payments and in the same year, Google had asked publishers to seek permission on how rival ads were displayed.

The EU's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said Google had prevented rivals from being able to "compete and innovate fairly" in the online ad market.

Comment: Ars Technica adds:
The particular wing of Google's advertising empire the Commission is concerned with here is "AdSense for Search." Adsense for Search does not refer to the famous ads above Google.com search results but, instead, are ads displayed in "Custom Search" results that can be embedded inside their websites. We have a version of this on Ars - just click the magnifying glass in the top navigation bar and search for something. You won't leave Ars Technica; instead you'll get a customized version of Google Search embedded in arstechnica.com, complete with Google Ads above the results. These are the "Adsense for Search" ads, and they are different from Google.com ads. The European Commission's ruling is all about these "ads for custom search engines."
Google adsense violations
© European CommissionThe European Commission provided this helpful graphic of Google's custom search ad practices.
The European Commission reviewed "hundreds" of Google advertising contracts and found a range of behavior from Google's Ad division that it deemed anti-competitive. First, from 2006 to 2009, Google ads had to exclusively be shown on pages with Google custom search engines. You weren't allowed to do something like use Google to crawl your site and then show Yahoo ads above the embedded results.

The Commission noted that Google loosened this requirement in 2009 and replaced it with another practice it found uncompetitive: "Premium Placement" clauses. These clauses said that, while you could show custom search advertisements from a competing ad provider, Google's ads had to go in the top slots, and there were a minimum number of Google ads you needed to serve on your custom search page. Changing the way rival advertisements were displayed also required written approval from Google.

Basically, Google was bundling its ad platform with its custom search engine for websites, and the European Commission ruled that arrangement was anti-competitive toward other ad providers. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager laid out the Commission's view of the situation, saying, "Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. The misconduct lasted over 10 years and denied other companies the possibility to compete on the merits and to innovate - and consumers the benefits of competition."


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Cross

Pope refuses convicted French cardinal's resignation


The Guardian
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 18:08 UTC
pope francis barbarin
© Vatican/EPAPope Francis receives Cardinal Philippe Barbarin in Vatican City on 18 March 2019.
Philippe Barbarin, the French Roman Catholic cardinal convicted this month of failing to report sexual abuse allegations, said on Tuesday that Pope Francis had turned down his offer to resign.

"On Monday morning, I put forward my resignation to the hands of the Holy Father. Invoking the presumption of innocence, he declined to accept this resignation," said Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, in a statement.

Barbarin is appealing against the verdict that he failed to report abuse claims.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Vatican's spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, said the Vatican remained close to sexual abuse victims and the French faithful "who are living in a particularly painful moment".

Barbarin, 68, is the most senior French cleric caught up in the global child sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic church.

On 7 March a Lyon court ruled that Barbarin, a cardinal since 2003, was guilty of failing to report allegations of abuse of boy scouts committed by a priest, Bernard Preynat, in the 1980s and 1990s. He was given a six-month suspended prison sentence.

Comment: See also:

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Robot

Sick of human politicians? 25% of Europeans would prefer AI government

Helen Buyniski
RT
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:30 UTC
merkel
© Global Look / Daniel Karmann
More than a quarter of Europeans would rather have their countries' important political decisions made by artificial intelligence than their elected and unelected human officials, according to a surprising new survey.

Fully one in four Europeans said they were "somewhat or totally in favor of letting an artificial intelligence make important decisions about the running of their country," a number that climbed to one in three for the Netherlands, UK, and Germany, according to a survey by the Center for the Governance of Change, a tech-focused research group from IE University in Spain. The figures remained constant across education levels, gender, and political affiliation, indicating either Europeans are abnormally welcoming of their new robot overlords - or they're sick of their human ones.

Spoiler alert: it's likely the latter. While the survey uncovered high levels of technological anxiety across all demographics, even the fear of having one's job stolen by robots doesn't hold a candle to Europeans' antipathy for their political masters, who've shown themselves all too willing to throw their constituents under the (self-driving) bus in pursuit of power - whether it's France's Emmanuel Macron attempting to outlaw protest and bar critical media from his press conferences or Theresa May repeatedly serving up unappetizing Brexit deals in a reverse-psychology effort to transmute "Leave" into "Stay."
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Bizarro Earth

SOTT Focus: Youth Strike Movement For Climate Change is an Immensely Deceptive Globalist Propaganda Campaign

Ian
In This Together
Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
youth strike
Recently we have all been asked to celebrate the youthful commitment to 'save the planet' personified by the 'Youth Strike 4 Climate .' Hundreds of thousands of children, across the world, have been involved in various forms of strike action in protest against humankind's heating of the planet through our CO2 emissions. Many were given leave from their lessons to 'demonstrate.' This has been widely welcomed by the political class. Jeremy Corbyn, Caroline Lucas and Nicola Sturgeon were but a few of the leading politicians supporting this 'coordinated day of action.

Particularly delighted was the President of the EU Commission Jean Claude Juncker. He tweeted his support and a committed a quarter of the EU's annual budget for programs to 'mitigate' against man made climate change. That's an annual expenditure of more than €36bn, based upon the EU's 2015 figures. As ever with the EU, it is difficult to know precisely how much of your tax money they spend or where they spend it. They haven't independently audited their budget accounts for more than 20 years, preferring their own 'in house' auditors. Wouldn't we all?

Juncker tweet
While mass absenteeism presented a bit of a problem for schools, who should record a child's absence for any reason other than illness as 'unauthorised,' the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) union were also supportive. Despite some 'official concerns,' clearly there was tacit acceptance of the strike from government education departments around the world.

All of which begs some interesting questions. Whose idea was it that schoolchildren as young as 5 yrs old should get involved in political protest? Who coordinated the 'day of action?' What were they protesting for (or against) and, most importantly, who funded it and why?

Comment: James Corbett also does an excellent job deconstructing these recent developments:


The madness has spread everywhere.

Kids were about to embark on one of these 'protests against nature' (which is what they really are) in Christchurch when the terror attacks there occurred.

In France, kids' 'protests' have been getting way more coverage in the media than the Yellow Vest protests, and there are daily updates even in regional, local newspapers about how one or two teens skipping school are doing in their 'protests to save the planet'...

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Heart - Black

Methamphetamine is flooding into the US, DEA official says

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 16:58 UTC
meth epidemic
© Newsweek
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that opioid-related deaths are starting to plateau, officials fret a surge in methamphetamine-related deaths could contribute to the next leg up in the American drug overdose crisis.

There were 1,854 meth-related deaths reported in 2010. By 2017, more than 10,300 deaths were linked to meth and or chemically-similar psychostimulants, which is a 550% jump from 2010.
meth deaths
The DEA told the Journal that their drug-tracking system recorded 347,807 law-enforcement meth seizures submitted to labs in 2017, a 118% increase from 2010. The recent inflow of meth into the U.S. has made it more affordable and easily accessible, the agency warns.
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Fire

Senegalese man sets Italian school bus on fire with children on board

Sarah Rossi
Reuters
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:10 UTC
burning bus
© Vigili del Fuoco
A bus full of school children was set on fire by its driver in the outskirts of Milan on Wednesday in an apparent protest against migrant drownings in the Mediterranean, Italian authorities said.

All the children managed to escape unhurt before the bus was engulfed in flames. Police said the driver was an Italian of Senegalese origin.

"He shouted 'Stop the deaths at sea, I'll carry out a massacre'," spokesman Marco Palmieri quoted the driver as telling police after his arrest.
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Beaker

China clones 'Sherlock Holmes of police dogs' to cut time and cost of K9 training


RT
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:06 UTC
good police doggie
© Global Look Press / Ou Dongqu
Beijing used the skin of a veteran police dog, credited with helping to solve many murders, to create its younger clone. Officials hope that the K9 cloning program will drive down cost and time required for dogs' training.

A three-month-old pup named Kunxun, China's first ever cloned police dog, arrived at a canine-training base in the nation's southwestern Yunnan Province, local media reported. She is a Kunming wolfdog, a breed similar to a German shepherd. Kunming dogs are widely used in China by the military, police, border guards and firefighters.

Kunxun's DNA is 99.9 percent identical to veteran police dog named Huahuangma, whose skin was used as genetic material for the clone, police officials stated. Huahuangma is said to have earned the name 'Sherlock Holmes of police dogs' after helping to crack "dozens" of murder cases. The embryo, created from her DNA, was later implanted into a beagle, which gave birth to Kunxun via cesarean section.
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Blue Planet

Why Finlandians seem to be so much happier than Americans

Tess Riley
Huff Post
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 01:01 UTC
Finland’s capital, Helsinki
© Getty ImagesA waterfront view of Finland’s capital, Helsinki. The country’s strong social safety net is just one of the reasons citizens experience a high quality of life.
To be the happiest country, having the top economic growth isn't necessarily the answer. Are you listening, U.S.?

For the second year in a row, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world by the World Happiness Report. What's more, the Nordic nation has pulled "significantly ahead" of the other top 10 countries in the report, which ranks the happiness levels of 156 countries using data from Gallup World Poll surveys.

The U.S., by contrast, has continued its downward trend. This year it's in 19th place for overall happiness. Last year it was 18, down from 14 the year before.

It's not hard to understand why Finland is doing so well. The northern European country has a strong social safety net, including a progressive, successful approach to ending homelessness. It also has a high-quality education system, and its commitment to closing the gender gap is paying off. With a population of just over 5.5 million people, it's the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers.


Comment: The article linked to above suggests that it is not actually "closing the gender pay gap" that makes for better quality of life per se. But rather, that Finland also gives new fathers paid paternity leave!

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Star of David

Why Tom Friedman's belief in a Jewish 'ancestral homeland' is a toxic myth

Yossi Gurvitz
Mondoweiss
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 13:48 UTC
Tom Freidman
Tom Freidman
Reading a recent post, I made the critical error of clicking on the link to a Thomas Friedman column. I will not engage Friedman's screed against Ilhan Omar - for the record, I'm on Team Ilhan - because I believe Friedman has too much blood on his keyboard to be seriously engaged. I will, however, take exception to an aside of his. Friedman writes:
I am not dual loyal. I always put America first, but I want to see Israel thrive - just like many Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Indian-Americans and others feel about their ancestral homelands.
Don't know how to break it to you, Tom, but Israel isn't your ancestral homeland. You were born in Minnesota in 1953. Your parents also lived in the US. Wherever your grandparents came from, it wasn't Israel, since it didn't exist at the time.

What you're referring to, Tom, without even noticing it, is the myth that Jews today are all the descendants of Jews who once lived in Palestine, and as such have an eternal right to the land. This is the founding myth of Zionism, and it often masquerades as history. Let's blow it up, shall we?
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Info

JPMorgan Managing Director dies: Sudden tragedy has connections to other JPM deaths

Pam Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
Douglas Arthur Carucci
Douglas Arthur Carucci
When you are the largest bank in the United States and you've been compared to the Gambino crime family in a book by two trial lawyers; when you've pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the United States Justice Department in the past five years; when you've paid over $30 billion in fines over charges of crimes against the public and investors since 2008; and when you've had an unprecedented string of employees leaping to their death from buildings, dropping dead at home or on the street, and two alleged murder-suicides by employees - all in just the past five years - one might think that law enforcement might show some interest - especially since this employer - JPMorgan Chase - holds tens of billions of dollars of Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) on its workers. (This death benefit, by the way, pays tax-free to the corporation, not the employee's family.)

But when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers - no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.

Take the case of Douglas (Doug) Arthur Carucci, age 53, who died on Saturday, March 9 under what Sarah Butcher at eFinancial Careers calls "tragic" and unexpected circumstances. Carucci is believed to have been a resident of Manhattan with his wife, Cindy.

Comment: What do these banking execs know? And why are so many of them ending up dead under such tragic circumstances (assuming there's a connection between them)??

See also:

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