EU launches Google antitrust inquiry

The European Commission has launched a preliminary antitrust inquiry into Google after three companies complained that the US giant's dominant search engine penalises potential competitors and keeps advertising prices artificially high.

The European Commission has written to Google to find out how its search functions work, following allegations from the UK price comparison site Foundem, an online French guide to legal services, ejustice.fr and the Germany-based shopping portal Ciao, owned by Microsoft.

Shivaun Raff, the chief executive of Foundem, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Google had a dominant 90 per cent share of the UK search market and acted as the gateway to the internet, allowing the company to control what users found when they searched......... read more>>

EU launches Google antitrust inquiry

Serb police raid Mladic son's house

Serbian police are carrying out a raid on a Belgrade house in search of Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander wanted on war crimes and genocide charges.

Masked and armed special forces blocked the street of a house believed to belong to Maldic's son Darko on Tuesday morning, in the first major raid for the fugitive since October last year.

Local media said Darko had arrived at the home last night after being away from it for a while.

Mladic has been at large since he was indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1995.

He is wanted for war crimes carried out in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, including his alleged role in the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.......... read more>

Serb police raid Mladic son's house

Rescue teams work round the clock in Madeira

Along the seafront in Funchal, a wide palm-fringed avenue borders the harbour, normally the perfect place for a holiday stroll, but there are no sightseers tonight... just gangs of weary salvage workers, and a constant rumble of heavy machinery.

Round the clock, the efforts to clear tonnes of mud and rock carried down from the mountains has been unceasing.

In Funchal's deserted shopping centre, hoses thread through the narrow streets where residents are still trying to gain access to ruined and waterlogged buildings.

The flood waters have torn the heart out of Madeira's capital. The local paper carries one banner headline: "Devastation"......... read more>>

Rescue teams work round the clock in Madeira

Strike hits flights from Paris airports

Flights have been cancelled at the two main Paris airports as French air traffic controllers begin a five-day strike over job loss fears.

Half of the flights in and out of Orly airport have been cancelled, while one in four from Charles de Gaulle have also been pulled from the schedules.

Staff are protesting over a deal agreed by six nations to modernise air traffic control that they say will cut jobs.

The strike is taking place during a school holiday in France.

Analysts said union leaders were also hoping to put pressure on President Nicolas Sarkozy's government ahead of regional elections next month........... read more>>

Strike hits flights from Paris airports

Man smart, woman smarter?

What's common among Pepsi Cola, Yahoo, Xerox, Kraft, DuPont and Sara Lee? Not much, you might feel. But what is striking is that all these global firms currently have a female Chief Executive Officer (CEO)!

We live in exciting times - and this is true more than ever before if you are a young woman in most parts of the industrialised world. By this, I do not restrict my definition to the western world; trends are evident that women have cracked the glass ceiling, and there is a distinct rise in the growth of what some have labelled 'female power' in developing nations too.

A lot of data is on offer and some may view this with certain circumspection. Consider this: By the close of 2010, 60 percent of graduates across Asia, America and Europe will be women. And, that estimate indicates that about half of the American workforce is female, including 51 percent of the professional workers......... read more>>

Man smart, woman smarter?

Allied bid for Obama to remove US European nuclear stockpile

BRUSSELS (AFP) – European NATO allies are to urge President Barack Obama to remove all remaining US nuclear weapons from European soil, as domestic pressure grows to rid its soil of outdated Cold War-era aerial bombs.

Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Norway will call "in the coming weeks" for more than 200 American warheads, mostly stocked in Italy and Turkey, to be taken back, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yves Leterme told AFP.

A joint proposal by the five NATO members will demand "that nuclear arms on European soil belonging to other NATO member states are removed," Dominique Dehaene said.

Only the United States has nuclear arms stored in other NATO member states in Europe, he added. The proposal does not refer to the distinct, and more modern British and French nuclear arsenals........ read more>>

Allied bid for Obama to remove US European nuclear stockpile