G3 News

2021-07-08 23:30:09 36 States Sue Google Over How it Manages its Play Store, Alleging Damage to Both Consumers and App Developers

@G3News: A bipartisan group of state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit targeting Google’s app store Wednesday, adding to the tech giant’s mounting regulatory woes, as government officials at both the federal and state level bring challenges to its business practices.

Thirty-six states, including Utah, New York, North Carolina and Tennessee, as well as the District of Columbia, brought the suit.

It argues that Google maintains a monopoly in the market for distributing apps for the Android operating system, which it owns and develops and is used by most of the world’s smartphones. The suit claims that Google favors its Play Store over other app stores available on Android devices and argues that developers have “no reasonable choice” but to distribute their apps through the store.

“Google has taken steps to close the ecosystem from competition and insert itself as the middleman between app developers and consumers,” the state attorneys general allege.

“Google has served as the gatekeeper of the Internet for many years, but, more recently, it has also become the gatekeeper of our digital devices — resulting in all of us paying more for the software we use every day,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.
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2021-07-08 22:29:55 Pentagon Warns of an “Increased Potential” for Nuclear Conflict in Newly Disclosed Manual

@G3News: A U.S. military manual that only recently became public says that the world now faces a higher probability of conflicts involving nuclear weapons.

The document points to multiple nuclear weapons systems and policies being pursued by adversaries and potential adversaries as signs that the world is moving away from de-escalation and is instead moving closer to the reality of a nuclear exchange.

While the document avoids placing any weight on United States policy in helping to increase the likelihood of nuclear conflict, it does note that the "flexible" nuclear weapons the US has pursued could be used to defend America and its interests in the event of a regional conflict involving nuclear arms.

A copy of the manual, titled “Joint ­Publication 3-72, Joint Nuclear Operations,” was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists last week through the Freedom of Information Act and posted online July 6.
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2021-07-08 21:28:01 Wells Fargo Tells Customers It’s Shuttering All Personal Lines of Credit

@G3News: Wells Fargo is ending a popular consumer lending product, angering some of its customers, CNBC has learned.

The bank is shutting down all existing personal lines of credit in coming weeks and no longer offers the product, according to customer letters reviewed by CNBC.

The revolving credit lines, which typically let users borrow $3,000 to $100,000, were pitched as a way to consolidate higher-interest credit card debt, pay for home renovations or avoid overdraft fees on linked checking accounts.

"Wells Fargo recently reviewed its product offerings and decided to discontinue offering new Personal and Portfolio line of credit accounts and close all existing accounts," the bank said in the six-page letter. The move would let the bank focus on credit cards and personal loans, it said.

The move comes more than a year after the bank suspended home equity loans, given the economic uncertainty fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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2021-07-08 20:47:23 Tokyo Olympics to Be Held Without Fans After New COVID-19 State of Emergency Declared

@COVID19Up: There will be no fans at the Tokyo Olympics.

The announcement Thursday followed the declaration of a new state of emergency, which takes effect Monday and goes through Aug. 22. The Games begin July 23 and end Aug. 8.

"We wanted a full stadium so community people could get involved in welcoming the athletes so we could have a full presentation of the power of sports," said Tokyo 2020 president Seiko Hashimoto. "However, now faced with COVID-19 we have no other choice but to hold the Games in a limited way."

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2021-07-08 19:49:56 U.S. Job Openings Hit Record 9.2 Million, but Businesses Can’t Find Enough Workers to Fill Them

@G3News: Job openings in the U.S. rose slightly in May to a record 9.21 million, reflecting an insatiable demand for labor as the economy fully reopens and businesses scramble to keep up with soaring sales for their goods and services.

The number of available jobs has set a record for three straight months. Job openings had fallen to as low as 4.6 million last year after the coronavirus pandemic briefly shut down much of the economy.
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2021-07-08 07:12:29 7 Important Things You Need to Know About COVID-19 Today

@COVID19Up: Here are seven big stories related to COVID-19 that everyone should be talking about today (July 7).

1. The U.S. CDC Stopped Reporting Most COVID-19 Cases in Vaccinated People. That Makes It Hard to Know How Dangerous Delta Is.
(SOURCE) — Robert Shmerling, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, called the CDC's decision not to track all breakthrough cases "surprising" and "disappointing."

2. Indonesia Reports Highest Number of New COVID-19 Cases and Deaths for Third Day in a Row
(SOURCE) — Deaths in Indonesia from COVID-19 rose sharply on Wednesday, with reported daily fatalities nearly double the number from two days ago.

3. CDC Says Delta Variant Now Makes Up Majority of COVID-19 Cases in U.S.
(SOURCE) — The proportion of US COVID-19 cases that were the Delta variant rose from 30.4% for the two weeks ending June 19 to 51.7% for the two weeks ending July 3.

4. Delta Variant Panic in U.S. Could Cause More Harm Than Good, Doctor Warns
(SOURCE) — Dr. Monica Gandhi argues that panic over the spread of the Delta variant in California could halt school reopenings in the fall.

5. A Tsunami of Disability is Coming in the U.S. as a Result of "Long COVID"
(SOURCE) — Estimates suggest that millions of Americans may enter the ranks of the disabled due to "long COVID."

6. Long COVID: 40% Still Have Symptoms After Seven Months
(SOURCE) — The study was conducted among 410 people who tested positive for COVID-19 but who did not require hospitalization.

7. Epsilon Variant of SARS-CoV-2 Appears to Evade COVID-19 Vaccines, Study Finds
(SOURCE) — The Epsilon variant has three spike protein mutations it uses to weaken current COVID-19 vaccines by up to 70%.

Click here to see yesterday's top stories.
Click here to see last week's top stories.

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2021-07-08 05:55:11 Attempt to Discredit Landmark British Ivermectin Study: What You Need to Know

@COVID19Up: The July 3 episode of Tim Harford’s “More or Less: Behind the Stats”, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, spread more medical disinformation with a piece entitled “Is ivermectin a COVID wonder drug?". Timed to follow publication of an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases by Roman et al on June 28, this piece seems a clumsy attempt to discredit the landmark British study of Bryant, Lawrie et al which was published by the peer-reviewed American Journal of Therapeutics in June.

Though published by British authors—based at Dr Tess Lawrie’s Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd in Bath and the University of Newcastle—and despite these authors lacking any conflicts of interest, BBC Radio 4 made no attempt to contact any of the study authors for interview or ‘right of reply’, which is a fairness obligation under the Ofcom Broadcasting Code. Instead, Harford instead spoke to one Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Bryant, Lawrie et al have published the world’s first Cochrane-standards systematic review and meta-analysis of available randomised clinical trials of ivermectin in treatment and prevention of COVID-19. Review of 3,406 patients in 24 randomised trials demonstrated a mortality risk reduction of 62% on ‘moderate certainty’ evidence. The documentation is meticulous and comprehensive. Its restriction was to ‘randomised’ clinical trials because non-randomised studies are typically disregarded by regulatory authorities. There was no ‘cherry picking’: all available trials at the study cut-off date were included.

Meyerowitz-Katz referred to Roman et al, with an almost identical but not the same title, which also claims to be a systematic review and meta-analysis. The study surveys only 1,173 patients over 10 studies, with the remaining known randomised trials arbitrarily excluded. Moreover, the article misreports published clinical trial data in a way that verges on falsification of data, as an Open Letter to the Editor-in-Chief has detailed. The initial misreporting while on the preprint server medRxiv included a farcical reversal of the treatment and control ‘arms’ of the clinical trial of Niaee et al, drawing protest from Dr Niaee himself which can still be found in the comments section of medRxiv. Unfortunately for Clinical Infectious Diseases, further misreporting (undetected by the journal’s peer reviewers) remains, in a way that renders the article worthless. Further background on the sources can be found here.

These facts seemed unknown to Meyerowitz-Katz, who presented it as a contrasting study arriving at opposite conclusions.

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2021-07-08 01:13:47 An Officer Played a Taylor Swift Song to Keep His Recording Off YouTube Knowing It'd Face a Copyright Strike. Instead It Went Viral.

@G3News: When James Burch and several activists began filming a sheriff’s deputy during a confrontation on the Alameda County courthouse steps in Oakland, Calif., this week, the officer caught the group by surprise. He pulled out his phone and started blaring Taylor Swift’s 2014 hit single “Blank Space.”

Confused, Burch asked: “Are we having a dance party?”

After he and the other activists pressed the officer about what he was doing, the deputy—identified by local media as Sgt. David Shelby—said, “You can record all you want, I just know it can’t be posted on YouTube.”

He was referring to YouTube’s automated copyright system, which detects and removes unauthorized protected material—such as a popular song—from being uploaded to the Internet.

Independent streamers of protests, including yours truly at G3, are often filming a crowd oblivious to the nuance that even the faintest copyrighted music in the background could subject videos to being removed from YouTube.

Those streaming political demonstration often find themselves having to pause their stream and/or walk away from a source of copyrighted music at a protest to prevent copyright strike and their stream being removed.

For now, the only way to avoid these preventative techniques is to have crowds be aware of the issue and avoid playing copyright music altogether at political demonstrations so that the demonstrations can reach across the internet.
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2021-07-07 23:24:55 USA Today to Start Charging for Online Content

@G3News: USA Today announced on Wednesday that it is putting digital content behind a paywall for the first time.

Much of the outlet’s breaking news stories will still be free to readers, with premium content consisting of “exclusive investigations, sophisticated visual explainers, thought-provoking takes on the news and immersive storytelling."

“This is a big change; our digital news has always been free,” said Editor-in-Chief of USA Today Nicole Carroll and Maribel Perez Wadsworth, the publisher and director of news for all of Gannett, the newspaper's parent company.
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2021-07-07 22:19:55 Facebook is Banning Anyone Charged (Not Convicted) With Participating in Jan 6 U.S. Capitol Riot

@G3News: Facebook has revealed that it will ban anyone who’s charged in connection with the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 and may start “fact-checking” claims that the riot was staged.

By basing the policy on charges and not convictions, it appears that Facebook will also deplatform users who are charged, even if the charges are subsequently dropped or they’re acquitted at trial.
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