Google’s Lawyers Work Behind the Scenes to Carry the Day

After regulators had pored over nine million documents, listened to complaints from disgruntled competitors and took sworn testimony from Google executives, the government concluded that the law was on Google’s side. At the end of the day, they said, consumers had been largely unharmed.
That is why one of the biggest antitrust investigations of an American company in years ended with a slap on the wrist Thursday, when the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation of Google’s search practices without bringing a complaint. Google voluntarily made two minor concessions.
“The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much in this particular case,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser to Google in the past. “The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in this very long investigation.”
The F.T.C. had put serious effort into its investigation of Google. Jon Leibowitz, the agency’s chairman, has long advocated for the commission to flex its muscle as an enforcer of antitrust laws, and the commission had hired high-powered consultants, including Beth A. Wilkinson, an experienced litigator, and Richard J. Gilbert, a well-known economist.
Still, Mr. Leibowitz said during a news conference announcing the result of the inquiry, the evidence showed that Google “doesn’t violate American antitrust laws.”
“The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a company blog post.
The main thrust of the investigation was into how Google’s search results had changed since it expanded into new search verticals, like local business listings and comparison shopping. A search for pizza or jeans, for instance, now shows results with photos and maps from Google’s own local business service and its shopping product more prominently than links to other Web sites, which has enraged competing sites.

But while the F.T.C. said that Google’s actions might have hurt individual competitors, over all it found that the search engine helped consumers, as evidenced by Google users’ clicking on the products that Google highlighted and competing search engines’ adopting similar approaches.
Google outlined these kinds of arguments to regulators in many meetings over the last two years, as it has intensified its courtship of Washington, with Google executives at the highest levels, as well as lawyers, lobbyists and engineers appearing in the capital.
One of the arguments they made, according to people briefed on the discussions, was that technology is such a fast-moving industry that regulatory burdens would hinder its evolution. Google makes about 500 changes to its search algorithm each year, so results look different now than they did even six months ago.
The definition of competition in the tech industry is also different and constantly changing, Google argued.
For instance, just recently Amazon and Apple, which used to be in different businesses than Google, have become its competitors. Google’s share of the search market has stayed at about two-thirds even though competing search engines are “just a click away,” as the company repeatedly argued. That would become the company’s mantra to demonstrate that it was not abusing its market power.

Claire Cain Miller reported from San Francisco, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

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Chinese Groups Take On H.I.V./AIDS Outreach Work

Le, a gay man who would give only his first name, was being tested at the Lingnan Health Center, an organization run largely by gay volunteers, whose walls are adorned with red AIDS ribbons and a smiling condom mascot. In the past, Le went to hospitals to be tested, he said, but the stigma of being a gay man in China made the experience particularly harrowing.
“I’d always be concerned about what the doctors would think of me,” Le said. “Here we’re all in the same community, so there’s less to worry about.”
Le is one of thousands of gay men in this bustling city of 13 million people who are benefiting from a pioneering experiment that supporters hope will revolutionize the way the Communist Party deals with nongovernment groups trying to stop the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Encouraged by the new slate of leaders who came to power in November, civil society activists hope the model taking shape here in the prosperous southern province of Guangdong, which has long served as a petri dish for economic reform, will be replicated nationally, not just in the fight against disease but also on issues like poverty, mental health and the environment.
While China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention has allowed community organizations across the country to participate in disease testing programs since 2008, in practice those efforts remain patchy. But in November, just before World AIDS Day the following month, the grass-roots movement received a high-profile endorsement from the incoming prime minister, Li Keqiang.
At a meeting with advocates for AIDS patients, Mr. Li, a large red ribbon pinned to his jacket, promised more government support and shook hands with H.I.V.-positive people. The image resounded in a society where those infected are routinely turned away from hospitals and hounded from their jobs. “Civil society plays an indispensable role in the national battle against H.I.V./AIDS,” he said, according to the state news media.
Activists remain wary, however, noting that the government has made similar promises in the past. And despite the high-level support and a policy in Guangdong allowing grass-roots groups to register directly with the government — instead of being forced to find an official sponsor, as in much of the country — many organizations say they still are stymied by dizzying bureaucratic hurdles or rejected for missing unannounced deadlines.
Tao Cai, the director of AIDS Care China, which provides support to 30,000 H.I.V.-positive people nationwide but remains unregistered, believes the obstacles come from local officials who are trying to prevent nonprofit groups from competing with their fiefs. “In China,” he said, “we say reform never gets out of Zhongnanhai,” a reference to the walled compound for senior leaders in Beijing.
There is little doubt that public health officials need help. Through October, nearly 69,000 new H.I.V. infections were reported in China in 2012, a 13 percent rise from the same period in 2011. Almost 90 percent of those cases were contracted through sexual intercourse, with rising numbers involving gay men. Medical experts also worry about syphilis, which has returned with a vengeance after being virtually wiped out during the Mao era.
Reported cases of syphilis, known in the south as “Guangdong boils,” have increased more than tenfold in the last decade, according to national statistics. As with H.I.V., gay men and sex workers are particularly at risk. Local health experts estimate that 5 percent of men who have sex with other men carry H.I.V., while around 20 percent test positive for syphilis.
The Chinese authorities have long tackled the rise in communicable diseases among gay men with all the sensitivity of a swinging billy club. In raids on bars, bathhouses and parks, police officers and health officials often force those detained to hand over their IDs and submit to blood tests.
Grass-roots health groups have been frequent targets of official harassment as well. In most provinces, they can legally register with the Bureau of Civil Affairs only if they are sponsored by a government agency. But advocates say few agencies are willing to vouch for groups focused on politically fraught issues like homosexuality, prostitution or sexually transmitted diseases.
In the face of such constraints, the majority of China’s estimated 1,000 H.I.V. organizations operate in a legal purgatory that deprives them of tax benefits and makes it risky to accept foreign donations, usually their main source of support.
Mr. Li, the incoming premier, has a spotty record when it comes to H.I.V. In the 1990s, when he was the top official in central Henan Province, a botched blood-collection program there infected hundreds of thousands of people with H.I.V. Critics say Mr. Li was more interested in covering up the problem than dealing with its causes. Even as he was holding court with AIDS groups, over a hundred of those infected in the scandal marched in Beijing to the Ministry of Health demanding justice.
Mr. Li’s views appear to have changed. In November, social media erupted over the case of a 25-year-old man seeking treatment for lung cancer who was turned away from two Beijing hospitals because he was H.I.V.-positive. A hospital in nearby Tianjin finally removed the tumor — but only after he altered his medical records to conceal his H.I.V. status from doctors. As a battle raged online between those condemning his actions and those sympathizing with his plight, Mr. Li ordered the Health Ministry to prohibit hospitals from rejecting AIDS patients.

Shi Da and Mia Lee contributed research from Beijing.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 4, 2013

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Thursday with the continuation of an article about a new model in China for caring for people with H.I.V. misspelled, in some editions, part of the name of an organization in Guangzhou that is using the model. As the article correctly noted, it is the Lingnan Health Center, not Lignan.

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Murder Charges Are Filed Against 5 Men in New Delhi Gang Rape

A court official announced that beyond rape and murder, the charges include destruction of evidence and the attempted murder of the woman’s companion, a list of crimes that could result in the rare imposition of the death penalty. A court official said the charges would be made public on Saturday. A sixth suspect is a juvenile and will have his case handled separately for now.
The case against the five men will be referred almost immediately to a new fast-track court set up in recent days to handle cases involving crimes against women, officials said. That court is expected to hold a trial soon in stark contrast to the apathy and years of delay that Indian rape victims often face when seeking justice.
The five are accused of luring the woman and her boyfriend onto a bus in South Delhi, beating them and abusing her so brutally with a metal rod during the rape that she sustained fatal internal injuries. The woman clung to life for two weeks but died on Saturday in a Singapore hospital, where she had been transferred for special care.
Gang rapes have become almost routine in India, a country that some surveys suggest has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Rape complaints increased 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, although it is impossible to know whether this represents a real increase in crime or simply an increased willingness by victims to file charges and by the police to accept them.
But something about the recent crime caught the public’s attention. Among the reasons could be the randomness of the crime (most rape victims know their abusers), its brutality and the sympathetic profile of the victim.
The outpouring of anger at the crime caught the government by surprise, and there has been widespread criticism of its aggressive response to protesters, which included tear gas, water cannons and beatings by truncheon-wielding riot police officers. The government invoked a terrorism law that prohibits even small gatherings and it closed a huge portion of the capital to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which represented a punishing loss to businesses in the area.
The government’s reaction fed longtime criticism that India’s police are too often used to guard the powerful from the people rather than to protect the people from predators. India’s police are generally poorly trained, deeply corrupt and often viewed by women as predators rather than protectors — one reason that laws forbid officers from arresting a woman or even bringing her to a police station for questioning during nighttime hours.
The case has also led to a continuing discussion about the conflict between the aspirations of India’s rising middle class and a deeply conservative and patriarchal culture that views the recent educational and economic successes of Indian women with unease and even alarm. An estimated 25,000 women are murdered each year by families who view their choice of mate as inappropriate, and Indian newspapers and television news programs now feature almost daily stories about new rape cases.
Kishwar Desai, an author, wrote an opinion article in The Indian Express on Thursday that said the gang rape illustrated to some that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.”
Because of the intense interest prompted by the case, a vast scrum of TV cameras and reporters jostled inside and outside of the courthouse for much of Thursday. And with officials refusing to provide routine information about whether the suspects would arrive at the courthouse, rumors about the day’s events ricocheted around the media scrum like a drop of water on a hot frying pan.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 3, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article erroneously reported that the charges had been filed earlier on Thursday.

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Spain’s Chinese Immigrants Thrive in Tough Economy

After five years, they bought a restaurant of their own with money borrowed from relatives, interest-free. She and her brother washed the dishes. Her parents slept on a mattress in the bathroom of their cramped apartment so that the children could study at night in the other room.

Today, while Spanish youth unemployment hovers around 50 percent, Ms. Wang, 24, who studied economics at Harvard on a one-year fellowship, juggles four jobs: teaching Mandarin, advising Chinese investors in Spain, running a publishing house and writing romantic novels. She sends home €1,000, or about $1,300, a month to support her parents, who retired last year.
Her family’s story is telling of the ways many of Spain’s 170,000 Chinese immigrants have managed not only to weather a tough economy but even to thrive, aided by intense labor and a strong Confucian model of family loyalty, while joblessness and cuts to government services have left other Spaniards struggling.
“The Chinese family is less dependent on the government because the family is the welfare state, the bank and social services, all wrapped in one,” Ms. Wang said.
“For Chinese people who lived through hardship back home,” she added, “working 16-hour days is nothing, and that has made us more resilient during the crisis.”
The Spanish government itself seems to have recognized the importance of this success. So determined is it to attract Chinese immigrants that in November it passed a law offering residency permits to foreigners who buy homes worth more than €160,000, with the specific aim of drawing Chinese and Russian investment, lawmakers said.
As hard-hit Spaniards struggle to keep both their jobs and their homes, Spain’s Chinese immigrants in Barcelona and Madrid are starting businesses and buying distressed properties from the bursting of Spain’s housing bubble.
Of the 8,613 foreigners who started businesses in the past 10 months, 30 percent, or 2,569 were Chinese, according to the National Federation of Self-Employed Workers.
InfoChina Gesti?n, a real estate company based in Madrid that focuses on Chinese investors, said the number of houses sold for €70,000 to €100,000 to Chinese nearly doubled last year, to 813. Mr. House, a real estate company in Madrid, said it was selling at least 10 houses a month to Chinese, a majority of whom paid at least 80 percent in cash.
The types of work many Chinese immigrants gravitate toward helps explain their success as much as their work ethic. In a time of economic crisis, ubiquitous low-margin Chinese-owned bazaars, hairdressers and supermarkets have become a lure for cost-conscious Spanish consumers.
“If it wasn’t for the Chinese shops, it would be harder to scrape by,” said Ester Maduerga, 30, a saleswoman at a sports shoe store, as she scanned the notepads, leather belts and plastic alligators at One Hundred and More, a Chinese-owned bazaar here.
Xi Li He, 26, the bazaar’s manager and cashier, said the business was flourishing, in part because he had reduced prices by importing inexpensive goods from China. When Mr. Xi, fresh from business school, tried to take a job at a large Spanish retailer, he said his mother doubled his salary.
That kind of success by Chinese immigrants has provided a beachhead of sorts for further investment from China that has pumped some life into an otherwise moribund Spanish economy.
Before Spain’s crisis exploded in 2008, Chinese foreign investment in Spain was negligible. By last year, it had grown to €70 million, according to ICEX, a government investment agency.
Ivana Casaburi, a professor of international marketing at Esade business school in Barcelona, said Chinese companies were being drawn to Spain because it offered a low-cost gateway to the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc.
Isla Ramos Chaves, an executive at the Chinese computer maker Lenovo, said that even with the crisis, Spain — the fourth-largest economy in the euro zone — remained a market that Chinese companies were eager to tap. She added that Chinese multinationals in Spain were proving robust, in part because they were anchored by a huge domestic market back home.
Executives at Haier, the Chinese-owned appliance maker, said the economic crisis, rather than being a deterrent, had provided an opportunity, as Spaniards were willing to consider competitively priced washing machines and air-conditioners, even if their brands were less well known.
“I am not sure we would have been as successful if the market was stable and growing,” said Santiago Belenguer, the general manager of Haier’s Spanish operations.
The success of Chinese newcomers to Spain has not spawned the kind of anti-immigrant backlash seen in some hard-pressed parts of Europe like Greece. Immigration experts said Spain’s relatively welcoming attitude reflected its new openness after the repression of the Franco years, when the country was a nation of emigration. Since the crisis, the return of thousands of Latin American immigrants to their home countries from Spain has also relieved pressure on the work force.
That does not mean everyone has championed the success of the Chinese, and some complain of stereotyping and being targeted by law enforcement.
In October, the police arrested 80 people in a nationwide crackdown on Chinese criminal gangs engaged in money-laundering and tax evasion. The police said the low price of Chinese products was being abetted by some importers not declaring shipments from China, thereby avoiding taxes.
Here in Barcelona, José Rodr?guez, the owner of A Porta Galega, a traditional tapas cafe in the hip neighborhood of Eixample, said cut-rate prices for everything from beer to shampoo at Chinese-owned shops made it impossible for Spaniards to compete. At least a dozen Chinese-owned tapas bars are scattered along his block.
Still, he added, he would sell his own restaurant to Chinese buyers, “for the right price.”
Silvia Taulés contributed reporting.

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A Soaring Homicide Rate, a Divide in Chicago

Anton Watson, center, with other children, parents and teachers at a Chicago peace vigil held amid a rising number of killings. CHICAGO — This city’s 471st homicide of 2012 happened in the middle of the day, in the middle of a crowd, on the steps of the church where the victim of homicide 463 was being eulogized. Sherman Miller, who was 21, collapsed amid gunfire not far from the idling hearse that was there to carry away James Holman, 32, shot to death a week earlier. Marcell Carter, left, 19, and Samantha Boyd, 18, at a makeshift memorial to a friend who was fatally shot on Chicago’s West Side. The funeral shooting at St. Columbanus Catholic Church on the South Side left neighbors fretting that no place, not even a church, felt safe any longer. “It’s become the Wild Wild West,” said Charles Childs Jr., who had watched from across the street as mourners screamed and scattered. The shooting, on Nov. 26, was one more jarring reminder of just how common killings seem to have grown on the streets of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, where 506 homicides were reported in 2012, a 16 percent increase over the year before, even as the number of killings remained relatively steady or dropped in some cities, including New York. But the overall rise in killings here blurs another truth: the homicides, most of which the authorities described as gang-against-gang shootings, have not been spread evenly across this city. Instead, they have mostly taken place in neighborhoods west and south of Chicago’s gleaming downtown towers. Already, 2013 began with three gun homicides on New Year’s Day, two of them on the South Side. Like other cities, Chicago has long been a segregated place, richer and whiter on the North Side, and the city’s troubling increase in killings has accentuated a longstanding divide. “It’s two different Chicagos,” said the Rev. Corey B. Brooks Sr., the pastor of New Beginnings Church on the South Side, who had led the funeral service for Mr. Holman the day shots rang out, then found himself leading Mr. Miller’s funeral service a week later. The authorities here have described both shootings as gang related. “If something like that had happened at the big cathedral in downtown Chicago or up north at a predominantly white church, it would still be on the news right now, it would be such a major thing going on.” More than 80 percent of the city’s homicides took place last year in only about half of Chicago’s 23 police districts, largely on the city’s South and West Sides. The police district that includes parts of the business district downtown reported no killings at all. And while at least one police district on the city’s northern edge saw a significant increase in the rate of killings, the total number there still was dwarfed by deaths in districts on the other sides of town, and particularly in certain neighborhoods. Along the streets downtown and in neighborhoods on the North Side not far from Lake Michigan, some residents acknowledged that they had heard about a rise in the city’s homicide rate, but said it had not affected their own sense of safety. “This area is a bit of a Garden of Eden,” said Gwen Sylvain, as she walked dogs along a residential street not far from the Loop. Others said they rarely had reason to go to the Chicago’s South or West Sides, only a few miles away, and some longtime residents said they had never once ventured to such neighborhoods. Police business on the North Side rarely seems to rise beyond an overly enthusiastic Cubs fan or a parking quibble, said Kyong Lee, who said that in the past he had, without consequence, forgotten to lock up his family’s shoe repair business. In Back of the Yards, a South Side neighborhood near the city’s old meatpacking district, the tenor was far different. Mothers spoke of keeping their children inside from the moment school ended, and businessmen of decisions to lock the front doors of their shops during business hours. “I don’t go out at night,” said Jesse Martinez, who recalled the gun pressed to his head as he was robbed a few years ago inside the hat and boot store he has run for 32 years.

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Israel disappointment after Al-Arian's comments been removed after 10 years

Israeli political sources arabized their disappointment with statements of Dr. Essam El-Erian, vice president of the party, "Freedom and Justice" and House Majority Leader on the demise of Israel within 10 years. She added that Israel has never questioned the legitimacy of the Egyptian state.

The sources considered that such statements of concern, especially as they lead to the emergence of a hostile and negative atmosphere between the two countries. As mentioned in an Israeli radio. Al-Arian had recently talked about the demise of the State of Israel within 10 years. He called on Jews to leave the land of Palestine and the return to the country they came from, and said that the Jewish occupiers of the territory of historic Palestine are an obstacle to the right of return of Palestinians.

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Egypt: increased kidnappings and the Islamization of Coptic girls

Returned Multi kidnapping of Coptic girls in Egypt.Still the disappearance of Coptic girls crisis escalate and looking for a solution, especially as it can cause over 90% of the incidents of sectarian nature in Egypt.

The disappearance of the girls is almost an almost daily basis, without any exaggeration, and pointed out that the disappearance of Coptic girls crisis worsened dramatically,

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مفاجأة.. رونالدو إلى مان يونايتد في صفقة خيالية..!

أن النجم البرتغالي كرستيانو رونالدو سيعود للمان يونايتد مع نهاية هذا الموسم مقابل 60 مليون جنيه.

علاقة رونالدو بإدارة ريال مدريد والاعلام الإسباني توترت كثيراً في الشهور الأخيرة وباتت مسألة انتقاله أقرب من أي وقت مضى وخصوصاً إذا لم يحصل ريال مدريد على أي لقب هذا الموسم.

يذكر أن السير أليكس فيرغسون أبدى رغبته في عدة مناسبات بعودة رونالدو وأن مان يونايتد سيكون سعيداً بعودة نجمه الذي غادره عام 2009.

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Hollywood stars are demanding tighter controls on weapons

Appeared a crowd of Hollywood stars including Beyonce and Jennifer Aniston and Brooke Shields and Steve Carell in a recorded tape to demand tighter controls on weapons in the United States in the wake of indiscriminate shooting at a school in the town of Newton in Connecticut that killed 20 children and 6 adults. And also encouraged the stars, including Cameron Diaz, Courtney Cox and Reese Witherspoon and Christina Aguilera and Jason Batman fans claim to develop a plan to regulate weapons.

And commissioned by President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden to chair a task force mission to seek the face of gun violence in America.

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Mursi robe White achieves 500 thousand "Lake"

Image of President Mohamed Morsi he was inside his home and wearing robes white in color. Shows Egyptian President, sitting next to him several children and is seen smiling at them, which made visitors and pioneers of the "Face book" are handled is very, very quickly between all the social pages.
And achieved nearly 500 thousand Lake in only 5 hours from the beginning of the deployment, and flooded with thousands of comments on that picture, where many activists confirmed that that image was captured in a house Mursi area of ​​Fifth Avenue. The most prominent of those comments slogan echoed many of the activists as the title transfer is a "head of us live our midst," and wished him many success in his job because of the burdens severe existing now, especially with the severe economic crisis experienced by Egypt now and feel the citizens in the face of rising price of the dollar againstthe value of the pound.

 

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China imposes new restrictions on Internet users

Chinese authorities issued a new law on Internet users limit the use of illegal acts of piracy, where she signed the Standing Committee on the Chinese parliament a new package of severe restrictions on the Internet and its users in the country.
Beijing said that the new restrictions limit the illicit use of information and fight piracy.

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