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UK antitrust enforcer to Microsoft: You can’t bully us

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

LONDON — In the high-stakes game of Big Tech deal-making, Microsoft — and not the British antitrust enforcer — blinked first.After enduring a fierce, four-month-long lobbying campaign led by senior Microsoft executives, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Tuesday it had rejected the U.S. tech giant’s plea to revisit its original decision to block a major gaming merger.Instead, Microsoft has submitted a new, restructured takeover of Activision for the British watchdog to review, under which it will sell the rights to stream existing and new Activision PC and console games to rival French game maker Ubisoft. The rights Ubisoft will acquire outside of the European Economic Area will be exclusive.As the CMA’s biggest merger investigation post-Brexit, the case has been seen as a litmus test for the regulator now that Britain is out of the bloc. Before Brexit, the European Commission had jurisdiction over competition merger investigations, meaning if the U.K. was st...

Mediterranean diet during pregnancy improved 2-year-olds’ cognitive, social abilities

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

(CNN) — Mothers who followed the Mediterranean diet while pregnant improved their children’s cognitive, social and emotional development at age 2 compared with children whose mothers did not follow the diet, according to a new randomized clinical trial.“At year 2 the children’s brains are harvesting some of the benefits that they received in their adequate nutrition during their intrauterine life,” said Dr. Miguel Martínez-González, a professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, in an email. He was not involved in the study.“No other dietary model possesses such an impressive accrual of scientific evidence as the traditional Mediterranean diet,” said Martínez-González, who is also an adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.The Mediterranean diet, which features simple, plant-based cooking, has been shown in studies to reduce the risk for diabetes, high ch...

Boston man faces federal charge in connection with armed robberies in Jamaica Plain, Dorchester

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

A 33-year-old man from Boston is now facing a federal charge, in addition to state charges for a string of armed robberies that affected businesses in both Jamaica Plain and Dorchester.The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts announced that Akeem Lahens was charged with one count of Affecting Commerce by Armed Robbery, months after the robberies occurred in April and May 2023.The announcement came as Lahens remains in state custody, following his arrest back on May 5, after both a Boost Mobile and Cricket Wireless in Jamaica Plain were robbed in late April by a suspect armed with two large knives. A similar robbery also took place at a Dunkin Donuts in Dorchester a day before Lahens’s arrest.“Law enforcement believed that the robberies were connected and the perpetrator was likely the same person, as the suspect’s appearance in surveillance footage and witnesses descriptions was the same,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated in a news ...

Trump’s co-defendants begin to turn themselves in at Fulton County jail

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

(CNN) — The first two of President Donald Trump’s co-defendants surrendered at the Fulton County jail on Tuesday, setting the tone for how the defendants will be processed and how the case will progress.John Eastman, a right-wing lawyer who advised Trump on plots to disrupt Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, turned himself in at the jail on Tuesday, shortly after Scott Hall, a bail bondsman in Atlanta.They had signed a bond agreement with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday. Hall was given an inmate identification number and released after spending roughly an hour at the jail on Tuesday.Willis has charged Trump and 18 of co-defendants of participating in schemes to meddle with Georgia’s election results.All 19 defendants are expected to surrender ahead of a Friday deadline set by Willis when she unveiled last week’s sweeping indictment over attempts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.Trump, who agreed to a $200,000...

Commandos pluck 2 children from dangling cable car in Pakistan; 6 more people wait for rescue

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

By RIAZ KHAN (Associated Press)PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Army commandos dangling from helicopters plucked two children from a broken cable car suspended hundreds of meters (feet) above a canyon Tuesday in a remote part of Pakistan, the military said. Four more children and two adults still awaited rescue as night fell.The military said in a statement that the rescue mission was still underway. Footage on TV stations showed a child in a harness being pulled to safety. The commandos’ rope could be seen swaying in the wind against the mountainous landscape.An expert described the rescue as extremely delicate because the wind generated by the helicopter blades could further weaken the remaining cables holding the car aloft.Relatives of those trapped prayed while anxiously watching the operation unfold. The rescue also transfixed the country as Pakistanis crowded around televisions in offices, shops, restaurants and hospitals.According to Pakistani TV stations, some of those ...

Massachusetts police misconduct database sheds light on discipline used by agencies

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

More than a quarter of the cops whose disciplinary records are listed in a state database received a suspension of between one and five days for their misconduct, according to data released Tuesday.The disciplinary records database maintained by the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission details thousands of allegations of misconduct against officers, the disciplinary outcomes, and some details of the incidents.It offers a first glimpse at the backgrounds of local police officers and allows the public to scrape data to glean more information on bad behavior dating back to December 1984 through Jan. 31.Roughly 17% of police officers listed in the database received a written reprimand for their alleged misconduct. Another 12% got a written warning or letter of counseling and just over 9% were subject to retraining, according to the database.Less than 1% of officers in the database were demoted or offered a last chance agreement and just over 5% were handed a suspension of bet...

Maxine Hong Kingston, bell hooks among those honored by Ishmael Reed’s Before Columbus Foundation

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Maxine Hong Kingston, Darryl Pinckney and the late bell hooks were among the authors honored this year by the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit co-founded by Ishmael Reed that celebrates multicultural literature.Established in 1976, the Before Columbus Foundation each year presents American Book Awards to both fiction and nonfiction writers. Kingston, best known for her memoir “The Woman Warrior,” received a lifetime achievement prize. Pinckney was cited for his memoir “Come Back in September,” and hooks, who died in 2021, was given a special award for criticism. On Tuesday, the foundation also announced awards for Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s novel “When We Were Birds,” Leila Mottley’s “Nightcrawling: A Novel,” Everett Hoagland’s poetry collection “The Ways” and Bojan Louis’ “Sinking Bell: Stories.” Other winners included Edgar Gomez’s memoir “High Risk Homosexual”; Aidan Levy’s biography of jazz great Sonny Rollins, “Saxophon...

Local news is a calling for ex-BBC reporter informing N.W.T. and beyond about fires

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

As thousands of terrified people packed up their belongings last week after an evacuation order in Yellowknife, N.W.T., local news site Cabin Radio was providing line-by-line, minute-by-minute updates on where to go and what to expect.Ollie Williams, a former BBC sports reporter, wrote many of those lines from inside a pickup truck on which sat a satellite dish held steady by heavy bags of dog food. He was fleeing, too.He helped launch Cabin Radio in 2017, a few years after he moved to Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, with a woman he met while covering the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.On Sunday night, as he spoke from an inn about 630 kilometres away in Fort Simpson, N.W.T., he had no regrets.“If I wasn’t doing the reporting I think I would have probably have struggled a lot more, mentally,” he said in an interview. “The job that I have is one that I love. I built myself a journalism role that was custom-designed to be one that I wanted to do...

Hudson’s Bay revamps rewards program with app, personalized offers and quests

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

TORONTO — Hudson’s Bay hopes to capture customer interest with a revamped loyalty program that includes a new app and personalized offers.The Toronto-based department store chain said Tuesday that the changes to its rewards offering are meant to refresh the program to better meet current shopping habits.“Hudson’s Bay was one of the first to introduce a rewards program in Canada, and since then we have seen tremendous change in how people are shopping, how they are prioritizing their purchases, and what they are looking for in a loyalty program,” said Kevin Parry, Hudson’s Bay’s vice-president of credit and loyalty, in a statement.“We wanted to level up our rewards game.”The program comes amid the effects of stubbornly high inflation, increasingly pushing shoppers to seek out deals amid higher price sensitivity.The rewards program will be structured around three tiers shoppers can work their way through, earning more points and faster with each level.Shoppers start ...

Events at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant since the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:15:19 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese officials plan to start releasing treated but still slightly radioactive wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean as early as Thursday, 12 years after a massive earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdowns of three of its reactors and the continuing leakage of cooling water. Here is a timeline of events:— March 11, 2011: A magnitude 9.0 earthquake strikes off the coast of northeastern Japan, triggering a towering tsunami that smashed into the Fukushima nuclear plant, knocking out power and cooling systems and triggering meltdowns in three reactors.— March 12, 2011: A hydrogen explosion occurs at the plant’s No. 1 reactor, sending radiation into the air. Residents within a 20-kilometer (12-mile) radius are ordered to evacuate. Similar explosions occur at the two other damaged reactors over the following days. — April 4, 2011: The plant operator releases more than 10,000 tons of low-level radioactive water into the s...