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Google's monopoly, Bangladesh's revolt and Mideast mayhem

 
Today's BUSINESS story

Google loses antitrust suit, declared 'monopolist'

What happened
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled Monday that Google illegally operated a monopoly over the internet search industry. The massive antitrust decision followed a 10-week trial in which the Justice Department said Google was using its market dominance to unfairly quash competition at the expense of consumers, advertisers and rival search engines.

Who said what
"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," Mehta said. The decision is a "major blow" to the "bedrock of Google's empire," Yahoo Finance said. It's also a "huge win for the Justice Department and could have giant implications" for other major tech firms.

Mehta's ruling "focused on the billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets," The Associated Press said. Those contracts with other tech giants gave Google the "scale to block out would-be rivals" like Bing and DuckDuckGo, CNN said.

Attorney General Merrick Garland called the verdict a "historic win for the American people." Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, said Mehta's ruling "recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn't be allowed to make it easily available."

What next?
Mehta set a Sept. 6 hearing to begin fashioning Google's penalties. The company said it will appeal the decision, a process that could delay Mehta's remedies for as long as five years, the AP said. Google faces a separate antitrust suit over its advertising infrastructure and "scrutiny in other jurisdictions, including the European Union," The Washington Post said. 

 
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Today's international story

Bangladesh army steps in as PM quits, flees protests

What happened
Bangladesh's longtime prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled to India on Monday amid escalating student-led protests that her government had tried to crush with force, leaving hundreds dead. Army chief Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman said he was temporarily taking control of the country to restore order as protesters stormed and ransacked Hasina's official residence and other buildings tied to her family and party, including the museum honoring her father, the country's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Who said what
"Keep faith in the military," Waker-uz-Zaman said in an address to the nation. "We will investigate all the killings and punish the responsible." He said Parliament would be dissolved and a national government formed as soon as possible, followed by new elections.

The protests, which began in opposition to a quota system that gave most civil service jobs to allies of Hasina, grew into a challenge to her increasingly authoritarian rule. "We are finally free of a dictatorial regime," constitutional lawyer and legal activist Shahdeen Malik told The New York Times. "This civilian dictator was more dictatorial than previous military dictators."

What next?
After two decades in power, Hasina is unlikely to make another comeback, her son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, told the BBC, adding his mother was "so disappointed after all her hard work."

 
 
Today's MIDDLE EAST Story

US base in Iraq hit amid rising Mideast tensions

What happened
A base housing U.S. and allied military personnel in western Iraq was hit Monday by a suspected rocket attack that injured several American personnel, U.S. officials said. At least five troops and contractors were injured, one seriously, when two rockets landed inside al-Asad air base, Reuters said, citing initial estimates.

Who said what
President Joe Biden said he and Vice President Kamala Harris met with national security advisers and discussed developments in the Middle East and steps to "respond to any attack against our personnel in a manner and place of our choosing."

Monday's attack "comes at a fraught time in the region, as U.S. and Israeli officials brace for Iran's promised response" to the assassinations of top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, The Washington Post said. But it's not clear if the al-Asad strike was part of that response or a "continuation of ongoing efforts by the Iran-backed groups in Iraq to target U.S. forces," The New York Times said. After Iran-backed militants targeted the same base in mid-July, the U.S. bombed a small drone factory near Baghdad last week, killing three Iraqi fighters and a Houthi commander visiting from Yemen.

What next?
The U.S. and Iraq are in discussions on drawing down the 2,500 U.S. troops stationed in the country.

 
 

It's not all bad

In a global first, the Texas Heart Institute successfully implanted an artificial titanium heart that uses magnetic levitation — the same technology that powers bullet trains. The total artificial heart (TAH) uses a magnetically levitated rotor to pump 12 liters of blood a minute, the frictionless technology significantly extending the device's lifespan while the patient waits for a donated heart. The breakthrough is a "beacon of hope for countless patients awaiting a heart transplant," said Dr. Joseph Rogers, who led the research.

 
 
Under the radar

Deep in the ocean, scientists have discovered the presence of "dark" oxygen — oxygen produced without photosynthesis. A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience found evidence of this oxygen being produced without light near polymetallic nodules. 

The "conventional view" is that oxygen was "first produced around 3 billion years ago by ancient microbes called cyanobacteria and there was a gradual development of complex life thereafter," Nicholas Owens, the director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, said in a news release. "The potential that there was an alternative source" for oxygen "requires us to have a radical rethink."

Polymetallic nodules comprise several metals including manganese, nickel and cobalt, and these metals are harvested during deep-sea mining in order to build electric vehicle batteries. But more deep-sea mining to fuel electric vehicle production could potentially damage the ocean's ecosystem, robbing marine life of oxygen the nodules seem to produce. "We need to be really careful," Franz Geiger, one of the study's authors, said to NPR. The deep-sea mining needs to be "done on a level and at a frequency that is not detrimental to life down there."

The findings also raise questions about the origins of life. They imply the "possibility that aerobic [oxygen-dependent] life arose before photosynthesis evolved," said The Economist. "That is controversial. But dark oxygen could certainly help aerobic microbes that survive in the deep today, as well as the larger organisms that eat them."

 
 
On this day

August 6, 1962

The colony of Jamaica gained independence from the U.K. The island had been a territory of the British crown for more than 300 years, but Jamaican nationalism in the mid-1900s fueled an independence movement. Jamaica remains a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and still counts King Charles III as its head of state. 

 
 
TODAY'S newspaperS

Hurricane Debby "slams Florida, brings death, damage" from "major flooding," the Detroit Free Press says on Tuesday's front page. "As Debby degrades, dangers still lurk," USA Today says. As the slow-moving storm heads inland, "Georgians told to get out," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says. Most newspapers note Monday's big global market sell-off, fueling "Wall Street's worst drop since '22," the Los Angeles Times says. The "plunging stocks fuel economic worries," the Journal-Constitution says, but "experts" say "don't sell stocks amid volatility."

► See the newspaper front pages

 
 
Tall tale

Beach bod

A woman in New Zealand called the police after spotting what she thought was a headless body on a North Island beach. "I just sort of froze and felt sick," Alice Cowdrey said to Radio New Zealand. Police were able to put her mind at ease after discovering that the figure was actually a "very realistic" sex doll.

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Theara Coleman, Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Devika Rao, Rafi Schwartz and Peter Weber, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images; K M Asad / LightRocket via Getty Images; Ayman Henna / AFP via Getty Images; Andris Barbans / Getty Images