Corruption Ledger

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea’s antitrust regulator has fined Alphabet Inc’s Google 42.1 billion won ($31.88 million) for blocking the release of mobile video games on a competitor’s platform.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday that Google bolstered its market dominance, and hurt local app market One Store’s revenue and value as a platform, by requiring video game makers to exclusively release their titles on Google Play in exchange for providing in-app exposure between June 2016 and April 2018.

The KFTC said the move against the U.S. technology giant is part of efforts by the government to ensure fair markets.

Game makers affected by Google’s action include Netmarble, Nexon and NCSOFT, as well as other smaller companies, the antitrust regulator added.

In 2021, Google was fined more than 200 billion won by the KFTC for blocking customised versions of its Android operating system.

One of the most closely watched US defamation cases in decades is set to begin this week as a Delaware court picks a jury to decide whether Fox News should pay Dominion Voting Systems $1.6bn (£1.3bn) for spreading falsehoods on election rigging.

A critical task for jurors over the five-week trial will be to decide who was responsible for the cable network’s decision to broadcast the claims, despite internal doubts about their veracity. Dominion asserts that Fox’s top brass approved of the coverage, but the network disputes this.

Last week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said he would not block Dominion from calling Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, to testify in person about his involvement in the coverage, which Judge Davis has ruled was false and defamatory.

“The more complicit the whole organisation is in perpetuating these known falsehoods, the more likely a jury would be to return a big dollar figure,” said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor.

A senior South Korean security official said on Tuesday that information contained in purportedly leaked US confidential documents that appeared to be based on internal discussions among top South Korean officials is “untrue” and “altered.”

Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo made the remark as he departed for Washington ahead of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s state visit to the U.S. on April 26, stressing that the two countries’ alliance remained strong. Several documents have recently been posted on social media offering a partial, month-old snapshot of the war in Ukraine, including one that gives details of internal discussions among South Korean officials about US pressure on Seoul to help supply weapons to Ukraine.

“The two countries have a same assessment that much of the information disclosed is altered,” Kim told reporters, adding that the report on South Korea is “untrue.” He did not elaborate which part of the document was untrue.

A U.S. judge rejected requests to sever JPMorgan Chase & Co’s lawsuit accusing former executive Jes Staley of concealing what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein from two related lawsuits over its work for the late sex offender.

Monday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan is a defeat for Staley, who said the scheduled Oct. 23 trial for all three cases left him too little time to defend against JPMorgan’s “slanderous” accusations.

It is also a defeat for women who claim that Epstein sexually abused them and are suing the largest U.S. bank.

They claimed that JPMorgan sued Staley as a means to “harass and intimidate” them into revealing private medical records and communications in their case.

Epstein was a JPMorgan client from 2000 to 2013. The U.S. Virgin Islands, where the financier had a home, is also suing JPMorgan.

+ Walmart is suing Capital One in an attempt to end its credit-card contract with the bank.
+ The retailer said the McLean, Virginia-based bank has repeatedly failed to meet a number of contractual obligations in its card partnership deal, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
+ Capital One “was consistently unable to meet the customer-service standards” outlined in its contract, such as issuing replacement cards and promptly processing payments and posting transactions, Walmart alleged in the suit.

+ China’s military claimed that its troops are “ready to fight at all times”
+ China’s People’s Liberation Army earlier stated that its drills were a “stern warning” to Taiwan
+ The White House expressed confidence that it can defend Taiwan and U.S. interests in the region

Most Wall Street banks are likely to report lower quarterly earnings and face a dour outlook for the rest of the year, with last month’s regional banking crisis and a slowing economy expected to hurt profitability.

Earnings per share for the six biggest U.S. banks are expected to be down about 10% from a year earlier, analyst estimates from Refinitiv I/B/E/S show. Banks start reporting results on April 14.

Access to cheap deposits, which swelled for bigger banks as savers fled smaller lenders in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse last month, likely boosted net interest income for the largest banks, analysts said.

The Department of Defense has sent over a criminal referral to the DOJ to trigger the probe, according to Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh. Meanwhile, an internal investigation has been launched to “review and assess the validity” of the documents, which “appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material.”  Photographs of scanned briefing slides were first posted on a messaging platform called Discord in January, but went unnoticed until last week. Since then, more documents have appeared on Twitter and Telegram as well, with the latest batch emerging on Friday.  According to Financial Times, their release has “sown chaos and paranoia among Washington’s national security apparatus ahead of a critical moment” in the Ukraine conflict, just as Kiev is about to launch a highly anticipated “counter-offensive.”

Germans appear to be particularly susceptible to what Bild described as Moscow’s “propaganda,” the newspaper said, adding that experts in the West are “alarmed” over this development. The tabloid then blamed this tendency on the “historically friendly relations” between the two nations, as well as the “legacy” of East Germany, which was once a part of the “socialist camp” and “a large number of Russian-speaking people” living in Germany nowadays. The paper then admitted that pro-Russian views have been spreading both among native Germans and the Russian-speaking part of the population.

President Emmanuel Macron, following a trip to Beijing in which he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, said in a new interview Sunday he does not believe Europe should follow the “American rhythm” on Taiwan. “We don’t want to get into a bloc versus bloc logic,” Macron said in an interview for French business daily Les Echo,arguing that Europe “should not be caught up in a disordering of the world and crises that aren’t ours.” “The question asked of us Europeans is the following: is it in our interest for there to be acceleration on the topic of Taiwan? No. The worst thing we Europeans could do would be to be followers on this topic and to adapt to the American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction,” he said. “Why should we go at a rhythm chosen by someone else?”

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Texas judge who sparked a legal firestorm with an unprecedented ruling halting approval of the nation’s most common method of abortion is a former attorney for a religious liberty legal group with a long history pushing conservative causes.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, on Friday ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone in a decision that overruled decades of scientific approval. His ruling, which doesn’t take immediate effect, came practically at the same time that U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, essentially ordered the opposite in a different case in Washington. The split likely puts the issue on an accelerated path to the U.S. Supreme Court.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The U.S. Navy has deployed a guided-missile submarine capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk missiles to the Middle East, a spokesman said Saturday, in what appeared to be a show of force toward Iran following recent tensions.

The Navy rarely acknowledges the location or deployment of submarines. Cmdr. Timothy Hawkins, a spokesman for the 5th Fleet based in the Gulf nation of Bahrain, declined to comment on the submarine’s mission or what had prompted the deployment.

He said the nuclear-powered submarine, based out of Kings Bay, Georgia, passed through the Suez Canal on Friday. “It is capable of carrying up to 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and is deployed to U.S. 5th Fleet to help ensure regional maritime security and stability,” Hawkins said.

Four women and 10 children have been repatriated by Canada from detention camps for foreign fighters and their families in northeastern Syria. It was the fourth repatriation operation conducted by the Canadian government of its nationals held in camps in Syria for foreigners accused of being associated with the armed group ISIL (ISIS). Three of the women were arrested in Montreal at the airport before appearing in court on a “terrorism peace bond application” – a type of restraining order, Canadian police said in a statement on Friday.

One, an unidentified 38-year-old woman, was transported to Alberta province in western Canada and released on bail pending a hearing on the conditions of her status. “This is not a criminal charge,” her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon told AFP news agency, adding the prosecutor will want to “ensure that the person follows the conditions for a period of up to one year.”

The other two, Ammara Amjad and Dure Ahmed, “will remain in custody until their next hearing, which is scheduled for Tuesday”, police said. “Everything was good” regarding the fourth woman, said Greenspon, who is representing all four women. She faces neither criminal charges nor a request for a peace bond.

“The 10 children are repatriated and are with their families here in Canada,” said Greenspon. It remains unclear whether any of those being repatriated could face prosecution for alleged involvement with the armed group.

The European Union’s top justice official said he hopes to discuss with Group of Seven partners plans to set up a special tribunal to prosecute Russia over the war in Ukraine.

“We’ll continue, maybe during the Japanese presidency (of the G7) to see whether it’s possible to have the same approach about a proposal,” European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders said in a recent interview with Kyodo News and ahead of a G7 justice ministers’ meeting in July in Tokyo.

According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022. One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has launched an investigation into the possible release of Pentagon documents that were posted on several social media sites and appear to detail U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine, but may have been altered or used as part of a misinformation campaign. The documents, which were posted on sites such as Twitter, are labeled…