Apple CEO Tim Cook Rejects US Senate Report

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has defended his company’s tax avoidance  tactics, Cook faced a grilling by US lawmakers accusing the tech-behemoth of sham subsidiaries and convoluted strategies to shift profits offshore, however Cook strenuously denied the company used gimmicks to avoid paying taxes. Cook told a US Senate committee Apple paid all the taxes it owed, complying with not only the law, but the spirit of the law.

He said last year it paid $US6 billion to the US Treasury, a tax rate of about 30%.

The high level US Senate committee investigating corporate offshore tax avoidance has accused Apple of shifting billions of dollars in profits to avoid paying US taxes on a massive scale. It found Apple avoided paying $9 billion in tax in 2012. Earlier, Panel chairman Senator Carl Levin accused Apple of “exploiting an absurdity” in its tax payments.

Mr Cook told the hearing that Apple lives up to its tax obligations and more, but some lawmakers expressed outrage over findings of the panel’s probe that the tech-behemoth avoided taxes by using a web of foreign subsidiaries, some without any tax jurisdiction :: Read the full article »»»»

Google Recognises Palestine

Internet search behemoth Google has recognised Palestine’s upgraded United Nations status, placing the name “Palestine” on its search engine instead of “Palestinian Territories,” the US company said, raising the ire of Israel. The domain name www.google.ps, Google’s search engine for the territories, now brings up a homepage with “Palestine” written underneath the Google logo.

In November last year the UN general assembly upgraded Palestine to the status of non-member observer state by a vote of 138 votes in favour, 9 against and 41 abstentions.

Palestinian authorities have since begun to use the “State of Palestine” in diplomatic correspondence and issued official stamps for the purpose. The google recognition took effect this week, Google spokesman Nathan Tyler said in a statement :: Read the full article »»»»

Googles Ghost-town Tours

Internet behemoth Google has launched a virtual tour through the nuclear wasteland surrounding Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

Virtual tourists can now take an eery tour through the deserted streets of Namie, one of the towns abandoned after the Fukushima meltdowns spewed radioactive fallout across a large area.

The site reveals streets overgrown with weeds, and time appears to have stood still since Namie’s entire population of 21,000 people was evacuated two years ago.

Fifty percent of the town on the Pacific coast sits within the 20-kilometre evacuation zone around the nuclear plant, which was crippled by Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami :: Read the full article »»»»

Australian Court Orders Search Behemoth Google to Pay Damages for FALSE Gangster Search Results

An Australian court has ordered internet search behemoth Google to pay a man $AU200,000 in damages for wrongly linking him to the Melbourne’s underworld.

Michael Trkulja came to Australia from the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and is an elder in the Serbian Orthodox Church in Springvale, in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. In 2004, he was shot in the back while dining with his elderly mother at St Albans, in Melbourne’s western suburbs. The crime has never been solved.

But the Victorian Supreme Court heard, when entered into the search engines Yahoo and Google, Mr Trkulja name linked him to Melbourne’s criminal underworld, including to pictures of gangland boss Tony Mokbel

An Australian jury found in making the link, that the internet behemoth had wrongly implied Mr Trkulja was “so involved with crime in Melbourne, that his rivals had hired a hit-man to murder him.”

Lawyers for Google rejected the jury’s finding and tried to distance the company from the publication of the links. They also argued that Yahoo was first to make the wrong connection and therefore struck “the first substantial blow” to Mr Trkulja’s reputation :: Read the full article »»»»

Google Fights Deception Verdict in Australian High Court

The Australian corporate watchdog, the ACCC – Australian Competition and Consumer Commission- has told the High Court that Google is responsible for misleading content in its sponsored links. The behemoth that is Google is fighting a ruling that it engaged in misleading conduct when some advertisers used the names of competitors to attract searchers to their links.

The ACCC says these sponsored links give the false impression the businesses are linked. The ACCC says that Google Advertisements with the headline Harvey World Travel redirected to a competitors – STA Travel – website. The ACCC said that the ads were in breach of section 52 of the Trade Practices Act. Similarly, advertisements headlined with Honda, redirected to car-trading website Car Sales, several more Google Adwords accounts, including the Trading Post were said to be in breach of the Trade Practices Act.

In April this year, the Australian Federal Court found that Google HAD engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct regarding it’s AdWords website. the court said that what appears on Google’s web page is Google’s response to A User’s Query. That it happens to headline a keyword chosen by the advertiser does not make it any less Google’s responsibility

In this latest round of litigation, Google’s barrister Tony Bannon told the court that finding Google responsible for what it produces from an inquiry could have much wider implications, suggesting that a negative ruling may even hail the decline of AdWords :: Read the full article »»»»

Googles Marissa Mayer joins Yahoo!

Yahoo! – that would be if it could be internet behemoth – has named former Google vice-president Marissa Mayer as its chief executive, the company’s third in less than 12 months.

37-year-old Ms Mayer will assume the role this week. Ms Mayer was one of Google’s earliest employees, she was the Internet search company’s first female engineer. Ms Mayer was responsible for local and geographical products including Google Offers, Google Maps, Google Earth, Street View and local search for desktop and mobile.

The new appointment signals Yahoo!’s renewed focus on product innovation in an effort to drive advertising revenue for one of the world’s largest consumer Internet brands the company said via statement. The move comes as a surprise after many reports said interim CEO Ross Levinsohn had a lock on the top job.

Yahoo! confirmed via regulatory filings that the cost of luring Ms Mayer away from Google was considerable. Ms Mayer will receive a package of almost $US60, including an annual base salary of just over $US1 million, an annual $US2 million bonus as well as stock bonuses of up to $US3 million, giving her an average annual salary of around $US5 million, assuming she sticks  :: Read the full article »»»»