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Europe is currently facing its worst modern refugee crisis. Culpability for that humanitarian disaster, says Amnesty International, lies squarely with the European Union.

Those trying to reach European shores include desperate migrants and asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, all making a dangerous voyage across the waters from Libya to Italy and from Turkey to Greece and then walking across Europe. Many dont make it, like Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy, whose lifeless body stirred the world if but for a moment.

According to A perfect storm: The failure of European policies in the Central Mediterranean, a new report released by Amnesty International, 2016 was the worst year for migrant deaths, but 2017 is shaping up to break that grim record.

Amnestys report pins the blame squarely on European Union policies, which they call reckless. The EU has tasked the Libyan coast guard with aiding search and rescue operations. Amnesty argues that pairing with Libya has not prevented departures or loss of life, but instead is exposing refugees and migrants to even greater risks at sea and, when intercepted, to disembarkation back in Libya, where they face horrific conditions in detention, torture and rape.

Meanwhile the passage to Europe has only gotten more precarious, the smugglers have only gotten more brazen, and the boats they use have never been more ill-equipped.

The rubber rafts setting sail from Libya these days are almost never expected to make it to Europe. They leave with no gas, no life preservers, and no means of communication on board. And with more people than ever before trying to leave, more people are suffering and dying.

The numbers explain it best: 181,400 people traveled from North Africa to Italy in 2016. This year over 80,000 people have already made that treacherous voyage. Thats 14 percent higher than the same date in 2016. More than 2,000 people have died this summer alone.

The European Unions response has been to work more closely with the Libyan coast guard. That, too, says the Amnesty report, is a tragedy in the making.

The route, it explains, is more terrifying than ever. And the solutions have only worsened the problem. Amnesty has some suggestions: Bring more European rescue boats to the coast of Libya and open more legal routes for migrants. Not everyone will like that solution especially when Europe has spent the bulk of the last months considering means of repatriation and convincing Libya to shoulder more responsibility.

Amnestys study is based on interviews with migrants, academics, journalists, UN organizations, the coast guard of Italy, and European parliamentarians. Researchers visited the migrant receiving points at four Italian ports, spoke to FRONTEX, the for-hire coastal border patrol company, the Italian ministry of the interior, and Italian coast guard as well as non-governmental agencies working on search and rescue missions.

But it is the testimony of the migrants themselves that brings home the horror of the largest human displacement since the Second World War. Its a nightmare that begins even before a migrant makes it to the Libyan coast.

Take part of the story of a 20-year-old Gambian, Abukafir, who told Amnesty:

It was December 2016. We left Agadez, in Niger, at 6am, six Toyotas together, driving very, very fast. We drove for 12 hours, without stopping, 27 people. We were chased. Five Toyotas were caught. The people on them were abandoned in the desert.

Amnesty Internationals report explains that the incidents of death on the sea is almost directly correlated to the number of search and rescue missions out on the sea. Migrants began to die when Mare Nostrum, a search and rescue operation organized by the EU from October 2013 through the following October, was abruptly suspended because EU leaders believed the rescue ships were a pull-factor for migrants.

The idea that rescue ships are an enticement to refugees has floated through Europe off and on for several years.

In 2015, Lady Joyce Anelay, then a minister in the foreign office, told the press, We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean as Britain believed such missions were encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing. But British authorities eventually backed away from that stance; it was too dangerous.

When Mare Nostrum stopped, migrants started to die. When the EU beefed up search and rescue missions, in the incidence of mortality dropped. The causality seemed clear.

This summer, the search and rescue missions have never been more necessary. In the two years since this crisis began in earnest, migrants have begun leaving under riskier and riskier conditions. Amnesty lists a number of reasons the death toll is ticking ever higher: the absence of satellite phones, boats leaving in poor weather and after dark, the use of flimsy rubber rather than wooden boats, and multiple boats launching simultaneously, making rescue difficult.

Boats are most easily rescued after having been spotted, or after issuing a distress signal, so the lack of a satellite phone is a significant problem. Worse still, the boats are leaving and barely making it beyond Libyan waters before they need assistance that presents a problem and a challenge to Europeans trawling waters near Sicily, or in between.

The people leaving too, are leaving in worse shape. There are more women in late stage pregnancy. On board conditions are horrific worse. The story of Kwakese Junior, a Ghanaian man, illustrates.

I was so confused, very unwell and tired when I was rescued. My legs were swollen. We had our legs in water during the journey. I had a headache, all my body was aching. There was no food or water. It was so hot. We were jam-packed, stepping on each other. If you fall you cannot get up again. Nobody could sleep. Many were thirsty and hungry. Many were sick. Nobody had a phone. We were lost.

And Amnesty points out that European leaders have focused their attention on trying to dissuade people from leaving, rather than on search and rescue. Nine NGOs have stepped in to fill the voice and to try to help with search and rescue as the EU has backed away. But individual European countries are not thrilled by that idea. Last week, Italy floated the idea of blocking NGOs from using their harbors. It was overruled.

In early June, the New York Times ran a dramatic graphic study on migrants and in the Mediterranean. In that piece, the Times indicated that the NGO boats that have moved ever closer to the coast of Africa over the last three years may have actually encouraged flimsier boats, and riskier refugee voyages. Just last week, Italy announced it was overwhelmed by the number of migrants arriving, and wanted to close off ports to NGOs who go all the way to Libyan waters to make rescues. 11,000 refugees had arrived in the space of days.

Amnestys report challenges that idea. And even the New York Times report acknowledged ending NGO rescues was a potentially deadly choice.

In a video for France24, a journalist embedded herself on the NGO rescue ship Aquarius for 10 days. Her conclusion was very similar to that of Amnesty International. If the NGOs are not there, she said, the immigrants will drown.

One concern for Europe is the changing demographics of migrants. The European Council on Foreign Relations recently found only some 61 percent of migrants are not actually eligible for asylum. However, the ECFR report very specifically laid out that ending rescues was not the answer; instead it argues that Europe must open legal channels of migration in order to help close illegal channels.

But thats not whats happening currently. As Amnesty points out in this report, the Libyan coast guard is being trained to pick up the slack. It doesn't appear up to the job, and the consequences of failure are fatal.

See more here:
The EU's migration policy is literally getting people killed - Vox

The European Union leveled a $2.7 billion fine against Google this month for allegedly illegally disadvantaging several European e-commerce sites by algorithmically favoring Google Shopping results over their own.

The reasons for the fine are fairly tedious, even by the usual standards of EU bureaucratic action. The specific Google product at issue isnt well-known or widely used and the specific companies involved arent well-known either. And while the cash stakes are nothing to sneer at, the amount of money involved is fairly trivial relative to Googles overall scale.

Yet for all that, the ruling is arguably the most important development in business regulation on either side of the continent in this decade. The details of the case arent important, but the high-level view is. Europe has ruled that Google has monopoly power in the web search market and should be regulated as such. Thats a game-changer. The United States, so far, disagrees.

If by some chance you discovered this article or any other Vox article through a web search on your mobile phone, you are probably looking at whats known as an Accelerated Mobile Page. AMP is a Google initiative to make mobile web pages load at lightning speed through a combination of stripping them down and hosting the content directly on Googles servers.

One reason publishers have adopted AMP is that the technical performance really is impressive. But as critics like Jon Gruber have long pointed out, it also has significant downsides.

Given the tradeoffs, the real answer to his question, Can someone explain to me why a website would publish AMP versions of their articles? is extremely simple. Publishers do it because Google wants them to do it. They perceive that AMP pages will be favored over non-AMP ones in Googles search, and so if you want to maximize your search referral traffic you ought to do what Google wants and get on the AMP train.

Publishers, in short, perceive Google as possessing considerable power in the marketplace. Europe is now on record as seeing that as a potential problem. The United States thinks it basically isn't.

From the standpoint of American antitrust authorities, Google is largely immune to scrutiny on two grounds.

One is the theory that despite its large market share, Google is no monopoly because competition is just a click away. A traditional monopoly would rely on control over some kind of physical asset to make competition literally impossible. By contrast, its genuinely quite easy to navigate over to Bing or Duck Duck Go if you decide you dont want to use Google for web search.

If Google downgrading traditional web search results in favor of advertising display units or special boxes makes users like it better, then thats a win-win. If users like it less, then they can go search somewhere else. The American view is that for the government to try to second-guess these kind of design calls would be counterproductive. As the FTC concluded in its 2013 letter closing investigations of Google:

Product design is an important dimension of competition and condemning legitimate product improvements risks harming consumers. Reasonable minds may differ as to the best way to design a search results page and the best way to allocate space among organic links, paid advertisements, and other features. And reasonable search algorithms may differ as to how best to rank any given website. Challenging Googles product design decisions in this case would require the Commission or a court to second-guess a firms product design decisions where plausible procompetitive justifications have been offered, and where those justifications are supported by ample evidence.

The other is that US antitrust doctrine since the late-1970s has focused exclusively on consumer welfare, typically with a fairly narrow focus on consumer prices. Legally suspect monopoly behavior would raise prices. Google is free, so nothing it does raises prices, so nothing it does can be anti-consumer.

These doctrines sometimes lead American authorities to strange results. Back in 2012, a group of traditional book publishers banded together with Apple to break Amazons stranglehold over the e-book industry and force it to change its pricing policies. The Justice Department sued the hapless publishers who Amazon was crushing rather than helping them against the de facto e-book monopolist. After all, despite Amazons dominant market share competition (at the time from Barnes & Nobles Nook) was just a click away. And Amazon was dedicated to keeping prices low.

By the same token, while antitrust authorities wont stop Google from pressuring publishers into using AMP, they certainly would stop publishers from forming a cartel that bargained collectively over AMP and other relevant industry issues.

One problem with only a click away analysis is network effects.

Facebook is good to use in part because its a good product, but in part because everyone is already on Facebook. Even if a rival social network product came along that was, all things considered, slightly better, nobody would use it because nobody else is using it.

Google, by the same token, has a nearly insurmountable lead over every rival in virtue of the fact that so many people are googling all the time. Each search is an input into Googles ongoing iterative machine learning that aims to get better and better at surfacing the most relevant content. No rival can match Googles user base, so no rival can match the speed at which Google is learning and getting better. That gives Google considerable latitude to mess around with how search works to promote its own products while still maintaining a dominant basic position in search.

During the landmark antitrust litigation against Microsoft in the 1990s, this was exactly the position the US government took.

At the time, people wanted to buy Windows computers in part because they were compatible with other Windows computers that were already ubiquitous. That gave Microsoft market power, even though it was certainly always possible to buy a non-Windows computer. And even though the government didnt ultimately carry the day with all the claims it made in that litigation, the basic principle that Microsoft should be considered a monopoly whose actions come under scrutiny stood up. But American regulators havent taken a similar view of the new generation of network effect-driven technology giants.

From Googles point of view, all of this is borderline ridiculous.

The claim that the search giant is a nefarious monopoly worthy of heightened regulatory scrutiny amounts to arguing that they deserve to be punished for offering a superior product. Search engines arent like water utilities or railroads where limitations on physical space create a natural monopoly. And Google didnt obtain a dominant market share by purchasing rivals or merging a bunch of separate search engines. Nothing is stopping anyone from using a rival search service if they want to, its simply that most people choose to use Google.

Even worse, barring them from vertically integrating search with other Google offerings doesnt just cost them money (though of course it does that) it prevents them from improving their product. Relative to Googles ambitions, the classic Google experience of displaying a list of links to search results is incredibly primitive.

As Farhad Manjoo reported in 2013, Googles goal is to build something like the computer that powers the Enterprise in Star Trek, simply answering your questions. These days if you ask Google how tall John Wall is, Google simply tells you how tall John Wall is.

Internet content providers, of course, dont like this trend and would prefer Google to serve up links to websites that would garner traffic and advertising revenue. Google, for selfish business reasons, would rather keep users on Google and continue gobbling up ad revenue for itself. But answering the question directly is also a genuinely superior user experience to the alternative.

From Googles point of view, the truly anti-competitive move would be for regulators to prop up non-Google information services by preventing Google from outcompeting them by offering a superior seamless product.

A heavy theme in late-1990s coverage of the Microsoft anti-trust litigation was that the software giant had grown to become one of Americas most influential companies without bothering to make a proportionate investment in lobbying Washington. Once the lawsuit was underway, that changed, and Microsoft began to rapidly amp up its lobbying activity, but it was too late by then to stop Bill Clintons administration from charging forward.

George W. Bushs victory in the 2000 election, however, proved beneficial to Microsoft and helped induced the government to agree to settle the case.

Bush, more broadly, inaugurated a general era of business-friendly policymaking and light-touch regulation. Then along came Barack Obama who campaigned on a promise to stiffen antitrust enforcement, and in many ways delivered on the promise. Obama was, however, closely politically aligned with Silicon Valley and was much more likely to deliver anti-monopoly regulation when the targets were stodgy telecom companies than sexy high-tech ones.

The Obama White House was particularly close to Google, which sent 31 executives to White House jobs and employed 22 White House officials after they left Washington, with others revolving to or from the State Department and the Pentagon. Google had a massive presence at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the sole investor in Civis Analytics, a major data and technology vendor to Democratic campaigns. The White House, sometimes including Obama personally, characterized European antitrust scrutiny of Google as a form of de facto protectionism with the European Union cast as seeking to unfairly disadvantage American tech companies to prop up European ones.

This tight alignment with Democrats could theoretically mean political trouble for Google in a Trump-dominated Washington. In practice, however, Trump has made very conventional business-friendly Republican appointments to all the relevant agencies, including tapping Maureen Ohlhausen a vocal critic of Obama-era antitrust enforcement as overly zealous as acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

The result is that for now at least the United States and Europe appear to be headed down two very different paths with regard to the application of antitrust law to digital technology.

The American philosophy emphasizes the risk that overly zealous regulation could constrain innovation from some of the most dynamic companies on earth while the European one emphasizes the risk that those companies themselves have grown so large and powerful that they can choke off new players. They diverge in part on how they think about network effects as a moat in the modern economy, and in part on their specific assessment of Googles business decisions.

But they also diverge in how they think about the purpose of competition policy.

American regulators take a relatively narrow view that the goal should be to prevent consumers from facing situations in which they have no choices, or in which lack of choices forces them to pay higher prices. European regulators take a broader view that the goal should be ensure the viability of a diverse ecosystem of firms. The American view is that excessive regulation is a clear threat to innovation, while the European view is that a corporate monoculture is a clear threat to innovation.

And not everyone in America is satisfied with the American approach. Hillary Clintons campaign called for more stringent anti-trust enforcement, though without specifically mentioning the technology platform giants as potential targets. But late in its lifespan, the Obama administrations own Council of Economic Advisers released a report bemoaning declining competition in the American economy over the past generation and specifically singling out the Microsoft litigation as a worthwhile effort to push back. And in a spring 2016 speech, Elizabeth Warren called out Google, Apple, and Amazon by name as companies that deliver enormously valuable products but nonetheless require more scrutiny because the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors that want their chance to change the world again. Bernie Sanders, too, is a proponent of a more regulation-friendly approach to competition policy.

For now, the main concrete consequence of the underlying shift is that technology CEOs are lavishing praise on Trump, recognizing that despite their workforces discomfort with his culture war politics and anti-immigrant demagoguery, their objective interests are aligned with his economic policy priority.

But European regulators have put on the table an intellectual framework for thinking about antitrust in the digital era that could drastically change how the economy works, and the rising progressive faction of the Democratic Party wants to adopt that approach. As the economic policy debate continues to shift away from how to promote recovery from a severe recession to how to promote broadly shared growth on a sustained basis, this question of whether American tech giants should be seen as favored national champions or threats to innovation is likely to become increasingly central.

See more here:
Google's battle with the European Union is the world's biggest economic policy story - Vox

Luigi Di Maio, Italian MP from the M5S party took aim the European Union failures in dealing with the migrant crisis, which has disproportionally hit his country.

Di Maio told him in video published by IlFatto Quotidiano: Dear President Macron, we do not know each other, we have never got the chance to meet, but I want to take advantage of the power of the Internet to send this message.

About 80% of migrants arriving in Europe go through Italy. It's simple math. Of the approximately 90,000 migrants that landed in 2017 in Europe, some 80,000 arrived in Italy."

The Italian politician then explained the shocking financial cost to his country and called for more help from the European budget.

Getty/Il Fatto Quotidiano

You claim to be pro-EU. But let me tell you something, its very easy to be pro-EU with the borders of others

Luigi Di Maio

You know that Italy takes care of 98% of the expenses to receive these migrants. Last year, Italians spent about 4.5 billion euros compared to only 100 million euros coming from the EU.

We ask the EU and Europe not only to help with the money but also with this phenomenon that involves, for geographical reasons, Italy and the EU border. We are an EU member and we should receive help.

Macron was swept into power on a wave of pro-EU sentiment - a point which Di Maio raised when he urged for collective action on the crisis on Italys shores.

President Macron, after your victory in France, everyone was talking about the victory of Europeanism. You claim to be pro-EU. But let me tell you something, its very easy to be pro-EU with the borders of others, especially with the Italian borders.

Germany and France have finally agreed to increase their relocation efforts of migrants from Italy as a crisis over should be done with the new arrivals threatens the whole EU.

The European Union has warned member states all countries must take their share of migrants, but a number of central European countries, in particular, Poland and Hungary, have refused.

Di Maio told Mr Macron: we expect the French and France to help and support us much more than what you have said and done so far.

It is time for all of Europe to take care of the migration problem, the immigration issue. We can no longer hide, we can no longer pretend that Italy is not the port of the EuropeanUnion and that it is receiving an astronomical number of migrants.

President Macron, the time has come to show some courage, it is time to really prove that there is stilla European Union. Lets solve the problem of immigration. Let's get everyone En Marche, as you like saying."

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'We can't afford to be pro-EU' Italian MP warns Macron migrant crisis threatens whole bloc - Express.co.uk

The European Union followed up with a statement saying that the bloc would announce at a summit meeting with Japan in Brussels on Thursday that they had reached a political agreement on a deal. That means that the two sides have agreed on the broad outlines of a pact but still have to work out the details often the most difficult part of trade agreements.

Among other things, the pact would eliminate a 10 percent duty that the European Union imposes on Japanese car imports, while removing obstacles that European automakers face in Japan. That would be particularly significant for luxury carmakers like BMW, Mercedes and Toyotas Lexus brand, said Ferdinand Dudenhffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany who focuses on the auto industry.

Those vehicles suffer the most from high import duties. It could be a chance for the high-value, premium vehicles, Mr. Dudenhffer said. American brands like Cadillac or Lincoln wont have the same advantage and will be in a worse position, he said.

The trade deal has been under negotiation for years, but talks were effectively delayed while Japan focused on a separate deal with the United States and other Pacific Rim countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But Mr. Trump dealt that agreement a possibly fatal blow shortly after taking office this year, when he formally abandoned it. At the same time, trade talks between the United States and Europe have stalled.

The pact to be announced on Thursday offers both Japan and the European Union an attractive alternative.

For the European Union, the political imperative around this agreement is intense, said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, a research organization in Brussels. With Britain preparing to exit the bloc, a process known as Brexit, he continued, European Union leaders were under pressure to show the 27 other states in the bloc that membership still has benefits, including gains from liberalizing trade.

With Brexit, a huge chunk of European trade is under uncertainty, Mr. Lee-Makiyama said. The commission is struggling for a win, he added, referring to the European Commission, the executive arm of the bloc.

For Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, the deal also looks like a much-needed win.

Mr. Abe won office five years ago with promises of liberalizing the Japanese economy and making the countrys industries more competitive, but critics say his efforts have fallen short. He had hoped to make the Trans-Pacific Partnership a centerpiece of his economic legacy, but that may now be out of reach.

Accusations of influence-peddling and gaffes by members of Mr. Abes cabinet have added to his problems. Voters in Tokyo delivered a stinging rebuke to his party in municipal elections on Sunday.

Though key issues must still be ironed out, the two sides have reached agreement on several contentious issues, including cars and cheese.

European negotiators had insisted that Japan lower import duties on a range of agricultural goods, in particular dairy products, an area that Tokyo has staunchly protected.

In return, the Europeans offered to lower duties on vehicles from Japan, a change that could benefit carmakers like Toyota and Honda, who have so far claimed a smaller market share than in other markets, including the United States.

Together, the European Union and Japan would create a trading bloc of a size to rival the North American Free Trade Agreement, now the worlds largest free trade zone.

Still, history shows that political opposition can derail trade pacts even after the parties reach a broad agreement. The Obama administration was unable to conclude a trade deal with the European Union, even though both sides wanted one. The talks stalled largely because of opposition from the food industry and environmental activists.

The proposed deal between the European Union and Japan could founder for the same reasons. Environmental groups have expressed worry that drafts of the pact fall short on a number of issues, including curbing the illegal timber trade and tackling overfishing.

European automakers said on Tuesday that they wanted assurances that the pact would truly give them access to Japan, which is notorious for tax policies and other measures that effectively exclude foreign manufacturers.

Japan should resolve the remaining nontariff measures facing E.U. vehicle exports, Erik Jonnaert, secretary general of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, said in a statement.

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EU to Unveil Outline of Trade Deal with Japan on Eve of Trump Visit - New York Times

MANILA - The European Union said Tuesday it would donate P49 million (850,000 euros) in humanitarian aid to victims of fighting between government forces and Islamic State-inspired extremists in Marawi City.

The grant from the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations will be used to buy food and water supplies, health care, and hygiene kits among others, the EU said in a statement.

This grant from the EU will support the delivery of immediate life-saving assistance to those most in need, and contribute to increased protection of populations affected by the conflict," said Pedro-Luis Rojo, head of the East, South East Asia and Pacific Regional Office for ECHO.

The government earlier said it would no longer accept grants with conditions from the EU, which has criticized President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs. Humanitarian aid, however, will still be accepted.

The Philippines new ally, China, earlier donated P20 million for relief operations in Marawi, including P5 million for families of slain soldiers.

Beijing also turned over P370 million worth of arms to Manila to fight terrorism.

Clashes between government troops and Maute terrorists broke out in Marawi City last May 23, prompting President Duterte to declare martial law in the whole island of Mindanao.

Thousands have fled the city while more than 461 people have been killed in ongoing clashes, among them 337 terrorists, 85 government forces, and 39 civilians.

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European Union donates P49M for Marawi victims - ABS-CBN News