The US economy expanded at a much faster pace in the first three months of the year than previously estimated, the Commerce Department reported on Thursday.

WASHINGTON The budget deal struck by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to end a debt-limit

Google and the US Justice Department are beginning what might be the most decisive tech trial in a generation. The lawsuit could have substantial consequences – not only for the search giant, but for its rivals such as Apple and Meta, and the technology industry more broadly. The antitrust trial will examine claims from critics that Google has unfairly used its power to become dominant in a variety of parts of technology, in particular its search engine. The United States will argue Google didn’t play by the rules in its efforts to dominate online search in a trial seen as a battle for the soul of the Internet. The US Justice Department is expected to detail how Google paid billions of dollars annually to device makers like Apple, wireless companies like AT&T and browser makers like Mozilla to keep Google‘s search engine atop the leader board. DuckDuckGo has also complained, for example, that removing Google as the default search engine on a device and replacing it with DuckDuckGo takes too many steps, helping keep them to a measly 2.3% market share. DuckDuckGo, Microsoft and Yahoo are among a long list of Google competitors who will be watching the trial closely. “Google makes it unduly difficult to use DuckDuckGo by default. We’re glad this issue is finally going to have its day in court,” said DuckDuckGo spokesman Kamyl Bazbaz who said thatGoogle had a “stranglehold on major distribution points for more than a decade.” Google has denied wrongdoing and is prepared to vigorously defend itself. The legal fight has huge implications for Big Tech, which has been accused of buying or strangling small competitors but has insulated itself against many accusations of breaking antitrust law because the services the companies provide to users are free, as in the case of Alphabet’s Google and Facebook, or low price, as in the case of Amazon.com. “It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this case, particularly for monopolies and companies with significant market share,” antitrust lawyer Luke Hasskamp told Reuters. “This will be a major case, particularly for the major tech companies of the world (Google, Apple, Twitter, and others), which have grown to have an outsized role in nearly all our lives,” he added. Previous antitrust trials of similar importance include Microsoft, filed in 1998, and AT&T, filed in 1974. The AT&T breakup in 1982 is credited with paving the way for the modern cell phone industry while the fight with Microsoft is credited with opening space for Google and others on the internet. Congress tried to rein in Big Tech last year but largely missed. It considered bills to check the market power of the companies, like legislation to prevent them from preferencing their own products, but failed to pass the most aggressive of them. Big Tech’s rivals now pin their hope on Judge Amit Mehta, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit that goes to trial was brought by former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department. In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has pressed on with the lawsuit and filed a second one against Google in January focused on advertising technology. Judge Mehta will decide if Google has broken antitrust law in this first trial, and, if so, what should be done. The government has asked the judge to order Google to stop any illegal activity but also urged “structural relief as needed,” raising the possibility that the tech giant could be ordered broken up. The government’s strongest arguments are those against Google‘s revenue sharing agreements with Android makers, which requires Google to be the only search on the smartphone in exchange for a percentage of search advertising revenue, said Daniel McCuaig, a partner at Cohen Milstein who was formerly with the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Additional reporting by Reuters Read More AI can help generate synthetic viruses and spark pandemics, warns ex-Google executive Google boss says he wants to make people ‘shrug’ How Google reshaped the world – and is about to do it all over again AI is using vast amounts of water Elon Musk says monkeys implanted with Neuralink brain chips were ‘close to death’ Volcano discovery could power electric cars for decades, scientists say

Manchester City will be playing in a second Champions League final in three years when the English team meets Inter Milan in Istanbul on Saturday

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Donald Trump is shifting gears as the Iowa caucuses draw closer, taking a more active approach to campaigning in the Hawkeye State in order to quash any possibility that one of his primary rivals could catch up to him there.

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can classify four subtypes of Parkinson’s disease with up to 95% accuracy. Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in London “trained” a computer program to recognise the subtypes of the condition using images of stem cells from patients. The team said their work, published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, could pave the way for personalised medicine and targeted drug discovery. Sonia Gandhi, assistant research director and group leader of the Neurodegeneration Biology Laboratory at the Crick, said: “We understand many of the processes that are causing Parkinson’s in people’s brains. The hope is that one day this could lead to fundamental changes in how we deliver personalised medicine Sonia Gandhi, Francis Crick Institute “But, while they are alive, we have no way of knowing which mechanism is happening, and therefore can’t give precise treatments. “We don’t currently have treatments which make a huge difference in the progression of Parkinson’s disease. “Using a model of the patient’s own neurons, and combining this with large numbers of images, we generated an algorithm to classify certain subtypes – a powerful approach that could open the door to identifying disease subtypes in life. “Taking this one step further, our platform would allow us to first test drugs in stem cell models, and predict whether a patient’s brain cells would be likely to respond to a drug, before enrolling into clinical trials. “The hope is that one day this could lead to fundamental changes in how we deliver personalised medicine.” Parkinson’s is a condition in which parts of the brain become progressively damaged over many years. Symptoms include involuntary shaking of particular parts of the body, slow movement, and stiff and inflexible muscles. But there is also a wide range of other physical and psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety, problems sleeping, and memory problems. These vary from person to person due to differences in the underlying mechanisms causing the disease. The researchers said that until now, there was no way to accurately differentiate Parkinson’s subtypes. It means people are given nonspecific diagnoses and do not always have access to targeted treatments, support or care, the team added. For the study, the researchers generated stem cells, which have the ability to develop into specialised cell types in the body, from patients’ own cells. The team then used those cells to chemically create four different subtypes of Parkinson’s: two involving pathways leading to toxic build-up of a protein called alpha-synuclein and two involving pathways associated with dysfunctional mitochondria, the cell’s battery packs. Working with the British technology company Faculty AI, the team developed machine-learning algorithms which were able to accurately predict the Parkinson’s subtype when presented with images it had not seen before. James Evans, a PhD student at the Crick and UCL, and first co-author of the study, said: “Now that we use more advanced image techniques, we generate vast quantities of data, much of which is discarded when we manually select a few features of interest. “Using AI in this study enabled us to evaluate a larger number of cell features, and assess the importance of these features in discerning (the) disease subtype. “Using deep learning, we were able to extract much more information from our images than with conventional image analysis. “We now hope to expand this approach to understand how these cellular mechanisms contribute to other subtypes of Parkinson’s.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Oxford scientists find no evidence to suggest Facebook not good for wellbeing Many adults would struggle to understand video-sharing platforms’ rules – Ofcom Ozzy Osbourne PlayStation tweet which failed to reveal link to Sony banned