Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has fined HP Inc. and some of its resellers, for what it calls “cartelisation” activities that inflated the cost of PCs and printers – and which it says HP used to head off threats from resellers to sell counterfeit ink cartridges. The ₹138.85 crores/$14.4 million fine won’t be a massive inconvenience to HP. The facts of the case may be, as the CCI found HP told its resellers what prices to charge when they bid for tenders posted to a government procurement site. The PC and printer giant also prohibited some of its resellers from bidding on tenders. In its order related to HP’s bids to sell printer supplies, the regulator reveals it accessed WhatsApp records that show HP staff and some of its resellers “were operating in a collusive arrangement and shows the practice of bid rigging including cover bidding, price fixation, and customer allocation, during 2017-2020.” Cover bidding is the practice of having one reseller make a ridiculously high bid that a vendor knows won’t win a deal, in the hope other resellers who offer more reasonable quotes will get the sale. The order also claims that HP would decide in advance which of its resellers would sell to which customer. The CCI found that one of HP’s motives was to ensure that it remained competitive with other PC and printer makers, rather than to favor a particular reseller. Another motive was to stop resellers from selling counterfeit ink and toner. “Due to constant downward pressure on pricing because of new resellers, Tier-2 resellers threatened a shift to low-cost counterfeit products to compete on price,” the order states. Some of those resellers formed an “understanding” about the prices they would charge, so they would not undercut each other’s bids. The order says HP “facilitated” development of that understanding to defend its printer supplies business. “HP India was commercially forced into a position where it had to support the collusive arrangement adopted by the Tier-2 resellers,” the order states. In a second order regarding the sale of PCs, the CCI found HP’s actions helped HP to navigate the reverse auction process used to determine the winner of some tenders. “HP India faced the risk if its resellers exited early due to unsustainable downward pricing pressure resulting in no sale for HP India,” the order states. “The coordination amongst HP India’s reseller was accordingly designed to ensure that at least one HP reseller remained present in the final round.” The orders compel HP, and the resellers it worked with, to cease all such activity. ®

Exclusive: More than 200 illegal holiday properties found in buildings at the highest level of seismic risk

Tourists in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, are staying in illegal accommodation listed on Airbnb and Booking.com in buildings considered so seismically vulnerable they could collapse in the event of a major earthquake, according to exclusive data shared with the Guardian.

Analysis of data collected by Re:Rise, a Romanian organisation working on seismic risk reduction, identified at least 207 illegal tourist rental properties advertised across the two platforms in Bucharest at the end of May, with a combined capacity to host more than 1,000 visitors each night.

Continue reading...

At the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre broke new ground in selling readers an angry rightwing perspective. Today, most of Fleet Street is run by his disciples

In 1986, 131 years after the Daily Telegraph was founded, its editor, Max Hastings, wrote a memo to senior colleagues about the newspaper’s nature and purpose. “The Daily Telegraph is … ‘nice’,” he said, “in the business of reassurance, of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their world is looking pretty safe and stable.” He went on: “We are not a strident campaigning newspaper – our business each day is to seek to give our readers the fullest possible information about what is happening in the world, and to suggest what it might mean.”

In practice, under Hastings and many other Telegraph editors, this ethos produced a journalism of pervasive but usually understated conservatism: often focused on the English countryside, the value of hierarchy and tradition, the pleasures of seasonal pursuits such as foxhunting and gardening, the interests of farmers and retired military men – and cautionary tales about more reckless lives gone wrong, often presented through enjoyably detailed reports from the divorce courts. The Torygraph, as many non-readers called it, could be inward-looking and “numbingly dull”, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the historian of British conservatism, but it was “thoroughly respectable”. Many of its most renowned figures, such as Hastings’s predecessor as editor, Bill Deedes, were “mildness itself”.

Continue reading...

Een merkwaardig tafereel woensdagavond in Rotterdam-Charlois. Terwijl de politie een deur openbreekt voor onderzoek naar een woningoverval, klinkt even verderop een harde knal. Een man is, afgeleid door de politiewagens in de straat, met zijn auto op z'n kant terechtgekomen. Hij is meteen aan de beurt voor een blaastest.

Van de 104 wethouders in de 22 gemeenten in de regio Rijnmond waar de nieuwe bestuursploeg bekend is, zijn er 32 vrouw. Daarmee ligt het aandeel vrouwelijke wethouders net iets boven het landelijke gemiddelde. De verschillen tussen gemeenten zijn groot.

Phil Kingsbury - Thanks for 5.2 million views! has added a photo to the pool:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Olympus C730UZ
f/5.6 - 5.9 mm - 1/200 - ISO 64

Napalm Death Tiny Desk Concert

In het wild kunnen vuursalamanders zo’n twintig jaar oud worden. Maar dat lukt in Nederland alleen met hulp van vrijwilligers. Een nachtelijke zoektocht naar larven in het Bunderbos.

Er is een nieuwe route in drugsland: via de Atlantische Oceaan komen grote hoeveelheden cocaïne Europa binnen. De ingrediënten: volle zee en supersnelle speedbootjes.