Birth rates in the world's rich economies have more than halved since 1960 to hit a record low, according to a study that urged countries to prepare for a "lower fertility future." From a report: The average number of children per woman across the 38 most industrialised countries has fallen from 3.3 in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022, according to a study by the OECD published on Thursday. The fertility rate is now well below the "replacement level" of 2.1 children per woman -- at which a country's population is considered to be stable without immigration -- in all the group's member countries except for Israel. "This decline will change the face of societies, communities and families and potentially have large effects on economic growth and prosperity," warned the Paris-based organisation.

Faltering population growth acts as a drag on economic expansion. Across the EU, the rise in overall labour force participation will soon not be enough to compensate for its falling working-age population, exacerbating labour shortages, according to the IMF and European Commission's 2024 ageing report. Coupled with rising life expectancy, low births also put pressure on public finances as they leave fewer people contributing the tax revenues needed to pay for the rising costs of an ageing population. A lack of pupils is also driving an increase in school closures across Europe, Japan and South Korea.

The European Union on Tuesday accused Microsoft of breaching antitrust rules with the "abusive" bundling of its Teams and Office products. From a report: "The European Commission has informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365," the European Commission -- the EU's executive arm -- said in a Statement of Objections, which is sent to inform companies of concerns raised against them. If the commission decides that an infringement has taken place once companies have responded, it can ban the conduct and fine the charged company up to 10% of its global revenue.

Microsoft this year took the preemptive step to unbundle Teams from Microsoft 365 in an effort to quash antitrust concerns by the EU. However, the commission said in its Tuesday statement that the changes were "insufficient to address its concerns and that more changes to Microsoft's conduct are necessary to restore competition." Microsoft said it would work to find solutions to address the commission's additional concerns.

Top officials from the European Union and China agreed to negotiate a planned series of import taxes on Chinese electric vehicles. "The call marks the first time the two sides have agreed to negotiate since the EU threatened China with electric vehicle (EV) tariffs of up to 38%," reports the BBC. From the report: The EU said Chinese EVs were unfairly subsidised by its government. In response, China accused the EU of protectionism and trade rule breaches. An EU spokesperson told the BBC the call between Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis and his Chinese counterpart Wang Wentao was "candid and constructive." They said the two sides would "continue to engage at all levels in the coming weeks." However, the spokesperson also doubled down on the EU's opposition to how the Chinese EV industry is funded. They said "any negotiated outcome" to the proposed tariffs must address the "injurious subsidisation" of Chinese EVs.

China released a similar statement on Saturday and made clear it still disagreed with the EU. As well as its call with the EU, Mr Wang met German Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck on Saturday. In a Facebook post about the meeting, China's Ministry of Commerce said it had told Mr Habeck about its "firm opposition" to the tariffs. It repeated its threat to file a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization (WTO) "to firmly defend its legitimate rights and interests."

Germany has also expressed criticism of the tariffs. When the EU first proposed them last week following its investigation of Chinese EVs in the trading bloc, Germany's Transport Minister, Volker Wissing, said the move risked a "trade war" with Beijing. "The European Commission's punitive tariffs hit German companies and their top products," he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, at the time. The European car industry has been critical too. Stellantis - which owns Citroen, Peugeot, Vauxhall, Fiat, and several other brands - said it did not support measures that "contribute to the world fragmentation [of trade]."

Apple is imposing unfair restrictions on developers of apps for its App Store in violation of a new European Union law meant to encourage competition in the tech industry, regulators in Brussels said on Monday. From a report: The charges further escalated a tussle between Apple, which says its products are designed in the best interest of customers, and E.U. regulators, who say the company is unfairly using its size and considerable resources to stifle competition. Apple is the first company to be charged for violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 that gives European regulators wide authority to force the largest "online gatekeepers" to change their business practices.

After initiating an investigation in March, E.U. regulators said Apple was putting unlawful restrictions on companies that make games, music services and other applications. Under the law, also known as the D.M.A., Apple cannot limit how companies communicate with customers about sales and other offers and content available outside the App Store. The company faces a penalty of 10 percent of global revenue, a fine that could go up to 20 percent for repeat infringements, regulators said. Apple reported $383 billion in revenue last year. "Today is a very important day for the effective enforcement of the D.M.A.," said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy. She said Apple's App Store policies make developers more dependent on the company and prevent consumers from being aware of better offers.

Apple is withholding a raft of new technologies from hundreds of millions of consumers in the European Union, citing concerns posed by the bloc's regulatory attempts to rein in Big Tech. From a report: The company announced Friday it would block the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing from users in the EU this year, because the Digital Markets Act allegedly forces it to downgrade the security of its products and services.

"We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security," Apple said in a statement. Under the DMA, Apple is expected to receive a formal warning from EU regulators over how it allegedly blocks apps from steering users to cheaper subscription deals on the web -- a practice for which it received a $1.9 billion fine from Brussels regulators earlier this year.

European Union officials have delayed talks over proposed legislation that could lead to messaging services having to scan photos and links to detect possible child sexual abuse material (CSAM). From a report: Were the proposal to become law, it may require the likes of WhatsApp, Messenger and Signal to scan all images that users upload -- which would essentially force them to break encryption. For the measure to pass, it would need to have the backing of at least 15 of the member states representing at least 65 percent of the bloc's entire population. However, countries including Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic were expected to abstain from the vote or oppose the plan due to cybersecurity and privacy concerns, Politico reports. If EU members come to an agreement on a joint position, they'll have to hash out a final version of the law with the European Commission and European Parliament.

The European Union is getting closer to passing new rules that would mandate the bulk scanning of digital messages -- including encrypted ones. On Thursday, EU governments will adopt a position on the proposed legislation, which is aimed at detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The vote will determine whether the proposal has enough support to move forward in the EU's law-making process. From a report: The law, first introduced in 2022, would implement an "upload moderation" system that scans all your digital messages, including shared images, videos, and links. Each service required to install this "vetted" monitoring technology must also ask permission to scan your messages. If you don't agree, you won't be able to share images or URLs.

As if this doesn't seem wild enough, the proposed legislation appears to endorse and reject end-to-end encryption at the same time. At first, it highlights how end-to-end encryption "is a necessary means of protecting fundamental rights" but then goes on to say that encrypted messaging services could "inadvertently become secure zones where child sexual abuse material can be shared or disseminated."

The Washington Post reports: Commitments from Big Tech companies to identify and label fake artificial-intelligence-generated images on their platforms won't be enough to keep the tech from being used by other countries to try to influence the U.S. election, said the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. AI won't completely change the long-running threat of weaponized propaganda, but it will "inflame" it, CISA Director Jen Easterly said at The Washington Post's Futurist Summit on Thursday. Tech companies are doing some work to try to label and identify deepfakes on their platforms, but more needs to be done, she said. "There is no real teeth to these voluntary agreements," Easterly said. "There needs to be a set of rules in place, ultimately legislation...."

In February, tech companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI and TikTok, said they would work to identify and label deepfakes on their social media platforms. But their agreement was voluntary and did not include an outright ban on deceptive political AI content. The agreement came months after the tech companies also signed a pledge organized by the White House that they would label AI images. Congressional and state-level politicians are debating numerous bills to try to regulate AI in the United States, but so far the initiatives haven't made it into law. The E.U. parliament passed an AI Actt year, but it won't fully go into force for another two years.

Meta has confirmed that it will pause plans to start training its AI systems using data from its users in the European Union and U.K. From a report: The move follows pushback from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta's lead regulator in the EU, which is acting on behalf of several data protection authorities across the bloc. The U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) also requested that Meta pause its plans until it could satisfy concerns it had raised. "The DPC welcomes the decision by Meta to pause its plans to train its large language model using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram across the EU/EEA," the DPC said in a statement Friday. "This decision followed intensive engagement between the DPC and Meta. The DPC, in cooperation with its fellow EU data protection authorities, will continue to engage with Meta on this issue."

While Meta is already tapping user-generated content to train its AI in markets such as the U.S., Europe's stringent GDPR regulations has created obstacles for Meta -- and other companies -- looking to improve their AI systems, including large language models with user-generated training material. However, Meta last month began notifying users of an upcoming change to its privacy policy, one that it said will give it the right to use public content on Facebook and Instagram to train its AI, including content from comments, interactions with companies, status updates, photos and their associated captions. The company argued that it needed to do this to reflect "the diverse languages, geography and cultural references of the people in Europe."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group. The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to "steer" users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation.

The charges would be the first brought against a tech company under the Digital Markets Act, landmark legislation designed to force powerful "online gatekeepers" to open up their businesses to competition in the EU. The commission, the EU's executive arm, said in March it was investigating Apple, as well as Alphabet and Meta, under powers granted by the DMA. An announcement over the charges against Apple was expected in the coming weeks, said two people with knowledge of the case.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Privacy campaigner noyb has filed a GDPR complaint regarding Google's Privacy Sandbox, alleging that turning on a "Privacy Feature" in the Chrome browser resulted in unwanted tracking by the US megacorp. The Privacy Sandbox API was introduced in 2023 as part of Google's grand plan to eliminate third-party tracking cookies. Rather than relying on those cookies, website developers can call the API to display ads matched to a user's interests. In the announcement, Google's VP of the Privacy Sandbox initiative called it "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."

However, according to noyb, the problem is that although Privacy Sandbox is advertised as an improvement over third-party tracking, that tracking doesn't go away. Instead, it is done within the browser by Google itself. To comply with the rules, Google needs informed consent from users, which is where issues start. Noyb wrote today: "Google's internal browser tracking was introduced to users via a pop-up that said 'turn on ad privacy feature' after opening the Chrome browser. In the European Union, users are given the choice to either 'Turn it on' or to say 'No thanks,' so to refuse consent." Users would be forgiven for thinking that 'turn on ad privacy feature' would protect them from tracking. However, what it actually does is turn on first-party tracking.

Max Schrems, honorary chairman of noyb, claimed: "Google has simply lied to its users. People thought they were agreeing to a privacy feature, but were tricked into accepting Google's first-party ad tracking. "Consent has to be informed, transparent, and fair to be legal. Google has done the exact opposite." Noyb noted that Google had argued "choosing to click on 'Turn it on' would indeed be considered consent to tracking under Article 6(1)(a) of the GDPR."

Rare Earths Norway has discovered Europe's largest proven deposit of rare earth elements in the Fen Carbonatite Complex, positioning Norway as a key player in Europe's effort to reduce reliance on China's rare earths supply. CNBC reports: Rare Earths Norway said in a June 6 statement that its Fen Carbonatite Complex in the southeast of the country boasts 8.8 million metric tons of total rare earth oxides (TREOs) with a reasonable prospect for economic extraction. Within the TREOs, which are considered vital to the global shift away from fossil fuels, the company says there is an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of magnet-related rare earths which can be used in electric vehicles and wind turbines. The discovery eclipses a massive rare earths deposit found last year in neighboring Sweden.

One of the aims of the Critical Raw Materials Act is to extract at least 10% of the European Union's annual demand for rare earths by 2030 and Rare Earths Norway says it hopes to contribute to that goal. Rare Earths Norway said the rare earths deposit in Telemark, roughly 210 kilometers (130 miles) southwest of Oslo, is likely to underscore Norway's position as an integral part of Europe's rare earth and critical raw material value chain.

Following in the European Union's footsteps, Japan's parliament has enacted a law on Wednesday that will prohibit big tech from blocking third-party app stores. AppleInsider reports: The intention of the bill is that it will facilitate competition and reduce app prices. Japan's government reportedly believes that Apple and Google are a duopoly, and that they charge developers high fees that are then passed on to users. Big tech companies with App Stores will also prohibit companies from prioritizing their own services. Google is likely to be hit hardest by this. Violators will initially be fined up to 20% of the domestic revenue of the specific service that broke the law. The fee can increase to 30%, if the behavior continues.

The Japanese government's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) will choose which firms to apply it to. Companies that will be regulated will be required to submit compliance reports annually. While it hasn't been explicitly said that Apple and Google must comply, It seems certain that the announcement that they'll be held to the provisions is imminent. The Japan FTC isn't expected to add any Japanese firms to the list. The law likely won't take effect until the end of 2025.

The European Union on Wednesday said it would impose higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports, which it found benefit "heavily from unfair subsidies" and pose a "threat of economic injury" to EV producers in Europe. CNBC reports: On a preliminary basis, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, concluded that the battery-electric vehicles value chain in China "benefits from unfair subsidization" and pronounced that it is in the EU's interest to impose "provisional countervailing duties" on BEV imports from China. The additional tariffs are the result of an EU probe that began in October. The duties are currently provisional, but will be introduced from July 4 in the event of unfruitful talks with Chinese authorities to reach a resolution, the commission said in a statement. Definitive measures will be placed within four months of the imposition of provisional duties. [...]

The bloc is imposing a 38.1% tariff on battery-electric vehicle producers who did not cooperate with its investigation, and a lower 21% duty on carmakers in the Asian country who complied but have not been "sampled." The commission also disclosed a set of individual tariffs, which [Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU commissioner for trade, said] are linked to their cooperation with the probe and with the amount of information they supplied. Rates are lower for those companies who shared details, he added. Main Chinese BEV producer BYD was struck with a 17.4% tariff, with Geely slapped with a 20% duty. The EU has also imposed its 38.1% tariff on autos firm SAIC. All three producers were sampled in the EU probe, which is ongoing. Meanwhile, taxes on imported Chinese EVs in the United States are set to quadruple from 25% to 100%, starting this year.

Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. From a report: The new standard will replace SMS as the default communication protocol between Android and iOS devices. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU. Right now, when people on iOS and Android message each other, the service falls back to SMS -- photos and videos are sent at a lower quality, messages are shortened, and importantly, conversations are not end-to-end encrypted like they are in iMessage. Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats and chaos ensues.

It was "a catastrophic IT failure," writes Computer Weekly. It was nearly two years ago that Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, "declared itself in financial distress" — effectively declaring bankruptcy — after the costs on an Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million.

But Computer Weekly's investigation finds signs that the program board and its manager wanted to go live in April of 2022 "regardless of the state of the build, the level of testing undertaken and challenges faced by those working on the programme." One manager's notes "reveal concerns that the program manager and steering committee could not be swayed, which meant the system went live despite having known flaws." Computer Weekly has seen notes from a manager at BCC highlighting a number of discrepancies in the Birmingham City Council report to cabinet published in June 2023, 14 months after the Oracle system went into production. The report stated that some critical elements of the Oracle system were not functioning adequately, impacting day-to-day operations. The manager's comments reveal that this flaw in the implementation of the Oracle software was known before the system went live in April 2022... An insider at Birmingham City Council who has been closely involved in the project told Computer Weekly it went live "despite all the warnings telling them it wouldn't work"....

Since going live, the Oracle system effectively scrambled financial data, which meant the council had no clear picture of its overall finances. The insider said that by January 2023, Birmingham City Council could not produce an accurate account of its spending and budget for the next financial year: "There's no way that we could do our year-end accounts because the system didn't work."
A June 2023 report to cabinet "stated that due to issues with the council's bank reconciliation system, a significant number of transactions had to be manually allocated to accounts rather than automatically via the Oracle system," according to the article. But Computer Weekly has seen a 2019 presentation slide deck showing the council was already aware that Oracle's out-of-the-box bank reconciliation system "did not handle mixed debtor/non-debtor bank files. The workaround suggested was either a lot of manual intervention or a platform as a service (PaaS) offering from Evosys, the Oracle implementation partner contracted by BCC to build the new IT system."

The article ultimately concludes that "project management failures over a number of years contributed to the IT failure."

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that the past year saw record-breaking heat, with global temperatures surpassing all historical measurements. According to Copernicus, May marked the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, and exceeded a key Paris Agreement temperature target. The Week reports: The stretch is a "stark warning." In a separate study published Wednesday, a group of 57 scientists found that human activity was responsible for 92% of 2023's warming, which increased at a rate "unprecedented in the instrumental record."

While averting catastrophe is "still just about possible," the decisions made by global leaders "especially in the next 18 months" will determine whether the planet can be saved, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a special address. "We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell."

Without serious efforts to reverse global warming, "this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold," Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said. "The 11 months in a row that tied or broke the 1.5C barrier did not yet constitute a breaching of the Paris target, since the benchmark refers to a timescale of multiple decades," notes Axios. "Still, the fact that the climate is now exceeding the target with greater regularity, and is projected to continue doing so, is a sign of the matter's urgency."

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called Wednesday for a "windfall" tax on profits of fossil fuel companies to help pay for the fight against global warming, decrying them as the "godfathers of climate chaos." From a report: Guterres spoke from the American Museum of Natural History in New York in a bid to revive focus on climate change at a time when many national elections, and conflict in places like Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan this year have seized much of the international spotlight.

In a bare-knuckled speech timed for World Environment Day, Guterres drew on new data and projections to trumpet his case against Big Oil: The European Union's climate watching agency reported that last month was the hottest May ever, marking the 12th straight monthly record high. The EU's Copernicus climate change service, a global reference for tracking world temperatures, cited an average surface air temperature of 15.9 C (60.6 F) last month -- or 1.52 C higher than the estimated May average before industrial times. The burning of fossil fuels -- oil, gas and coal -- is the main contributor to global warming caused by human activity. Meanwhile, the U.N. weather agency predicted an 80% chance that average global temperatures will surpass the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) target set in the landmark Paris climate accord of 2015. Further reading: UN Chief Says World is On 'Highway To Climate Hell' as Planet Endures 12 Straight Months of Unprecedented Heat.

A donation by former Google chief Eric Schmidt to Europe's top particle physics lab heralds a new way to fund frontier research just as the West's technological race with China quickens. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, will use the previously unreported gift of $48 million [non-paywalled link] from the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation to develop AI algorithms to analyze raw data from the lab's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful energy particle accelerator. In 2012, it discovered the Higgs Boson, a particle that's key to understanding how the universe is built.

Now, CERN needs to reinvest to stay at the cutting edge of particle physics research. By the late 2030s, the LHC is expected to reach the end of its useful life and CERN needs $17 billion from European nations to fund the construction of a much bigger accelerator, known as the Future Circular Collider. But that funding has yet to be secured and, in the meantime, China has proposed its own collider. raditionally, CERN has relied on contributions from its 23 member states and observer partners like the US for funding pure research, while private investors focus on applied research, according to Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN's director of international relations. That makes the Schmidts' donation to pure research a private-sector first and may herald a different approach to funding the next collider, she says. "We're looking at all sorts of potential partners," Warakaulle said in an interview with Bloomberg last week. "How we could partner with the EU, private investments potentially."

Russia may charge domestic companies to use foreign software, the TASS news agency quoted Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev as saying on Tuesday, as Moscow seeks to cut dependency on foreign technology and bolster its own. From a report: President Vladimir Putin has made achieving technological independence a key goal, as Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine seek to hamstring Moscow's ability to acquire technology and equipment from abroad that could help it on the battlefield. As part of that push, Putin signed a decree in early May which stated that at least 80% of Russian companies in key economic sectors should transition to using Russian-made software by 2030. Many Russian companies still use foreign software in their daily operations, although an EU sanctions package passed last December prohibits companies from supplying enterprise and design-related software to Russia. Shadaev said that introducing a levy on Russian firms would "equalise" foreign and Russian software.