15/09/2025

MONDAY | SEPT 15, 2025

/thesuntelegram FOLLOW / Malaysian Paper

ON TELEGRAM m RAM

8

Rolling Stone owner sues Google

o Publisher claims AI Overviews siphon traffic

Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal dies, aged 89 SAO PAULO: Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal ( pic ), who played, and even boxed, with Miles Davis and was known as “The Sorcerer” for coaxing tunes from everything from a live piglet to water-filled kettles, died on Saturday, aged 89. According to a Coffey was referring to AI licensing deals firms such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI have been signing with News Corp, Financial Times and The Atlantic . Google, whose Gemini chatbot competes with ChatGPT, has been slower to sign such deals. – Reuters Critics lauded his creativity as a composer and his virtuoso playing of the keyboards, guitar and saxophones. Born on June 22, 1936, in Alagoas state in Brazil’s poor northeast, he was spared work in the fields as an albino child and instead spent hours learning how to play his father’s accordion and listening to birdsong. His family moved to the port city of Recife when Pascoal was 14, where he developed as a musician before setting off for Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. He recorded with musicians who became some of Brazil’s greatest performers, including singer Elis Regina. Percussionist Airto Moreira took Pascoal on tour to the United States, where he met Davis. Before inviting him to play on his Live Evil album in 1970, Davis asked Pascoal to join him in his personal boxing ring and, in the Brazilian’s telling of the encounter, got hit hard in the face. “That’s when he started calling me the Mad Albino,” Pascoal said in an interview. On his own 1977 album Slaves Mass , Pascoal squeezed a piglet to make it squeal for the opening of a track. Other bizarre instruments he experimented with included children’s toys and cow horns. Pascoal objected to the classification of his work as “jazz”, and his compositions owe as much to Brazilian musical genres such as the fast-flowing chorinho and samba. “When people hear my music, they find it very hard to pinpoint and to pigeonhole it,” he told Jazzwise magazine in 2022. “When they think I am doing one thing, I am already doing something else. It’s very liquid.” Pascoal wrote, recorded and led groups of musicians well into his 80s. – Reuters The move disappointed some publishers and industry bodies, including the News/Media Alliance, which has said the decision left publishers without the ability to opt out of AI overviews. “All of the elements being negotiated with every other AI company doesn’t apply to Google because they have the market power to not engage in those healthy practices,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 US-based publishers. “When you have the scale and market power that Google has, you are not obligated to abide by the same norms. That is the problem.” message shared on his social media pages, Pascoal “passed away surrounded by family and fellow musicians”. Pascoal became an instantly recognisable figure for jazz fans with his mane of white hair and thick beard.

share it expects to rise, and added that its affiliate revenue has fallen by more than a third from its peak by the end of last year as search traffic declined. Online education company Chegg also sued Google in February, alleging that the search giant’s AI-generated overviews were eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers’ ability to compete. Google said on Saturday that AI Overviews offer a better experience to users and send traffic to a wider variety of websites. “With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. We will defend against these meritless claims,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said. A judge handed the company a rare antitrust win earlier this month by ruling that it will not have to sell its Chrome browser as part of efforts to open up competition in the search market.

Penske, media conglomerate led by Jay Penske and whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google only includes publishers’ websites in its search results if it can also use their articles in AI summaries. Without the leverage, Google would have to pay publishers for the right to republish their work or use it to train its AI systems, the company said in the lawsuit. It added Google was able to impose such terms due to its search dominance, pointing to a federal court finding last year that the tech giant held a near 90% share of the US search market. “We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity – all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions,” Penske said. It alleged that about 20% of Google searches that link to its sites now show AI Overviews, a a family-owned

WASHINGTON: The owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google on Friday, alleging the technology giant’s AI summaries use its journalism content without consent and reduce traffic to its websites. The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington DC marks the first time a major US publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results. News organisations have for months said the new features, including Google’s “AI Overviews”, siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue.

KIDDIE POWER ... Children taking part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race on Saturday as motoring Revival, a three day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, near Chichester in Britain. – REUTERSPIC enthusiasts attend the Goodwood

Australia to spend A$12b on submarine shipyard SYDNEY: Australia will spend an initial A$12 billion (RM33.5 billion) to upgrade shipyard facilities for a future fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, the government said yesterday. The “very significant” investment is to be spent over a decade to transform a shipbuilding and maintenance precinct in Perth, Defence Minister Richard Marles said. strike capabilities in the face of China’s expanding military strength across the Pacific. Australia, which has no infrastructure to service nuclear-powered submarines, aims to acquire at least three US Virginia-class submarines within 15 years and eventually to make its own subs. Total costs to develop the Henderson Defence Precinct could eventually reach an estimated A$25 billion, the minister said. The shipyard expansion is the latest in a string of high-profile defence upgrades.

Australia announced in August it would equip its navy with 11 Mogami-class frigates built by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Australia will pay A$10 billion over the next 10 years to acquire the stealth frigates as it aims to expand its fleet of major warships from 11 to 26 over the next decade. The first three Mogami-class frigates will be built overseas, but Australia hopes to produce the rest in Western Australia. – AFP

The investment will equip Henderson with high-security dry docks to maintain nuclear powered submarines, as well as creating facilities to build landing craft and eventually Japanese Mogami-class frigates, Marles said. The United States is also expected to use shipyard maintenance of its own nuclear powered submarines, he said.

The government is ploughing money into Perth’s Henderson Defence Precinct after signing the 2021 AUKUS pact with Britain and the United States to arm its navy with nuclear-powered submarines. The investment is part of a major military restructure to improve Australia’s long-range

Rescuers find body in Madrid bar explosion MADRID: Spanish firefighters found a dead man yesterday as they combed through the wreckage of a Madrid bar destroyed by an explosion that left 25 people injured, two seriously. too early to establish a cause. Firefighters aided by sniffer dogs painstakingly cleared the rubble by hand on the ground floor amid the collapsed walls and framework.

brick,” said fire service spokesman Javier Ramos. Madrid emergency services confirmed on X that a man’s body was found early yesterday, with a civil protection psychologist supporting the relatives. They also said 25 people had been treated, with two in a “serious” condition taken to hospital. – AFP

“The work has been pretty complicated, with lots of personnel, because it has been necessary to go more or less stone by stone and brick by

A gas leak is suspected of having triggered Saturday’s blast in the capital’s Vallecas neighbourhood, but city officials have said it is