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FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Paris Olympics Probe

French financial investigators searched the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics last week, reportedly seeking documents in two separate preliminary investigations involving corruption allegations. Investigators with the National Financial Prosecutor’s office were said to be looking into possible conflicts of interest and embezzlement at the organisation and the local group responsible for Olympic infrastructure, Solideo. The unannounced arrival comes as French organisers look to hold themselves to a higher standard of transparency in light of past Olympic scandals, including by signing the first-ever host city contract with language banning corruption.

The city is set to host the Summer Games next July 26 to Aug. 11 at an estimated cost of nearly $10B. Organisers claim roughly 70% of the facilities to be used during the Games will be permanently repurposed afterward as part of efforts to make the event more sustainable.

BBC

Gannett Sues Google

Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the US, filed a federal lawsuit against Google and its parent company, Alphabet, last week. Gannett claims the tech giant is violating antitrust laws by holding a monopoly over the digital advertising business and controlling how publishers buy and sell ads online, leading to less revenue for publishers and Google’s ad rivals.

Google has led the US digital advertising market for years. In 2022, Google earned $224B from its digital advertising business, making up nearly 80% of its overall revenue. Google also faces antitrust challenges from the US Justice Department and the European Commission, which filed a similar case last week.

Associated Press

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe kisses Sun, finds source of “fast” solar wind

Parker Solar Probe has ventured near enough to the Sun to reveal the source of fast solar wind. Such details about solar wind structure are lost when the wind exits the Sun’s corona as a gust of charged particles. Parker has detected streams of high-energy particles that correlate to pockets on the Sun’s surface known as coronal holes. These are areas where a magnetic field emanates outward into the space around the Sun without looping back into its surface. These holes tend to appear near the Sun’s poles, so the fast solar wind they generate doesn’t hit Earth. But, when the Sun gets active every 11 years due to the flipping of its magnetic field, these coronal holes appear all over its surface, with some of the fast solar wind they produce reaching Earth.

We’re just about to enter into exactly this kind of active period, known as a solar maximum, with reports in recent months suggesting the Sun is more active than it has been in decades. This spells danger for the technology including GPS, telecommunications and other satellitebased tech which would be affected by severe solar winds.

Cosmos

Rampant groundwater pumping has changed the tilt of Earth’s axis

Human depletion of underground reservoirs has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than 4 centimetres per year. The Earth has lost enough groundwater to measurably tilt the planet’s axis of rotation.

The net water lost from underground reservoirs between 1993 and 2010 is estimated to be more than 2 trillion tonnes. That has caused the geographic North Pole to shift at a speed of 4.36 centimetres per year, researchers have calculated.

The tilt of the axis on which any celestial object spins tends to be stable. But small changes can occur when large masses shift location inside a planet and on its surface. “Every mass moving around on the surface of the Earth can change the rotation axis,” says Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University.

Nature