Google Loses Antitrust Case, Harris to Announce VP Pick

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Top news of the day

Investors will be watching the stock market nervously today after yesterday’s sharp sell-off. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,000 points, while the S&P 500 fell 3%. The Japanese stock market also fell sharply but rebounded overnight. The market’s unpredictability raised questions about the durability of the U.S. economy, which has been a pillar of global growth since the pandemic.

• 🎧 NPR’s Scott Horsley says: First up that most analysts believe the stock market decline is an overreaction. The economy isn’t growing as fast as it used to. “We’re not adding jobs at the rate we were a year or two ago. But we’re not on the brink of a recession,” he says. The Federal Reserve is watching the market closely to make sure the financial system is functioning properly. They didn’t cut interest rates last week, and now some people see that as a missed opportunity, Horsley adds.

Vice President Harris is expected to announce her candidacy for vice president today. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona has the highest approval rating, according to a new NPR poll. Still, half of respondents say they are unsure or have no opinion of him. Harris is scheduled to hold an event with her running mate in Philadelphia tonight. The duo will continue their seven-state tour, mostly closely watched by swing states.

A federal judge has ruled that Google acted illegally to secure its dominance in the search engine market. It is a historic victory for the Justice Department in the first antitrust case against a major company to go to trial in decades.

• 🎧 NPR’s Dara Kerr says Judge Amit Mehta “openly called Google a monopoly” in his nearly 300-page ruling. Google quickly said it would appeal the ruling and insisted it was the best search engine. The judge acknowledged that, but said Google had a significant advantage over rivals thanks to exclusivity deals with device makers like Apple and Samsung. In one year alone, Google paid more than $26 million to become the default search engine on its phones and computers. A separate trial will determine the company’s future remedies.

In her new book, Nancy Pelosi writes about governing as America’s first female House speaker. Pelosi has been a key figure in political history for decades. She was at the U.S. Capitol on the morning of September 11 and in the speaker’s chair during the January 6 insurrection. Pelosi recently spoke about her career and what she was doing in the days leading up to President Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race in a wide-ranging interview with Taking everything into account host Mary Louise Kelly. Read the highlights here, listen to the segment on Morning Edition, and tune in to Taking everything into account today and tomorrow for more.

Deep Dive

Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif fights in the ring more often than her opponents. She and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan face accusations that they are not women. Both identify as women and have long competed in boxing as athletes. Questions arose when the International Boxing Association said both athletes had been disqualified from the 2023 IBA World Championships after failing qualifying tests, the latest controversy in a long history of female athletes being questioned because of their gender.

• 🥊 The International Olympic Committee announced this week that all boxing athletes “comply with the rules regarding eligibility and participation in competitions.” The gender and age of an athlete are determined by their passport.
• 🥊 The tests are not completely reliable because they exist According to Penn State professor Jaime Schultz, there are medical reasons why women who normally have XX chromosomes may have an XY chromosome.
• 🥊 In 1928, women who competed in track and field events at the Olympic Games for the first time were suspected of being too muscular. Twenty years later, the organization now known as World Athletics introduced a rule requiring any woman who wanted to compete to provide a medical certificate.
• 🥊 In the 1960s, sports organizations introduced medical examinations. Some of them required women to strip off their clothes and present their bodies to a medical commission.
• 🥊 Sports organizations forced women to wear certificates of femininity after the 1960s. The IOC adopted the Barr body test, which examined an athlete’s chromosomes, but this method was also questioned.

Learn more about the fight to qualify for women’s sports ON “Tested” – New Series from NPR EmbeddedThe podcast tells the story of elite female runners who were told they could no longer race in the women’s category unless they changed their biology.

Picture show

The ocean’s largest predatory fish, the great white shark, has returned to Cape Cod in remarkable style, boosting tourism. Kris Roszack, owner of Down Cape Charters near Cape Cod Bend, says white sharks have become more predictable there than the weather. White shark numbers in the area were at an all-time low a few decades ago as fishermen decimated their main food source, seals. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 helped rebuild seal and shark populations.

3 things to know before you go

1. Bon Iver Set to Perform at Vice President Harris Rally tomorrow in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as part of their stateside tour.
2. JD Vance’s wife Usha tried to defend her husband’s earlier comment yesterday in an interview with Fox News mocking childless women, calling them “childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their lives.”
3. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted to dumping the body of a bear cub in Manhattan’s Central Park, which finally solves a decade-old mystery.

This newsletter is edited by Suzanne Nuyen.

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