The European Union is suing Google. The E.U. says the Internet search company is violating anti-trust laws, unfairly limiting competition in the market place. How?

 

Well, if you search Google for a running watch, for example, you'll see pictures, prices, and links for watches whose companies paid Google to advertise on the site. Competitor's watches and the best or most relevant running watches may not be top search results.

 

Google says it respectfully but strongly disagrees with the complaint, and says that when Europeans are shopping online they are far more likely to use other sites than Google anyway.

 

Today is a day of remembrance at Virginia Tech. It's the eighth anniversary of a shooting when a student killed dozens of other students and faculty before killing himself. Norris Hall, where most of the victims were, was reopened two years later and now houses the Virginia Tech Center for Peace Studies and Violence Provention.

 

The al-Shabaab terrorist group attacked a Somalian government building this week. A Kenyan news aper reports that 15 people were killed, at least six of the Islamist militants who want to replace Somalia's government also died in the attack. It happened less than two weeks after al-Shabaab targeted Christian students at a Kenyan university. The terror group al-Shabaab is becoming deadlier and more ambitions. Al-Shabaab means "the youth" in Arabic, and it's a group that's risen out of the chaos of the failed state of Somalia. The irony is, as it's gained more international prominence, it's actually lost ground at home due to in-fighting in the group, successful operations by government sources, but also drone strikes by the U.S. At the same time, though, it's become more aggressive abroad, particularly in September 2013 when it carried out the West Gate Mall attack which killed more than 60 people. 

 

More recently, in April, the attack at Garissa University in Kenya that killed more than 150. Like ISIS, al-Shabaab has a powerful presence on the web, particularly in terms of recruiting. 

 

An added threat are al-Shabaab's deep ties to the U.S. A number of Somali Americans from cities such as Minneapolis that have large Somali American communities have gone to Somalia to join the ranks of al-Shabaab. Some of them have become suicide bombers. A man from Alabama, Omar Hammami, became the rapping jihadi, powerful in their recruiting videos, though he was later killed.

 

U.S. counterterror officials are seeing more communication as well as the sharing of know how and technology between al-Shabaab and other al-Qaeda-tied groups, such as AQAP in Yemen. And they say a credible next step would be cooperation on joint terror operations abroad.