Daily News Roundup

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29

US President Donald Trump has accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without providing evidence or giving details of what action he might take.

Mr Trump’s attack against the tech giant follows a string of grievances against internet companies, including Twitter and Facebook, which he has accused of silencing conservative voices reports the ABC.

He has also previously hit out at Amazon, which he says hurts small businesses and benefits from a favourable deal with the US Postal Service.

Mr Trump said in several tweets on Tuesday that Google search results for “Trump News” were “rigged” against him.

“I think Google is really taking advantage of our people,” Mr Trump said in the Oval Office.

“Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory, and they have to be careful. It’s not fair to large portions of the population.”

Google denied any political bias, saying in a statement that its search engine is “not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology”.

Facebook declined to comment. Twitter did not comment when asked for a response. In congressional testimony, both companies have denied engaging in partisan censorship.

Mr Trump frequently berates news outlets for what he perceives as unfair coverage.

Neither he nor the White House detailed how they would probe Google or what legal justification they would use.

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The sky above Western Australia’s south-west, including Perth, was lit up overnight by what is believed to have been a meteor.

The Department of Fire and Emergency Services was inundated with calls at 7:40pm from people who said they had seen a fireball streak across the sky.

More than one concerned caller suggested it could be a UFO while others were more concerned it could start a fire.

The Perth Observatory was sent dozens of videos taken from CCTV cameras and dashcams which captured the phenomenon.

Robyn Garratt, from the town of York, east of Perth, was among those who witnessed the incident.

“We saw a really bright light and felt the boom, about two or three minutes afterwards,” she told ABC Mid West.

“It shook the house, rattled the windows, it was pretty scary.”

In 2016 a 1.15-kilogram meteorite landed near Morawa in WA and was recovered by Curtin University.

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Russia will next month hold its biggest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu says, in a massive military exercise that will also involve the Chinese and Mongolian armies.

The exercise, called Vostok-2018 (East-2018), will take place in central and eastern Russian military districts and involve almost 300,000 troops, more than 1,000 military aircraft, two of Russia’s naval fleets, and all of its airborne units, Mr Shoigu said in a statement reported by the ABC.

The manoeuvres will take place at a time of heightened tension between the West and Russia, which is concerned about what it says is an unjustified build-up of the NATO military alliance on its western flank.

NATO says it has beefed up its forces in eastern Europe to deter potential Russian military action after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and backed a pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine.

The war games, which will take place from September 11-15, are likely to worry Japan, which has already complained about a Russian military build-up in the Far East, something Moscow has linked to Tokyo’s roll-out of the Aegis US missile system.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is due to attend a forum in the Russian city of Vladivostok during the same period, and a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said on Tuesday that Tokyo always paid attention to shifts in Russian-Chinese military cooperation.

This daily news roundup is curated with stories from ABC News.