Island nations say recycling insufficient to solve problem when 400 million tonnes of plastic waste is produced yearly.

US president-elect says measures will remain until countries stamp out irregular border crossings and drug trafficking.

sydney — Australia's Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island will be connected by subsea cable to the northern garrison city of Darwin, a project backed by Alphabet's Google that Australia says will boost its digital resilience. Christmas Island is 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) west of the Australian mainland, with a small population of 1,250, but strategically located in the Indian Ocean, 350 kilometers (215 miles) from Jakarta. The cable announcement comes as the Australian and U.S. militaries upgrade airfields in Australia's north, where a rotating force of U.S. Marines will be joined by Japanese troops next year. Google's vice president of global network infrastructure, Brian Quigley, said in a statement the Bosun cable will link Darwin to Christmas Island, while another subsea cable will connect Melbourne on Australia's east coast to the west coast city of Perth, then on to Christmas Island and Singapore. Australia is seeking to reduce its exposure to digital disruption by building more subsea cable pathways to Asia to its west, and through the South Pacific to the United States. "These new cable systems will not only expand and strengthen the resilience of Australia's own digital connectivity through new and diversified routes but will also complement the Government's active work with industry and government partners to support secure, resilient and reliable connectivity across the Pacific," Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement. The other partners in the cable project include Australian data center company NextDC, Macquarie-backed telecommunications group Vocus, and SUBCO. SUBCO previously built an Indian Ocean cable from Perth to Oman, with spurs to the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia, and Cocos Islands, where Australia is upgrading a runway for defense surveillance aircraft. Although 900 kilometers (560 miles) apart, Christmas Island is seen as an Indian Ocean neighbor of Cocos Islands, which the Australian Defense Force has said is key to its maritime surveillance operations in a region where China is increasing submarine activity. The new cables will also link to a Pacific Islands network being built by Google and jointly funded by the United States, connecting the U.S. and Australia through hubs in Fiji and French Polynesia. Vocus said in a statement the two networks will form the world's largest submarine cable system spanning 42,500 kilometers (26,408 miles) of fiber optic cable running between the U.S. and Asia via Australia.

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — The U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge that Google illegally dominated online advertising technology in seeking a second antitrust win against the company.  The closing arguments in Alexandria cap a 15-day trial held in September in which prosecutors sought to show Google monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks and tried to dominate the market for ad exchanges, which sit between buyers and sellers.  “Google rigged the rules of the road,” said DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum, who asked the judge to hold Google accountable for anti-competitive conduct and added that Google is "once, twice, three times a monopolist."  Another DOJ lawyer, Julia Tarver Wood, compared the case to the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities and said U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema had to decide whether to adopt the DOJ or Google version of the state of the ad market.  Google lawyer Karen Dunn said the DOJ had not met its legal burden and was asking Brinkema to overrule key precedents. "The law simply does not support what the plaintiffs are arguing in this case," Dunn said.  She argued the DOJ was ignoring Google's legitimate business decisions and the robust quality of the online advertising market. The company argues the government had cherry-picked a narrow slice of the online market and did not account for aggressive competition.  Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, were up 1.4% in afternoon trading.  Publishers testified at the trial that they could not switch away from Google, even when it rolled out features they disliked, since there was no other way to access the huge advertising demand within Google's ad network.  In 2017, News Corp estimated losing at least $9 million in ad revenue that year if it had switched away, one witness said.  If Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would consider prosecutors' request to make Google at least sell off Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company's publisher ad server and its ad exchange.  Google offered to sell the ad exchange this year to end a European Union antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.  Analysts view the ad tech case as a smaller financial risk than the case in which a judge ruled Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online search, and in which prosecutors have argued the company must be forced to sell its Chrome browser.

Impact of US indictment of group's chairman is spreading as multiple projects say they are reviewing deals with Adani.

Supporters of the former prime minister are marching to the capital, Islamabad, demanding his release from jail.

After previous hopes for Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire were dashed, US officials warn that negotiations are not complete.

A DHL cargo plane crashed near Lithuania’s Vilnius Airport, killing one crew member.

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Joe Biden performed his final presidential pardons of Thanksgiving holiday turkeys.

US special counsel cites Donald Trump's return to White House, longstanding policy not to prosecute sitting presidents.

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Education Minister Paul Givan is expected to spend more than £700,000 on the move.

Supporters of ex-Pakistani Prime Minister Iman Khan are descending on Islamabad to demand his release from prison.

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Gaza's Government Media Office says about 10,000 tents either washed away or were damaged due to the storm.

At least five people have been killed in clashes between police and protesters over the survey of a mosque in India.

Israel hits Hezbollah strongholds in and outside Beirut a day after Lebanese group claims 50 attacks on Israeli targets.

Experts say Republicans tapped into angst over out-of-touch politicians to profit from concerns about Biden’s age.