Lorenzo Soria, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and former editor of the Italian news weekly L'Espresso, died Friday, the association said. He was 68.
Soria died peacefully at his Los Angeles home, the association said in a statement, lauding his "generosity, passion" and sense of humor.
"He was deeply committed to the movie industry's power to heal the world and shine a spotlight on injustice," said the group that awards the annual Golden Globes for excellence in TV and movies.
The Argentinian-born Soria grew up and worked in Italy for L'Espresso before becoming a Los Angeles resident in 1982. Continuing to write for the weekly and for the daily La Stampa, he covered a wide variety of topics including politics and technology.
But his real love was interviewing "Hollywood talent and reporting about trends and changes in the film and television industry," the organization said.
A member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association since 1989, he was in the administration for more than 25 years. After serving twice before as president, his current tenure began in 2019.
A memorial is planned but details weren't immediately available, said the group, which cited an unidentified Soria family member in its announcement of his death.
Google is blasted by UK watchdog for what it calls anti-competitive behavior through digital ads
Google was slammed Friday by U.K. regulators who say it's taking advantage of its dominance in digital advertising to thwart competition in Britain, ratcheting up pressure that the tech giant is facing on both sides of the Atlantic over its "ad tech" business practices.
Britain's Competition and Markets Authority said that the U.S. company gives preference to its own services to the detriment of online publishers and advertisers in Britain's 1.8 billion pound ($2.4 billion) digital ad market. The watchdog leveled its accusations after an investigation, and the findings could potentially lead to a fine worth billions of dollars or an order to change its behavior.
Google is a major player throughout the digital ad ecosystem, providing servers for publishers to manage ad space on their websites and apps, tools for advertisers and media agencies to buy display ads, and an exchange where both sides come together to buy and sell ads in real time at auctions.
"We've provisionally found that Google is using its market power to hinder competition when it comes to the ads people see on websites," the watchdog's interim executive director of enforcement, Juliette Enser, said in a press release.
The watchdog's charges, known as a statement of objections, arrive two years after it opened its investigation. Google's digital ad business is also the focus of a European Union antitrust investigation and a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that's set to go to trial this month.
The CMA said that Google's "anti-competitive" conduct is ongoing, but the company disputed the allegations Friday.
"Google remains committed to creating value for our publisher and advertiser partners in this highly competitive sector," the company said in a prepared... Read More