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France Suggests Expanding Anti-Islamic State Coalition To Counter Hamas

Hamas

(CTN NEWS) – French President Macron Proposes Expanding Anti-Islamic State Coalition to Confront Hamas

During his visit to Israel, President Emmanuel Macron of France has suggested the expansion of the international coalition against the Islamic State to combat the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Macron, speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, emphasized the shared battle against terrorism as a common enemy for both France and Israel.

He mentioned France’s participation in the international coalition against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria and proposed that the coalition’s scope be broadened to address Hamas as well.

This proposal could potentially grant Western powers greater influence in shaping the approach to dealing with Hamas, as some have concerns about leaving Israel solely responsible for confronting the group.

The fear is that an unconstrained campaign against Hamas could escalate into a regional conflict with consequences felt in European capitals.

Macron, while meeting with families of French victims at Tel Aviv airport, emphasized the priority of freeing the hostages without distinction.

This implies a preference among Western leaders for Israel to avoid large-scale ground operations.

Macron also stressed the need for the fight against Hamas to be carried out with firmness but within the bounds of established rules.

Prime Minister Netanyahu did not directly comment on Macron’s proposal but described the battle as a confrontation between the “axis of evil” and the “free world.”

Arab foreign ministries expressed surprise at Macron’s proposal, stating that they had not been consulted.

Macron highlighted that Hamas had killed around 1,400 victims in its actions on October 7, attributing the violence to their desire for peace.

Among the casualties were 30 French citizens, and it is believed that nine French citizens are currently held hostage by Hamas.

Emmanuel Macron’s proposal suggests widening the international coalition initially formed to combat the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group to also address the Palestinian militant organization, Hamas.

This proposal has several significant implications and considerations.

1. Gaza’s Future:

If this proposal were to move forward, it would likely necessitate discussions about the future of Gaza following any potential defeat of Hamas. One possible scenario is the transfer of administrative responsibilities in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank. This could be a step toward reunifying Palestinian territories, which have been politically divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

2. Middle East Peace Process:

Macron’s proposal also emphasizes the need for a “decisive relaunch” of the Middle East peace process. This suggests that efforts to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not only focus on military or security aspects but also incorporate political and diplomatic dimensions. This could involve negotiations to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel, taking into account the legitimate rights of Palestinians to live in peace and security.

3. Terrorism and Political Solutions:

Macron underscores the importance of recognizing the legitimate rights of Palestinians while maintaining security measures against terrorist groups. This reflects the idea that addressing the underlying political issues and aspirations of Palestinians can contribute to long-term stability in the region, alongside efforts to combat terrorism.

4. Potential Impact on Israel:

Macron’s proposal could have implications for Israel’s approach to Hamas. It suggests a desire for a more coordinated and international effort to address Hamas, which may impact Israel’s policies toward the group. It also raises the possibility that Israel might be encouraged to avoid large-scale ground operations in Gaza.

5. International Consultation:

It’s worth noting that some Arab foreign ministries expressed surprise at Macron’s proposal, indicating that they may not have been fully consulted or involved in the discussions. This highlights the importance of international coordination when addressing complex issues in the Middle East.

In summary, Macron’s proposal seeks to expand the international coalition’s objectives to include Hamas, with an emphasis on addressing the broader political aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It aims to ensure that stability in the region is achieved through a combination of security measures and political solutions.

However, the actual implementation and impact of this proposal would depend on the willingness of relevant parties to engage in discussions and negotiations.

The US-led coalition against ISIS was established in September 2014.

A similar coalition was formed by NATO to combat the Taliban after the September 11 attacks.

The coalition’s focus in Iraq and Syria has evolved from primarily military operations to providing support to local partners by offering reconnaissance and intelligence.

In Syria, the US mainly partnered with the Syrian Kurds to defeat ISIS, a decision that raised concerns with Turkey, a fellow NATO member.

Macron’s office stated that France is open to discussing with Israel and its partners how to address the Hamas issue.

The international coalition against ISIS extends beyond ground operations and includes activities like training Iraqi forces, sharing information among partners, and combatting terrorism financing.

Western leaders have engaged in discussions without Netanyahu, including a recent phone call initiated by US President Joe Biden with European members of the G7, such as France, the UK, Germany, and Italy.

Macron’s visit followed similar visits by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, President Biden, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

These visits have indicated the West’s preference for prioritizing the hostage situation over a ground offensive into Gaza.

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna participated in the Egypt peace summit over the weekend.

Macron will meet with other regional leaders in Jordan’s capital, Amman, on Tuesday.

He also plans to meet with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, in Ramallah on the West Bank.

French officials have rejected the notion that Macron’s initial ban on Palestinian protests, later reversed by the courts, signified bias against Palestine.

Unlike the United States, France did not veto a UN Security Council draft resolution, led by Brazil, that condemned Hamas while calling for a humanitarian pause.

The United Kingdom abstained from the vote.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

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Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

google

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

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Washington — Trump Media,  The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.

The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.

The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.

The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.

trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.

Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

trump

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.

The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.

musk trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.

He also welcomed back a vast list of previously banned users, including Trump, and endorsed him for the 2024 presidential election.

SOURCE | AP

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

Supreme Court

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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