News
Solomon Islands Election 2024: Geopolitical Tensions and Local Priorities Take Center Stage
(CTN News) – In the Solomon Islands, the night before an election is called Devil’s Night.
To obtain votes at the last minute, political candidates offer bribes that range from cash to sacks of food and Chinese-made solar panels.
Vote-buying is a widespread strategy in Pacific nation elections, and it is difficult to eradicate, even with tougher electoral regulations.
However, this is not why some of the world’s most powerful nations are paying close attention to Wednesday’s vote.
This tiny island nation is critical in the power struggle for regional dominance between China, the United States, and its partner, Australia.
Back on the ground, voters will be primarily concerned with their immediate needs.
More than 80% of the 700,000 people reside outside Honiara, with many without access to essential facilities such as power, medical care, schools, and transportation.
Election day is celebratory, with street parties in Honiara and voters blowing conch shells at rallies. Locals, however, want to see improvements.
“I’m really excited [to vote] and eager to see the changes as well,” one voter, Judy, told the BBC.

Why China is on the ballot
While the government’s global relations efforts are commendable, Solomon Islanders want the next elected officials to “focus on the local level as well,” according to Marklyn Keremama (44).
“Any government that wins power next must accomplish what the people of the Solomon Islands desire… “We want leaders who care about our needs,” he stated.
Wednesday’s poll, which was postponed from last year, is the first time citizens can vote since the Solomon Islands shifted from the West to Beijing.
As a result, the vote might be interpreted as “a referendum” on current leader Manasseh Sogavare’s embrace of China, according to scholar Edward Cavanough, who traveled across the country for his book Divided Isles, which documents the country’s shift toward Beijing.
“The PM has been very adept at leaning into the [geopolitical competition] and playing each of these major and regional powers off each other to gain incredible concessions,” he said.
The Solomon Islands, located around 1,600 kilometers (994 miles) north of Australia, are one of the region’s poorest countries due to decades of tribal conflict.
Until 2017, Australia had commanded a peacekeeping mission here.
Then, two years after the mission finished, Prime Minister Sogavare abandoned his country’s decades-long diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of Beijing. In 2022, he signed a security agreement with China, the specifics of which are yet unknown.
That sounded a big warning for Australia and its Pacific neighbors. Mr Sogavare denied rumors that the accord would allow China to establish a naval base in the US-dominated Pacific region.
However, if he wins again, the PM has promised to strengthen connections. He sees Beijing as the source of his country’s future wealth while expressing his hatred for longtime allies Australia and the United States.
Since the agreement, China has provided help and investment to the country, constructing new stadiums, roads, and infrastructure. Last year, Mr Sogavare told the UN that China was the Solomons’ primary infrastructure partner.
However, his political opponents have criticized his closeness to China, questioning whether it is the best direction for the country. Some have stated that they will renegotiate the China security agreement if they acquire power, while others prefer to engage with traditional Western friends such as Australia.

How does the election work?
People from about 900 islands will go to polling booths between 07:00 local time (23:00 GMT) and 16:00 to vote for national and regional representatives.
There are 50 parliamentary seats to be filled. After that, negotiations establish a ruling coalition, with MPs voting among themselves to select a prime minister.
Party lines have traditionally been non-fixed, and over 100 candidates are standing as independents. Only 20 candidates are women, a long-standing concern.
According to Pacific researcher Meg Keen of the Australian Lowy Institute foreign policy think tank, two opposing coalitions (DCGA and CARE) are fielding enough candidates to allow either to win.
What are the concerns about the vote?
Analysts think that, aside from geopolitics, this election is extremely important for strengthening democracy in a country with a history of riots and coups.
The memory of prior riots in Honiara lingers, notably one in 2021 when demonstrators attempted to burn down the prime minister’s mansion as fury over alleged political corruption, ongoing poverty, and the country’s reliance on China boiled over.
It is also the country’s second election after the Australia-led Regional Assistance Mission left.
Election monitors are in the country to ensure the vote is fair and free, following long-standing worries about activities such as Devil’s Night. According to an election monitor analysis by Australian academics, candidates distributed cash and items freely throughout the 2019 election.
In the Solomon Islands, elections are contested mostly around local problems and pledges. Candidates with large finances and wealthy backers are more likely to gain favor and even buy votes,” says Dr Keen.
According to Dr. Keen’s election brief, post-vote negotiations sometimes involve corruption, including the use of money, ministerial pledges, and hotel lock-ups to obtain support for ruling coalitions.
Some lawmakers have accused Beijing of electoral influence, citing the Chinese embassy’s gift of fishing nets, knives, water tanks, and solar lights to a key province, Malaita, only days before the vote.
Previous research by Australian scholars concluded that China, like Taiwan before it, invested money in “constituency development funds” for MPs, simply slush monies to be used.
Dr Keen said these pots have virtually solely gone to MPs who supported PM Sogavare.
News
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue
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’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.

Pixa Bay
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 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.
SOURCE | CNN
News
2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
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.
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 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.
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.
SOURCE | AP
News
The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.
(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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