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Palestinian-American Boy, 6 Stabbed to Death, as Hate Crimes Escalate

The boy, 6, was stabbed 26 times with a large military-style knife, according to an autopsy, while his mother is in hospital.

Palestinian-American Boy, 6 Stabbed to Death

U.S. police have arrested a 71-year-old man and charged him with murder and a hate crime after he allegedly stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy to death and critically injured his 32-year-old mother in retaliation for the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The Will County Sheriff’s Office, located outside of Chicago, issued a statement on Sunday saying that their investigation had led them to the conclusion that both victims in the violent attack were targeted by the suspect because of their religion and the ongoing struggle between Hamas and the Israelis in the Middle East.

On Saturday morning, police located both bodies in a residence about 65 kilometres (40 miles) southwest of Chicago.

Autopsy results released on Sunday indicated that the youngster, who was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital, had been stabbed 26 times with a big military-style knife.

More than a dozen stab wounds covered the mother’s body. She was still in the hospital on Sunday, but doctors thought she would make it.

Even as it prepares a ground invasion, Israel is bombing a Palestinian enclave it has been surrounding for months.

Unnamed police say they found the suspect “sitting upright outside on the ground near the driveway of the residence” on Saturday with a wound on his forehead.

On Sunday, he remained in police detention pending his upcoming court date. First degree murder, attempted first degree murder, two counts of hate crimes, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon are all charges against him, according to the police.

Chicago CAIR director Ahmed Rehab said, “Our hearts are heavy, and our prayers are with the darling boy and his mother.”

Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian-American kid who had just turned six, and his mother Hanaan Shahin were named as the victims by the organisation.

CAIR said in a statement, “While we wait for the official investigation of the local authorities, what we can confirm at the moment is that we have a murdered child in his own home, a six-year-old who had just celebrated his birthday a couple of weeks ago, and a mother lying in the hospital in serious condition, both stabbed over a dozen times.”

Rehab claimed that the surviving mother had testified to the events to CAIR. We trust the police to thoroughly examine this horrific act as a hate crime, he stated in a statement.

The charity claims that the family of five spent two years in the house’s basement. According to the reports, the suspect was their landlord.

CAIR-Chicago called the crime “our worst nightmare” and part of a disturbing spike in hate calls and emails since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, citing text messages from the mother to the boy’s father as evidence that the suspect yelled, “You Muslims must die!” before the stabbing.

Jewish, Palestinian Hate Crimes

A growing number of Jewish and Palestinian Americans live in fear that the “isolating and scary” tensions between Israel and Palestine may lead to an increase in hate crimes and harassment in cities across the United States.

Bay Ridge has long served as a haven of security for the city’s Arab American community. There is a large Palestinian, Yemeni, Syrian, and Egyptian community in this 3 square mile area of south Brooklyn.

On Wednesday, though, news of a hate crime pierced that bubble of security.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released a statement this week saying that police reported that “three alleged assailants in three cars were waving Israeli flags” and shouting “anti-Palestinian remarks at three men walking on 86th Street.” As soon as they parked, “the group jumped out and began attacking the three men.”

ABC7, a local Brooklyn news station, said that two guys approached two persons waving Palestinian flags, stole one of the flags, and beat one of the protesters in the head. Two young boys in Gravesend, Brooklyn brandished what turned out to be toy weapons at the B’nai Yosef synagogue, according to the police. The juvenile court issued criminal summonses for the lads.

The FBI released a report earlier this year showing that the number of hate crimes in the United States increased again in 2021.

“But this moment is different,” CAIR’s research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said. According to one student, “right now there is an unusually vicious targeting of students that support Palestine, and the volume and intensity is something I haven’t witnessed before.”

Saylor noted that the youth of the United States who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people on college campuses have been the target of intense abuse and intimidation.

The Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard University sent a letter last week in which its signatories said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

That the events “did not occur in a vacuum” was a common refrain. Other student organisations also signed a statement condemning the violence, expressing concern over “the devastating and rising civilian toll,” and pointing out that the treatment of Palestine by the Israeli government has contributed to “conditions of violence.”

Some Jewish students, offended that their peers seemed to blame only Israel for the violence, reacted negatively to the statement’s publishing, arguing that by remaining silent in the face of Hamas’s attacks and showing no compassion for the group’s innocent victims, the letter actually endorsed Hamas.

On Wednesday, a billboard truck featuring the names and photos of Harvard students who had signed the committee’s letter drove near the university’s campus.

“They’re not targeting longtime activists who are used to harassment,” Saylor emphasised. You’re targeting “young professionals,” “young adults,” and “people who aren’t likely to be full-time activists at the moment.”

He referred to the truck as a “political intimidation” tool.

One Harvard law student, Hejir Rashidzadeh, told ABC News, “This is the most tense campus has ever been.”

Bill Ackman, CEO of a billion dollar hedge fund, tweeted to the university, “Please release the names of the students who signed the letter to insure that we do not inadvertently hire any of their members.”

Former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal called for a global day of “anger” on Friday to send a “message of rage to Zionists and America,” and many Jewish Americans feared violence would rise as a result.

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC, among others, have increased security for citizens in anticipation of protests.

“We have reviewed this information in close coordination with our partners in law enforcement and Jewish security organisations,” the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group fighting antisemitism, said in a statement on Friday.

“At this time, the Centre on Extremism is not aware of any credible threats to Jewish communities in the United States,” the statement reads.

Jews in the United States remain concerned for their security. The Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Centre has been monitoring a disturbing increase in antisemitic sentiment in recent years, which they attribute to the burgeoning white supremacist movement in the United States.

Deputy director of research, reporting, and analysis at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project Rachel Carroll Rivas told the Guardian that there has been “an alarming amount of antisemitic activity across the US in recent years,” including “explicit” neo-Nazi organising and “more coded” conspiracies and Holocaust revisionism. During the Israel-Hamas war, this has made the country “ripe for manipulation.”

Twitter users in Irvine, California, shared photos of a man waving a Nazi flag earlier this week. After the Hamas strikes on Israel, a protester at a pro-Palestine rally in New York City displayed a phone with a swastika graphic.

“This moment is profoundly isolating and scary for our people,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice.

Sasson stated that many people in her liberal Jewish group are still looking for lost family members in Israel.

“We are close to this pain,” Sasson, who has friends and family in Israel right now, added. We may be concerned about and sad for the Israelis who have died, and we can feel sympathy for the people of Gaza who are under siege at the same time.

Israeli forces have issued an evacuation order for northern Gaza, home to over a million people, ahead of a planned ground assault, which the UN has called “impossible without devastating humanitarian consequences.”

Some Jewish Americans, like Sasson, have expressed concern over the widespread sharing of content depicting the destruction of Gaza on social media accounts owned by the Israeli government.

When asked about the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza, she stated, “Not in my name should you be starving and bombing an entire civilian population in Gaza.” I really hope that’s not a contentious statement.

The lack of more voices like Sasson’s causes concern among Palestinian Americans, who fear for the safety of their community.

Ussama Makdisi, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, remarked, “It’s as if the Hamas attacks were the beginning of the conflict, and everything before that never happened.”

Makdisi remarked on “how quickly and strongly” American business, academic, and governmental elites expressed their condolences for Israeli victims of violence.

They have not shown any compassion for Palestinian victims of violence, he claimed. “It’s heartless. Refusing to speak out against genocide diminishes Palestinian lives and tells Palestinian Americans, “you’re on your own.”

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

Google

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.

google

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

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

trump

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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Could Last-Minute Surprises Derail Kamala Harris’ Campaign? “Nostradamus” Explains the US Poll.

Scientists Awarded MicroRNA The Nobel Prize in Medicine.

US Inflation will Comfort a Fed Focused on Labor Markets.

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