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U.S. Military Shoots Down Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon
(CTN News) – A week after it initially entered American airspace and set off a dramatic and public espionage story that deteriorated Sino-U.S. ties, a U.S. military fighter aircraft shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina.
Although the Pentagon advised deflating the balloon over open sea to protect people from debris falling to Earth from thousands of feet (meters) above commercial air traffic, President Joe Biden claimed to have given the order to do so on Wednesday.
Biden stated, “I want to commend our aviators who accomplished it. They successfully took it down.”
One F-22 fighter plane from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia fired the shot at 2:39 p.m. (1939 GMT) with a lone AIM-9X supersonic, heat-seeking air-to-air missile, according to a senior U.S. military official. Multiple fighter and refueling aircraft were part of the operation.
China vehemently denounced the military action on an airship that it said was utilized for meteorological and other scientific purposes and that had “totally accidentally” wandered into American airspace, claims categorically denied by American authorities.
China’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying it has “clearly requested the U.S. to handle this correctly in a calm, professional, and controlled way.” The United States insisted on employing force, which was an overreaction.
The Chinese spy balloon was shot down in relatively shallow waters six nautical miles from the American shore.
According to U.S. officials, the Chinese Spy balloon was shot down over relatively shallow water around six nautical miles off the American shore of the Atlantic Ocean. This might help attempts to retrieve pieces of Chinese spying equipment in the following days.
According to a U.S. military officer, the debris field covered seven miles (11 km) of water, and many U.S. military boats were there.
The balloon was brought down soon after the United States government banned flights into and out of Wilmington, Myrtle Beach, and Charleston airports in South Carolina due to an unspecified “national security action,” according to the authorities at the time. On Saturday afternoon, flights started up again.
While the military aspect of the eavesdropping drama is over thanks to Saturday’s shootdown, Biden is expected to continue under heavy political pressure from Republican rivals in Congress who claim he didn’t respond soon enough.
According to a senior administration official, the U.S. government personally discussed the move with China after shooting down the balloon. According to the individual, the State Department also informed friends and partners globally.
There are still unanswered questions about how much data China may have obtained during the Chinese spy balloon’s journey over America.
On January 28, the Chinese Spy balloon entered the Alaskan airspace of the United States, and on January 30, it entered Canadian territory.
On January 31, it later re-entered American airspace over northern Idaho, according to a U.S. military official. It did not return to open seas after crossing American territory, making a shootdown difficult.
The balloon’s location above the country was not made public by American authorities until Thursday.
Republican U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, who chairs the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, stated that it is obvious the Biden administration intended to conceal this national security blunder from Congress and the American people.
This criticism may have prompted Biden to emphasize on Saturday that he had ordered the Chinese Spy balloon to be shot down as quickly as possible days earlier.
Biden’s probable opponent in the 2024 race, former President Donald Trump, called earlier this week for the balloon to be shot down.
He has attempted to position himself as more assertive than Biden on China. The U.S.-China relationship will probably be a prominent topic of discussion in the 2024 presidential election.
According to a U.S. official, Washington had reported the shootdown to Beijing on Saturday after describing the Chinese Spy balloon’s presence as a “clear infringement” of American sovereignty.
Nevertheless, authorities on Saturday seemed to minimize the Chinese spy balloon’s influence on American national security.
The senior U.S. military official said, “Our assessment—and we’ll learn more when we pick up the debris—was that it was not expected to give considerable incremental value over and above existing (Chinese) intel capacity, like as satellites in low-Earth orbit.
A stream from a jet struck the Chinese Spy balloon, according to a Reuters photographer who saw the shootdown, but there was no explosion. Then it started to drop.
According to the Pentagon, the balloon was a component of a fleet of Chinese espionage balloons. It was reported that a second Chinese balloon was passing over Latin America on Friday.
The U.S. official said Chinese Spy balloons have previously been seen above nations on five continents, including East Asia, South Asia, and Europe.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a week’s trip to China scheduled to begin on Friday due to the alleged surveillance Chinese Spy balloon.
Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping had decided to postpone Blinken’s trip in November, disappointing some who regarded it as a long overdue chance to mend the increasingly strained ties between the two nations.
China wants a stable relationship with the United States to concentrate on its economy, which has been hurt by the now-abandoned zero-COVID policy and ignored by international investors concerned about what they perceive to be a return of state meddling in the market.
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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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