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U.S. President’s Son Hunter Biden Criminally Charged

Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, was charged on Thursday with defrauding a gun dealer into selling him a firearm. This is the latest indication that the younger Biden’s legal woes may impact on his father’s re-election bid next year.

In the first-ever indictment of a sitting president’s child, filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, Hunter Biden was charged with three criminal counts related to lying about his drug use, which would have prohibited him from possessing a firearm.

The charges ensure that courtroom drama will play a disproportionate role in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, as Joe Biden, 80, seeks reelection in a likely rematch with his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, 77, who faces four impending criminal trials of his own.

The new allegations against Hunter Biden brought by recently elevated U.S. Special Counsel David Weiss say nothing about any violations of U.S. tax law. A prior agreement under which Hunter Biden, 53, would have pled guilty to two misdemeanour tax charges and enrolled in a programme to avoid prosecution on the gun charge collapsed in a July hearing in a startling turn of events.

Weiss previously stated that any potential charges against Biden would have to be brought in either the District of Columbia or the Central District of California, which is situated in Los Angeles.

In October of 2018, prosecutors accused the younger Biden of lying about his drug use when he purchased a Colt Cobra handgun.

Biden Impeachment Inquiry

The action comes two days after Republicans in the House of Representatives opened an impeachment investigation into Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s international business dealings. The White House has criticised that action, which was taken without a vote by the entire House, as unfounded and politically motivated.

Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, said in a statement, “As anticipated, prosecutors filed charges today that they deemed unwarranted six weeks ago after a five-year investigation into this case.”

Some legal experts have suggested that any firearms-related allegations against Biden may be susceptible to a constitutional challenge, given that the U.S. Supreme Court last year in a landmark decision expanded gun rights under the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms.

In his statement, Lowell referred to this dispute, noting “the recent rulings by several federal courts that this statute is unconstitutional.”

After investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings for years as the U.S. attorney in the Democratic president’s home state of Delaware, Weiss was appointed special counsel in August.

Trump and his Republican allies have relentlessly attacked the younger Biden for years, accusing him of misconduct in relation to Ukraine and China, among other issues. Hunter Biden has held positions as a lobbyist, attorney, investment banker, and artist, and he has discussed his struggles with substance misuse in public.

While Republican legislators have gathered testimony that Joe Biden occasionally joined calls with his son’s business associates, they have yet to produce evidence that the president benefited personally.

David Weiss

“Today’s charges against Hunter Biden are a very small start, but unless U.S. Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in the fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear that President Biden’s DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy,” said Republican Representative James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, one of the three committees leading the impeachment investigation launched this week.

In December 2020, Hunter Biden disclosed that Weiss’s office was investigating his tax affairs. He has disputed his guilt.

While the majority of U.S. attorneys appointed by Trump were requested to resign when Biden assumed office in January 2021, the Biden Justice Department asked Weiss to remain in his position.

Hunter Biden has never worked in the White House or on his father’s presidential campaign. The president has stated that he has not discussed his son’s foreign business dealings with him and that his Justice Department would conduct any investigation of a family member independently.

Trump and other Republicans have claimed that Hunter Biden’s position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma during the time his father was Vice President under Democratic President Barack Obama created conflicts of interest.

In a July 2019 phone call with Ukraine’s president, Trump requested that the Ukrainian government investigate Joe and Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 presidential election.

The Democratic-led House of Representatives ultimately voted to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress emanating from these efforts, whereas the Republican-led Senate ultimately voted to keep Trump in office.

In a 2021 memoir, Hunter Biden describes his struggles with substance addiction, including crack cocaine use and alcoholism. According to sources at the time, he was discharged from the U.S. Navy reserve in 2014 after testing positive for cocaine.

Hunter and Ashley Biden are the two surviving further offspring of appropriate age of the elter occupant. His son Beau Biden died of cancer in 2015, and his daughter Naomi Biden perished as an infant in a car tragedy that also claimed the life of Joe Biden’s first wife.

According to Aaron Crawford, a presidential history expert at the University of Tennessee, Hunter Biden appears to be the first child of a reigning president to be indicted.

Weiss Cannot Be Trusted to Investigate Hunter Biden

Republicans Say Weiss Cannot Be Trusted to “Investigate Hunter Biden”

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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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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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Scientists Awarded MicroRNA The Nobel Prize in Medicine.

US Inflation will Comfort a Fed Focused on Labor Markets.

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