Reuters World News - Texas abortion ruling, COP's fossil fuel fight and AI campaign volunteers

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Texas’ top court rules against woman who sought abortion for medical emergency. A draft deal at COP28 faces fossil fuel backlash. Pressure grows on Harvard University’s governing body to make a call on the future of its president in antisemitism row. How AI is helping campaigners in the US election. Plus, Trump stays ahead in Republican race and Turkey soccer in crisis after a referee is punched by a club president. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the Supreme Court in Texas overturns an order allowing a woman's abortion. A UN climate draft deal faces fossil fuel backlash. Harvard's president is under pressure. Plus, picking up the phone to an AI campaign volunteer. It's Tuesday, December 12th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. Every weekday. I'm Carmel Crimmons in Dublin.

The Supreme Court in Texas has overturned a lower court's ruling that would have allowed a pregnant woman to get an emergency abortion. The High Court said that a good faith belief by a doctor that the procedure was medically necessary wasn't enough to qualify for the state's exception. Lawyers for the woman, Kate Cox, said that she'd left the state to obtain the abortion. Cox has said her fetus had a fatal diagnosis and that her health was at risk if she continued the pregnancy, including her ability to have more children in the future. Cox's lawyer says she still wishes to pursue her case. Dr. Michael Belmonti is a fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The fact that Kate needed to leave the state of Texas to get this care just proves that medical exceptions do not work.

Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis have attacked a commercial ship in the Red Sea. The Norwegian tanker was hit and set on fire by a cruise missile. It's the latest attack by the Houthis during two months of war. between Israel and Hamas. U.S. military central command said there were no U.S. ships in the vicinity at the time of the attack. The USS Mason responded to the tanker's Mayday call. Donald Trump is maintaining his dominant position in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, drawing the support of more than half of the party's voters. That's according to a new Reuters Ipsos opinion poll. The survey found that 61% of Republicans said they would vote for the former

president. None of his rivals came anywhere close. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley were each backed by 11% of Republicans. Harvard University is facing mounting pressure to make a call on the future of its president. Claudine Gay is facing calls to go after remarks she made about anti-Semitism on campus triggered widespread criticism. Penn's president has resigned, while MIT's board has backed its president after their appearances at the same congressional hearing. The Federal Reserve gathers for one last meeting this year on interest rates. Chair Jerome Powell is expected to leave rates unchanged, but it's all about cuts in 2024.

Howard Schneider is our Fed watcher. Well, the optimism is pretty broad at this point because the Fed's seemingly secure that inflation is going to continue to decline. I think what might throw things off a little bit is if they come out with a sort of a little bit of a hawkish lien that might push back the expectation for rate cuts by a few months, they don't want this to really creep into the conversation. And, you know, part of their messaging, I think, is going to be, we are not taking further rate hikes off the table. There's still work to do. And please don't talk to us about rate cuts because we are not ready to have that conversation yet. We also have inflation data coming out today. Could that change the Fed's outlook? Well, not in the immediate sense, the sense of the immediate outcome. It's just, it's too late in the game.

And there's been too much weight moving in the direction of the disinflation story this time. Now, if there was a real surprise to the upside, then you might start to see a little bit sterner tone from Powell at the press conference and certainly an openness if that continued down the road to do more. But look, I think the expectations right now are pretty centered in on the idea that there was zero percent increase in consumer prices in October. It's probably going to be pretty low this month as well. The UN General Assembly is expected to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza later today. The resolution is non-binding. It comes as the UN warns that half the population of the enclave is starving. Puma is ending its sponsorship of Israel's national football team.

The German company says the move was taken a year ago and was not related to the war in Gaza. Zara, meanwhile, has pulled ads from some parts of its website and app after a backlash online. Critics said the photos of mannequins and statues wrapped in white resembled photos of corpses and white shrouds in Gaza. The Spanish retailer said the photos were taken in September. before the war started. Fortnite Maker Epic Games has won its antitrust case against Google. The ruling is a stunning defeat for the tech company and could potentially upend the entire app store economy.

Google says it will appeal. The Turkish Football Federation has suspended all leagues after a soccer club president punched a referee in the face at the end of a match. A court has ordered the arrest of Ankara-Gouju president Faruuk Koka. Is the UN Climate Summit on the brink of failure? A draft of a potential deal doesn't mention the phase-out of fossil fuels, sparking criticism from the US, the EU, and climate-vulnerable countries. You'll not go silently to our watery graves. That's John Silk, the head of the Marshall Islands delegation.

A new draft text is expected, and more discussions will follow, dragging the summit into overtime. Kate Abnett is in Dubai. Kate, why was the phrase phase out not included in the draft text? Well, at the UN climate talks, there are nearly 200 countries represented. So you really have the global breadth of views on the future of fossil fuels represented here. And within that, you have oil-producing nations, in particular Saudi Arabia, as we hear from negotiators at this COP, who are firmly opposed to a phase out of fossil fuels. We should note, however, that fossil fuels are not absent from the latest draft of the deal. And there is a list of options in this text which countries could take to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And one of those options is reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels. So that would be the first time in a UN Climate Summit deal that all parties agreed to reduce fossil fuels. However, it is presented here as an option rather than an urgent call for countries to follow.

So for some parties here, that falls short. So could we still get a deal that includes the phasing out of fossil fuels? So there could be discussion of reducing the consumption and production of fossil fuels. There could be an indication that as clean energy sources are scaled up, polluting energy sources are scaled down. There are many ways to describe a fossil fuel phase out without using those two words, if it is those words that are the problem for some countries. However, it is also a problem for some countries to have any indication that the world will eventually ditch coal, oil and gas in this deal. And so we don't yet know how flexible countries are going to be in terms of what they can accept to get a compromise at the end of these talks. Shemaine Daniels is running for Congress.

The Democrat lost her race last year, but she hopes a new weapon will give her an edge this time. I'm here to provide accurate information and answer your questions honestly. That's Ashley. Don't be fooled by the stiff demeanor. She's no robocaller. Her creators say she's the first political phone banker, powered by generative AI technology. Tech reporter Anna Tong spoke with her

and joins us to discuss how AI is changing the campaign trail for 2024. I hear you. Transparency is key. So Anna, what does Ashley do for this campaign? How does she work? Ashley calls people, just like a normal campaign volunteer phone banker. And she, over the weekend, she's been calling thousands of people in Pennsylvania. And she just says, hey, my name is Ashley.

I'm an AI campaign volunteer with Shemaine Daniels's campaign. May I speak with you about Shemaine Daniels? How much do you know about her? What was it like talking with her? So according to her creators, it's a startup called Sivox. They made her voice sound like a robot and they disclosed that she's an AI up front. because they don't want people to be confused and they want to be ethical about it. But once you get past the robot voice, it's possible to have a very high bandwidth full

conversation with her about many, many different topics. So I asked her about the candidate's history, asked her about where she went to law school, I asked her about her policy on criminal justice reform. She mayne believes an affair in this legal system. About public safety. Sumane's approach to public safety is holistic. What are the dangers here? Are regulators on top of this?

Yeah, so I think they're all thinking about it, but the problem is the pace of the technology increases at a much higher velocity than regulators can keep up with. The dangers are vast. We already are in the U.S. living in a very polarized political atmosphere, and there are a lot of worries that this will usher in a new era of political disinformation because the AIs are able to have one-on-one conversations with all voters at a very very, very granular and individual level. And so a lot of experts are concerned about the potential

for this to manipulate and sway voters. So even Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, when he testified in front of Congress, he listed this as one of his top worries. Thank you for the conversation. Look forward to having you on board. That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.