French President Emmanuel Macron urged full support for the US plan to end the Gaza war, calling for a permanent ceasefire, release of all captives, and humanitarian access. Macron, however, blasted expanding West Bank settlements, which he said threaten Palestinian statehood and regional peace.
A Texas court has issued a stay of execution for Robert Roberson, a man whose 2003 murder conviction has raised serious questions about the validity of “shaken baby syndrome” as a medical diagnosis.
Thursday’s decision arrived with only a week remaining until Roberson’s scheduled execution date on October 16.
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Roberson, a 58-year-old autistic man, was accused of having killed his two-year-old daughter Nikki Michelle Curtis in January 2002, after he brought her to a hospital emergency room unconscious.
He has maintained that Nikki had been sick and fell from her bed overnight. But prosecutors argued that her head trauma must have been caused by “shaken baby syndrome”, a diagnosis popularised in the late 1990s as evidence of physical abuse in infants and toddlers.
But that diagnosis has been increasingly rejected, as doctors and medical researchers point out that the symptoms of “shaken baby syndrome” — namely, bleeding or swelling in the eyes or brain — can be caused by other conditions.
Roberson’s defence team has argued that Nikki suffered from chronic pneumonia in the lead-up to her death, and the medications she was given, including codeine, contributed to her death.
In Thursday’s decision, the judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed to pause his execution in light of a similar case being overturned in 2024.
Judge Bert Richardson contrasted the shifting nature of the medical research with the finality of execution in his concurring opinion.
“There is a delicate balance and tension in our criminal justice system between the finality of judgment and its accuracy based on our ever-advancing scientific understanding,” Judge Richardson wrote.
“A death sentence is clearly final and, once carried out, hindsight is useless. Thus, when moving forward in such a way, we should require the highest standards of accuracy so that we can act with a reliable degree of certainty.”
But the court limited its judgement to reopening Roberson’s petition for habeas corpus, which questions the constitutionality of a person’s imprisonment.
It declined to reconsider Roberson’s case as a whole. That prompted some of the judges on the court to issue a partial dissent.
Judge David Schenck, for instance, argued that “a new trial is necessary and mandated by our Constitution”, given the new evidence that has emerged in the two decades since Roberson was sentenced to death.
“The merits of Roberson’s claims and the cumulative effect of the evidence Roberson presents — in his fifth application as well as his previous and subsequent applications — would be more properly and more swiftly assessed at this point by a jury in a new trial,” Schenck said.
He added that a new trial would also offer the state of Texas “an opportunity to present this case on its merits”.
Still, some judges on the panel said they were opposed to reopening the case, arguing that the shift in medical consensus did not rule out an act of violence in Nikki’s death.
“Arguably credible and reliable scientific evidence still exists to suggest that shaking a child can cause serious injury or death,” Judge Kevin Yeary wrote in his opinion.
This is not the first time that Roberson’s case has been delayed. He has spent nearly 23 years on death row and was also slated to be executed a year ago, in October 2024.
But that execution date was scuttled in an extraordinary series of events. With his execution scheduled for October 17 of that year, a bipartisan group of legislators in the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence agreed to issue a subpoena for Roberson on October 21 — effectively setting up a battle between the legislature’s will and the court’s.
The subpoen sparked a court case about the separation of powers in Texas: A witness could not answer a legislative subpoena if the justice system executed him first.
Further, the members of the Texas House committee had argued that a 2013 state law barring the use of “junk science” in court cases had failed to be applied in Roberson’s case.
The case reached the Texas Supreme Court, which halted Roberson’s execution while the matter was resolved. Execution dates are set with at least 90 days’ notice in Texas, resulting in a prolonged pause.
On July 16, after appeals from Roberson’s defence team, a new execution date was set for this month.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, has accused critics of Roberson’s sentence of “interfering with the capital punishment proceedings” and has repeatedly pledged to push forward with the execution.
But even those involved in Roberson’s original capital murder trial have sought to see his sentence overturned.
Brian Wharton, the lead investigator in Roberson’s case, had once testified in favour of the prosecution. But last year, he told the Texas House committee that he supported Roberson’s appeal, given the new evidence that has come to light.
“He is an innocent man, and we are very close to killing him for something he did not do,” Wharton said.
On Thursday, one of the jurors who helped convict Roberson also published an opinion column in the Houston Chronicle, asserting that she was “wrong” to side with the prosecution.
“If we on the jury knew then what I know now — about the new evidence of Nikki’s missed pneumonia, how her breathing would have been affected by the Phenergan and codeine doctors gave her that last week, the signs of sepsis, and all the things that were wrong with the version of shaken baby syndrome used in the case — we would have had a lot more to discuss,” Terre Compton wrote.
“Based on all that has come out since the trial, I am 100% certain that Robert Roberson did not murder his child.”
A French court has rejected the appeal of a man found guilty of raping Gisele Pelicot after she was drugged by her husband and increased his sentence to 10 years.
Husamettin Dogan, a 44-year-old construction worker, was convicted of sexually abusing Gisele Pelicot, 72, in a landmark case last December, with witnesses testifying in his appeal earlier this week that Dogan was “fully aware” Gisele Pelicot was asleep while he was assaulting her.
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“The court and jury sentence Husamettin Dogan to 10 years in prison” along with “mandatory treatment for five years”, presiding judge Christian Pasta said on Thursday. Standing in the dock at the court in the southern city of Nimes, Dogan did not react to the verdict.
Pelicot returned to court this week to face the only man, out of 51, who appealed against his guilty verdict. She called for “victims to never be ashamed of what was forced upon them”.
Prior to Dogan’s sentencing, French prosecutor Dominique Sie called for his jail term to be increased to 12 years – the term prosecutors had initially sought – because of “Dogan’s stance, in all its rigidity, as he absolutely refuses to take any responsibility”.
“As long as you refuse to admit it, it’s not just a woman, it’s an entire sordid social system that you are endorsing,” Sie said.
Dogan claimed he was not a “rapist” and insisted he thought he was participating in consensual sexual activity.
Witnesses in Dogan’s appeal this week included Pelicot’s ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, who previously received a prison term of 20 years, the maximum sentence, for orchestrating the assaults in the former couple’s home in Mazan.
During the trial last year, Dominique Pelicot admitted that, for more than a decade, he drugged his then-wife of 50 years so that he and strangers he recruited online could abuse her. He also filmed the assaults, which included at least 50 men.
In Tuesday’s hearing, he denied ever coercing or misleading Dogan. “I never forced anyone,” he said.
He also refuted Dogan’s assertion that his invitation was to participate in a sexual game. “I never said that,” he said.
Dogan visited the couple’s home on June 28, 2019, where he is accused of assaulting Gisele Pelicot for more than three hours. Dogan, however, has said he only realised that something was wrong when he heard the woman snoring.
Investigator Jeremie Bosse-Platiere also testified on Tuesday. He cited video footage of Gisele Pelicot’s assault to assert that Dogan was fully aware Gisele had not consented.
“Anyone who sees the videos understands this immediately,” Bosse-Platiere said.
The police commissioner described a video in which Gisele Pelicot was seen moving slightly, causing Dogan to immediately withdraw.
“We understand that he is worried that his victim might wake up and freeze in a waiting position,” said Bosse-Platiere.
“After 30 seconds, seeing that it was a reflex caused by pain or discomfort, he reintroduces his penis into her vagina.”
Investigators found a total of 107 photos and 14 videos from the night Dogan visited the couple’s home in the southern town of Mazan.
Gisele Pelicot appeared at the proceedings on Wednesday, telling the court that Dogan had raped her and must “take responsibility” for his actions.
Gisele’s decision to waive her right to anonymity during the initial trial was celebrated as a bold move for transparency, raising awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault and domestic violence in France and around the world.
She also attended the proceedings in person and faced her abusers in court. She was named a knight of the Legion of Honour, France’s top civic honour, in July.
Her case has resulted in greater momentum to reform France’s laws on rape and sexual assault.
Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly and Senate have pushed for an update to the definition of rape under the country’s penal code, in order to include a clear reference to the need for consent. A final bill is expected to pass in the coming months.
US President Donald Trump says the Hamas-held captives in Gaza will be released “Monday or Tuesday” as part of his ceasefire plan creating “peace in the Middle East”. He added it is time for the war to end after Israel’s “big retribution” to Hamas’s October 7th attack.
Despite United States President Donald Trump’s tariff and immigration policies roiling businesses, the US economy is relatively stable. Experts say the country can thank the artificial intelligence (AI) industry for that.
“AI machines—in quite a literal sense—appear to be saving the US economy right now,” George Saravelos of Deutsche Bank wrote to his clients at the end of September. “In the absence of tech-related spending, the US would be close to, or in, recession this year.”
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Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has made similar observations in his Substack newsletter. AI companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and development, and other US companies are spending billions on AI products.
Just last month, a data centre in Abeline, Texas, the flagship site of the $500bn Stargate programme, a joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI and Japan’s SoftBank to advance AI infrastructure in the US, came online.
Around the same time, chipmaker Nvidia said it would invest up to $100bn in OpenAI and provide it with data centre chips. It also became the first US company to hit a $4 trillion market value. It was soon followed in that benchmark by Microsoft, which has seen its stock price surge, with AI one of key factors driving business demand.
Nvidia and Microsoft are not alone. Google’s parent company Alphabet and Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, have upped their commitments to their AI ambitions and investments.
All of this enthusiasm surrounding AI appears to be holding up the US economy for the moment, but there are fears that this could be a “bubble” similar to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
“The reason people are worried about an AI bubble is because seven companies are pulling more than 400 others forward,” Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University, told Al Jazeera.
A look at the S&P 500 shows that seven tech companies that are heavily involved in AI are the ones creating the most growth.
Harvey admits that since it’s still early days in AI adoption and growth, it’s hard to say if the stocks of those tech companies are overvalued.
“While share prices look somewhat elevated, there’s also real revenue behind the massive push to build data centres,” said Carl Frey, an associate professor of AI & Work at Oxford University. “A bubble may be building, but we’re nowhere near tulip mania territory,” he said, referring to the massive increase in tulip prices in the Netherlands in the 17th century, an event often held up as a hallmark of a bubble.
“The worry is that early AI adopters are having second thoughts. Large corporations that rushed in are narrowing projects to the few that clearly save money or make money, and putting the rest on ice,” he said.
For instance, major corporations like IBM and Klarna cut thousands of jobs in customer service and replaced them with AI—only to start reversing course not so long after they made that decision. They found the technology couldn’t do everything they hoped, compared to human workers.
If major corporations that have spent large sums of money adopting AI tools end up deciding that these tools are not actually that useful for their businesses, that could be a serious problem for AI companies. They could end up with fewer customers, and their stock prices could begin to tumble as projected profits decline.
A report released by MIT in August found that 95 percent of companies that have adopted AI are not achieving significant revenue acceleration from it. Data from the US Census Bureau shows that AI adoption by large companies has started to slow down recently.
It would appear that people are starting to question the utility of these AI tools, which are often used to replace people in jobs like customer service, software engineering and several other entry-level jobs.
“There’s a growing sense that a lot of companies raced to add AI to their operations last year because of the hype surrounding its power, and the fear of falling behind,” said Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. “It turns out, however, that integrating generative AI, in particular, into existing workflows in significantly useful ways is harder than people thought.”
Newport says the underlying models in these AI programmes are currently “too unreliable” to be able to successfully automate jobs. He notes the idea that we would see AI rapidly taking jobs right now “has simply not come true”.
A recent Stanford study found that entry-level jobs in customer service, accounting and software development have decreased by 13 percent since 2022 because of the adoption of AI tools in large companies.
It’s not clear that AI has reached “bubble” territory yet, but it might, and if that bubble were to burst, it could do a lot of damage to the US economy.
Frey says the dot-com bubble was very costly for investors, but it “left behind technologies and infrastructure that ultimately lifted productivity.” The question is whether this AI situation will play out the same way.
Across Israeli society, the reaction to the news of a Gaza ceasefire deal has been almost uniform: Joy.
In Tel Aviv, the families of those taken captive during the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 celebrated on Thursday after the announcement. And a man dressed as United States President Donald Trump – who played a large part in brokering the deal – carried Israeli and US flags and posed for photographs with smiling passersby.
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Two years of war on Gaza have fractured Israeli society. The minority who have openly opposed Israel’s killing of more than 67,000 Palestinians say they have been ostracised, while those who cheered on what experts have confirmed is a genocide have been left angered by growing international condemnation of Israel’s aggression.
“I cried when I got the news,” Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said from Berlin. “It’s really big. It’s like there’s a complete emotional unravelling across Israel; it’s like people are decompressing. There’s just massive, massive relief.”
For some, the news seems too good to be true, with speculation and nerves turning to how the ceasefire may ultimately unravel, as a deal earlier this year did.
“Everyone is happy. It’s what we’ve been calling for for two years,” said Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of parliament from the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al party. “I’ve been watching videos from Gaza, television from Tel Aviv showing the families of the hostages: Everyone is happy.
“Though there’s still caution,” she added. “There’s a feeling that someone, somewhere will find a reason to return to the war. People don’t trust this government – not just in Gaza, but in Israel, too.”
Much of that doubt centres on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously resisted calls to end the war at every opportunity.
Accusations from political opponents and captives’ families that he was prolonging the conflict for his own political ends – to ensure that his coalition holds together – have persisted throughout the war. Former US President Joe Biden also suggested that may be the case.
Today’s ceasefire does little to remove that suspicion. Netanyahu still faces the prospect of a verdict in his long-running corruption trial, an inquiry into his own failings before the October 7 attack, as well as the controversy over extending Israel’s military draft to its ultra-Orthodox community, whose parties are an important part of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. All of these have been conveniently relegated to secondary concerns while the war on Gaza has continued, but that will change once the fighting ends.
Nevertheless, with elections due by next year, or potentially even earlier, Netanyahu has successes that he can point to, particularly in weakening the Iranian-backed “axis of resistance” in the wider region. Perhaps most notable were the 12-day war with Iran in June, and the decapitation of much of the Lebanese group Hezbollah’s leadership in a war last year.
“Netanyahu is going to portray this as a victory,” the prime minister’s former aide and political pollster, Mitchell Barak, told Al Jazeera from West Jerusalem. “He can say he’s achieved everything he wanted to at the start of the war. He’s got the hostages back, he’s destroyed Hamas. On the sidelines of this, he’ll also claim that he used the opportunity to wipe out Hezbollah, weaken Iran and watch over as the Syrian regime fell. He’s reshaped the Middle East, he’ll claim, and removed many, if not all, of the main threats facing Israel.”
Others in Netanyahu’s far-right coalition already appear ready to oppose the deal. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have voiced hostility to the ceasefire, and have previously pledged to leave the government if a deal is passed that they do not agree with. However, what meaningful resistance they can muster – with Israel’s political opposition already pledging to support the government to secure the deal – is unclear.
“Hadash and the so-called opposition have all said they’ll support the ceasefire,” Touma-Suleiman said of a mainstream opposition that has, through the last two years, largely backed Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will make some noise, but they can’t really do much.”
How much the Israeli public credits Netanyahu, as opposed to Trump, for the ceasefire is unclear.
The US has been Israel’s staunchest ally amid international criticism of its actions in Gaza. In addition to its blanket backing at the United Nations, reports from Brown University’s Costs of War Project released this week confirmed what many long suspected: That the US treasury largely financed Israel’s war on Gaza and its attacks across the region.
However, for many Israelis, Israel’s failed strike on Hamas negotiators in Qatar and the unified response from Arab states proved a turning point for the US administration and its priorities within the Middle East, and ultimately led to Trump telling Netanyahu that he had to agree to a deal and end the war.
“I think Trump, allied with this coalition of Muslim and Arab states such as Turkiye and Qatar, probably succeeded in forcing the Israeli government’s hand,” Flashenberg said. “This could have been reached earlier, which suggests Trump forced it.”
“Netanyahu has to complete the first stage,” Touma-Suleiman said of the loosely worded ceasefire plan. “We know that, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about the second phase.
“That’s still to be negotiated – and on Israel’s side, those negotiations are going to be led by a government that is probably looking to restart the war.”
However, any effort to resume hostilities would unfold against the backdrop of an unpredictable US president who, having sent his special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to negotiate the ceasefire, appears heavily invested in the process.
“How long this will last depends on Trump,” Barak said. “He uses the presidency as a global bully pulpit. He’s shown he’s ready to do anything, irrespective of the norms, as he writes his own rulebook with new norms.
“Israel has always been a critical ally of the US in the Middle East, as well as its most favoured nation, but it’s not really clear any more if Trump particularly cares about critical allies or favoured nations, or even foreign allies in general,” Barak continued. “He wants peace, and Netanyahu knows that. He knows Trump could really leave him – and that would be a disaster.