Activision Blizzard agrees to settle California intercourse discrimination case

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick speaks at the CNBC Evolve conference November 19th in Los Angeles.

Jesse Grant | CNBC

Microsoft-owned Activision Blizzard has agreed to settle a case from a California state agency that alleged the video game publisher discriminated against women, including denying them promotion opportunities and paying them less.

California’s Civil Rights Department said in a statement on Friday that as part of a proposed settlement agreement, Activision Blizzard will pay nearly $55 million to provide relief to female employees and contractors from October 2015 to December 2020 and cover legal fees. About $46 million of the total will go to the fund for affected women, the agency said in the statement.

The news comes almost two years after Activision Blizzard settled a case from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which pointed to sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and retaliation. As a result, the company agreed to form an $18 million fund to pay victims.

In 2021, the agency, then known as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, filed a suit against the company, presenting allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation. Months later, the Wall Street Journal reported that while Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick was aware of allegations of misconduct inside the company, he didn’t share all relevant information with its board.

Shares fell, and Microsoft subsequently began talks to acquire Activision Blizzard, the maker of Call of Duty.

The $69 billion deal closed in October after regulators in the U.S. and Europe looked carefully at it. The Federal Trade Commission argued in San Francisco appellate court last week that a federal judge made mistakes in rejecting the regulatory agency’s attempt to stop the companies from completing the transaction.

The Los Angeles County Superior Court must approve Activision’s settlement with the state agency, according to the statement. The agency will file a new complaint that excludes prior harassment allegations, according to the proposed settlement agreement, which CNBC viewed.

The agreement would require Activision to keep up efforts around inclusion of underrepresented people in recruiting. Except when compensation is non-negotiable, the company would have to tell job applicants in writing at the start of hiring and promotion processes that they can negotiate their pay.

“We appreciate the importance of the issues addressed in this agreement and we are dedicated to fully implementing all the new obligations we have assumed as part of it,” Activision said in a statement to CNBC.

WATCH: Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick: We always believed the deal would get through

Rudy Giuliani ordered to pay Georgia election employees for defamation

Rudy Giuliani at 60 Centre Street in Manhattan on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022.

Theodore Parisienne | Tribune News Service | Getty Images

A federal jury on Friday ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay over $148 million to two Georgia election workers for falsely claiming they committed ballot fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

The jaw-dropping figure includes $75 million in punitive damages, along with awards of $20 million to each of the two election workers for emotional distress and more than $16 million each for defamation.

Giuliani was in court as the verdict was read aloud by a federal judge.

The defamation damage award is the latest in a series of legal blows to Giuliani related to his service as the top campaign lawyer for Donald Trump in efforts to reverse the former Republican president’s loss in that election.

Giuliani, Trump, and 17 other defendants were indicted this summer on state criminal court charges in Georgia in connection with their attempts to undo Trump’s defeat.

The civil verdict by the jury Friday came a after Giuliani’s lawyer said he would not testify in the case in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., reversing his supposed plans to do so.

The plaintiffs in the case, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who are mother and daughter, sued Giuliani in 2021 for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.

Courtroom sketch of Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss during Rudy Giuliani’s defamation trial on Dec. 14th, 2023.

Artist: Bill Hennessy

Judge Beryl Howell in August issued a default judgment against Giuliani in the women’s favor because he had repeatedly failed to comply with orders requiring him to turn over evidence to their attorneys. Giuliani previously had conceded that for the purposes of the lawsuit he had made false statements about the women that were defamatory.

Howell’s ruling meant that the trial would only determine how much money the former New York City mayor would pay the women in damages.

On Tuesday, a social media expert had testified that it would cost the women between $17 million and nearly $48 million to fix the damage to their reputations as a result of the lies told about them by Giuliani and others.

Read more CNBC politics coverage

Giuliani had said at a Georgia Senate hearing after the 2020 election that Freeman and Moss at a ballot counting location had passed each other USB flash drives like “vials of heroin or cocaine” as part of a scheme to defraud Trump of an election win. Moss later testified to Congress that she and her mother were passing candy.

Freeman testified during the trial that after Giuliani made his claims about her and her daughter, they received non-stop threats, and that she left her home for two months at the beginning of 2021 at the recommendation of the FBI.

“We are coming for you and your family!” one email sent to Freeman said, according to evidence shown to jurors. “Ms. Ruby, safest place for you right now is in prison. Or you will swing from the trees.”

Freeman wept on the witness stand, “It’s so scary every time I go somewhere if I have to use my name.”

Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney in the case, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates.

Moderna, Merck most cancers vaccine reduces danger of pores and skin most cancers return

An exterior view of Moderna’s clinical manufacturing facility. 

David L. Ryan | Boston Globe | Getty Images

Moderna and Merck‘s experimental cancer vaccine, when used in combination with Merck’s blockbuster therapy Keytruda, reduced the risk of death or relapse in patients with the most deadly form of skin cancer after three years, according to midstage trial data released Thursday. 

The combination specifically slashed the risk of death or recurrence of the cancer, known as melanoma, by 49% in patients in later stages of the disease compared to those who received Keytruda alone after three years. The cancer vaccine in combination with Keytruda also reduced the risk of melanoma spreading to other parts of the body by 62%.

Those results build on midstage trial data the companies released earlier this year, which showed the efficacy of the combination in the same 157 patients over a shorter period. After around two years, the vaccine and Keytruda cut the risk of death or relapse by 44% in melanoma patients, and reduced the risk of the cancer spreading in the body by 65%, according to the earlier trial data. 

The most common side effects of the vaccine after three years were fatigue, injection site pain and chills, according to Thursday’s data.

The new results suggest that the cancer shot used with the immunotherapy continues to provide meaningful health benefits to melanoma patients after they stay on the treatment for a longer period of time. The two drugmakers are continuing to study the combination as a treatment for melanoma in a late-stage trial, which began in July.

The vaccine, which uses the same mRNA technology as Moderna’s Covid vaccine, is custom-built based on an analysis of a patient’s tumors after surgical removal. The shot is designed to train the immune system to recognize and attack specific mutations in cancer cells.

Merck’s Keytruda, which is approved to treat melanoma and other cancers, belongs to a class of widely used immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors designed to disable a certain protein that helps cancer evade the immune system.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave breakthrough therapy designation to the cancer vaccine for the treatment of melanoma in February, which is intended to speed up the development and review of treatments for serious and life-threatening diseases.

Moderna and Merck are also testing the vaccine with Keytruda against other tumor types. On Monday, the drugmakers started a late-stage trial on the combination as a treatment for non-small cell lung cancer.

Melanoma is responsible for the large majority of skin cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. The rate of melanoma has increased rapidly over the past few decades, according to the organization.

About 100,000 people will be diagnosed with melanoma in the U.S. this year and nearly 8,000 people are expected to die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.

Don’t miss these stories from CNBC PRO:

IRS rejects 20,000 tax refund claims for worker retention credit score

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel speaks during an IRS event on August 2, 2023 in McLean, Virginia.

Alex Wong | Getty Images

The IRS is sending more than 20,000 rejection letters to taxpayers who wrongly claimed a pandemic-era tax break as the agency continues its crackdown on “dubious” filings.

Created to support small businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic, the employee retention credit, or ERC, is worth thousands of dollars per eligible employee. However, the tax break sparked a wave of companies pushing small businesses to wrongly claim the credit — and the agency temporarily stopped processing new filings in September amid a “surge of questionable claims.”

“With the aggressive marketing we saw with this credit, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing claims that clearly fall outside of the legal requirements,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement Wednesday.

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Starting this week, ineligible taxpayers will start receiving copies of Letter 105 C for disallowed claims. Later this month, the IRS will unveil a “voluntary disclosure program” for taxpayers who wrongly claimed the credit. The agency is rejecting filings from entities that didn’t exist or didn’t have paid employees during the eligibility period.

“The action we are taking today is part of an initial set of steps in our compliance work in this area,” Werfel said. “More letters will be going out in the near future, including both disallowance letters and letters seeking the return of funds erroneously claimed and received.”

The announcement comes less than two months since the IRS unveiled a special withdrawal process for small businesses that wrongly claimed the credit to avoid repayment, interest and penalties.

Don’t miss these stories from CNBC PRO:

Potential Trump 2024 Faux Electors Will not Take part As a result of They Are Scared Of Going To Jail

Arrests and criminal prosecutions are proving to be an effective way of deterring Republicans from participating in a potential Trump attack on the 2024 election.

The Washington Post reported:

In the past few months, 25 of those 84 electors have been charged with felonies, such as forgery, false statements, and filing false documents. Ten more have agreed as part of a lawsuit settlement to not serve as electors in any election in which Trump is on the ballot. And 13 others in Georgia have been labeled “unindicted co-conspirators.”

The publicity surrounding those investigations, and the specter of tarnished reputations and heavy legal costs, are likely to discourage future Trump electors — should the former president secure the GOP nomination next year — from casting votes for him in a state where Biden is again declared the winner, many Republicans said.

While the fake elector scheme was novel in 2020, with many pro-Trump electors claiming they didn’t fully understand how their votes would be used, those who engage in similar activities in the future could find it harder to claim they didn’t know they could be held criminally liable. Another discouraging force: a new federal law that tightened the rules surrounding the counting of electoral college votes every four years.

Multiple states have sent the message to Republicans not to mess with their elections. Investigations in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada and the criminal charges against Trump’s fake electors in several of those states are having the same impact that the 1/6 prosecutions have had on Trump’s calls for political violence.

Republicans have shown that even though they support Donald Trump, the vast majority of them aren’t willing to ruin their lives and go to jail for him.

The Electoral Count Reform Act has made it virtually impossible for Trump to replicate the 2020 fake elector, but if his campaign is thinking about pulling anything else, they are likely to have a difficult time recruiting co-conspirators at the Republican state and local levels.

Donald Trump is using the same strategy that he relied on in 2016 and 2020, but his support does not appear to be as passionate within the Republican Party. After the 1/6 attack, lawmakers took steps to change the law.

The MAGAs have realized that when they follow Trump’s order, they go to jail, while he goes to golf, and as the nation heads into 2024, many of them no longer are willing to take the fall for Donald Trump.

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We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

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15 Issues You Ought to Pack To Keep away from Checking a Bag on the Airport

We independently selected these products because we love them, and we think you might like them at these prices. E! has affiliate relationships, so we may get a commission if you purchase something through our links. Items are sold by the retailer, not E!. Prices are accurate as of publish time.

Does anyone actually enjoy being at the airport? You wait in line to check a bag, wait in line to get through security, wait in line to get off the plane, and then wait in line to get your checked bag before waiting for your ride home. Long story short, it’s just way too much waiting around when you have better things to do during your travels. If you want to cut down on the airport time, you can skip the checked bag and bring a strategically-packed carry-on bag instead.

If you don’t think a carry-on is going to cut it, you just need a few helpful products to make it all work. Stash some small items in this scarf with secret zip-up compartments. Pack your clothes in these compression cubes that take up 60% less space in your bag. Use this foldable duffle for a personal item on your flight home if you shop on trips.

These 15 things will help you maximize your carry-on space so you can hit the ground running as soon as you land.

Elon Musk reactivates Alex Jones’ X account

C.E.O. of Tesla, Chief Engineer of SpaceX and C.T.O. of X Elon Musk takes the stage during the New York Times annual DealBook summit on November 29, 2023 in New York City. 

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

Elon Musk on Sunday reinstated the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on X, formerly Twitter, reneging on a year-ago vow to keep Jones off the social network.

Jones was previously suspended from Twitter in 2018 for violating the company’s “abusive behavior policy.” That suspension, deemed permanent under the company’s prior management, came as Jones faced a defamation lawsuit for spreading the false claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

Musk’s decision to bring Jones back to X comes on the anniversary week of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Although 20 children and six educators were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, Jones had falsely and repeatedly said on his show, Infowars, that the shooting never really happened, and was a staged event designed to bring about stricter gun laws.

Infowars still appeared to be banned from X as of Sunday.

Believers in Jones’ conspiracies would go on to harass and threaten bereft family members, in some cases physically confronting and accusing grieving parents of being crisis actors whose children had never existed, according to reports by the Associated Press. Some of those targeted had to move from their homes multiple times and could not safely visit the graves of their loved ones.

Sandy Hook victims’ relatives sued Jones in Texas and Connecticut, winning a nearly $1.5 billion judgment against him. Jones sought but did not receive personal bankruptcy protection to try to avoid paying more than $1 billion of that judgment.

Users of the Elon Musk-led X social media platform had anticipated the reinstatement of Jones since at least Thursday, when Musk said he would consider reinstating Jones.

“Since this platform aspires to be the global town square, permanent bans should be extremely rare,” Musk wrote in a Thursday post.

Musk confirmed the reinstatement on Sunday after launching a poll on X that garnered nearly 2 million votes, over half of which favored reinstating Jones.

Musk said Jones “cannot break the law,” but that if he does spread misinformation, X’s community notes feature will correct him.

Jones’ first activity on the platform in over five years was to repost a welcome-back message from Andrew Tate — an influencer known for spouting misogynistic views online and awaiting trial for charges of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women in Romania. (Tate has sued the accusers who made those charges.) X has allowed Tate to monetize his account and Tate has said that he generated tens of thousands of dollars on X, previously.

While Musk — who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — bills himself as a free speech defender, he has wielded his control of the X platform to suspend the accounts of perceived enemies and vocal critics there. For example, X suspended the accounts of software developer Travis Brown, a same-day private jet tracker account built by Jack Sweeney, and Aaron Greenspan, the founder of legal and public records database PlainSite.

Under Musk’s management, X has also sued a progressive watchdog group, Media Matters for America, and one of its staff members alleging defamation. The suit followed an investigative report MMfA published that said blatantly Nazi content ran on the social network alongside ads from mainstream brands there.

Musk has faced a backlash for changes he’s made at Twitter since taking over the platform in late October 2022, including the widespread reversal of account suspensions. He famously reversed the suspension of former President Donald Trump.

In recent weeks, many major advertisers suspended their campaigns on X after Musk promoted what the White House called “antisemitic and racist hate” on the site. Musk would go on to tell those advertisers to “go f**k yourselves,” and “don’t advertise,” from the stage of the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York.

First CRISPR gene-editing remedy authorized in U.S.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the country’s first gene-editing treatment, Casgevy, for use in patients with sickle cell disease.

The approval comes about a decade after the discovery of CRISPR technology for editing human DNA, representing a significant scientific advancement. Yet reaching the tens of thousands of people who could benefit from the treatment could be challenging given the potential hurdles — including cost, at $2.2 million per patient — of administering the complex therapy.

Casgevy, co-developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, uses Nobel Prize-winning technology CRISPR to edit a person’s genes to treat disease. The treatment was approved by U.K. regulators last month.

Shares of Vertex fell 1% Friday, while shares of CRISPR fell 8%.

Sickle cell, an inherited blood disorder, causes red blood cells to become misshapen half moons that get stuck inside blood vessels, restricting blood flow and causing what are known as pain crises. About 100,000 Americans are estimated to have the disease.

This microscope photo provided on Oct. 25, 2023, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows crescent-shaped red blood cells from a sickle cell disease patient in 1972. Britain’s medicines regulator has authorized the world’s first gene therapy treatment for sickle cell disease, in a move that could offer relief to thousands of people with the crippling disease in the U.K.

Dr. F. Gilbert/CDC via AP, File

Casgevy uses CRISPR to make an edit to a person’s DNA that turns on fetal hemoglobin, a protein that normally shuts off shortly after birth, to help red blood cells keep their healthy full-moon shape. In clinical trials, Casgevy eliminated pain crises in most patients.

The FDA approved the treatment for people 12 years and older.

“Sickle cell disease is a rare, debilitating and life-threatening blood disorder with significant unmet need, and we are excited to advance the field especially for individuals whose lives have been severely disrupted by the disease,” said Dr. Nicole Verdun, director of the Office of Therapeutic Products within the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, in a statement.

“Gene therapy holds the promise of delivering more targeted and effective treatments, especially for individuals with rare diseases where the current treatment options are limited,” Verdun added.

While the treatment itself is administered only once, the whole process takes months. Blood stem cells are extracted and isolated before being sent to Vertex’s lab, where they’re genetically modified. Once ready, patients receive chemotherapy for a few days to clear out the old cells and make room for the new ones. After the new cells are infused, recipients spend weeks in the hospital recovering. 

Vertex will take the lead on launching the drug and estimates about 16,000 people with severe cases of sickle cell will be eligible.

Even among the people who could benefit the most, analysts worry few will clamor for a treatment that takes months to complete, carries the risk of infertility and could be cost prohibitive. Vertex said in a regulatory filing Friday it will charge $2.2 million per patient for the treatment.

“We believe the price of medicine to reflect the value that it brings, and the value that this brings is a one-time therapy for potentially a lifetime of cure,” Vertex CEO Dr. Reshma Kewalramani said Friday in an interview with CNBC.

Vertex is seeing “unanimous enthusiasm” from payers, patients and physicians, because people with sickle cell have been marginalized, Kewalramani said, and the field hasn’t seen much innovation.

Because the procedure is so complex, it will be limited to certain health facilities like academic medical centers. Nine health-care facilities are ready to start administering Casgevy, Vertex said in a release, with more facilities added in the coming weeks.

Bluebird’s Lyfgenia 

The FDA also on Friday approved a separate gene therapy by Bluebird Bio, called Lyfgenia that works differently than Casgevy but is administered similarly and is also intended to eliminate pain crises. That therapy was similarly approved for the treatment of sickle cell disease in people 12 years and older.

Bluebird will charge $3.1 million per patient for Lyfgenia. Shares of that company, which has a market value of just about $300 million, fell 40% Friday.

Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, estimated during a call with reporters Friday that across the two therapies approved Friday, close to 20,000 patients will be eligible for treatment.

But the FDA included a black-box warning – the strongest safety warning label –  to Bluebird Bio’s Lyfgenia, noting that in rare cases the therapy can cause certain blood cancers. 

The FDA added that warning after two patients who received Lyfgenia in a clinical trial died from a form of leukemia, Verdun told reporters Friday. 

The agency said it’s still unclear whether Lyfgenia itself or another part of the treatment process, such as the chemotherapy, caused the cancer.

But Marks said that the FDA wants patients to be aware of all potential side effects of the entire treatment process: “It’s about the totality of the therapy that’s given,” he told reporters.

Vertex did not see similar blood cancer cases in its clinical trial, which is why it did not receive a black-box warning on its label, Verdun noted.

Both Bluebird Bio and Vertex will follow patients who receive the treatments for 15 years as part of a post-approval study. The FDA has encouraged the companies to specifically monitor for malignancies, or the presence of cancerous cells that can spread to other sites of the body.

Wall Avenue CEOs say Basel three endgame guidelines will damage People

(L-R) Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO of Bank of America; Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase; and Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup; testify during a Senate Banking Committee hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building on December 06, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Win Mcnamee | Getty Images

Wall Street CEOs on Wednesday pushed back against proposed regulations aimed at raising the levels of capital they’ll need to hold against future risks.

In prepared remarks and responses to lawmakers’ questions during an annual Senate oversight hearing, the CEOs of eight banks sought to raise alarms over the impact of the changes. In July, U.S. regulators unveiled a sweeping set of higher standards governing banks known as the Basel 3 endgame.  

“The rule would have predictable and harmful outcomes to the economy, markets, business of all sizes and American households,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told lawmakers.

If unchanged, the regulations would raise capital requirements on the largest banks by about 25%, Dimon claimed.

The heads of America’s largest banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, are seeking to dull the impact of the new rules, which would affect all U.S. banks with at least $100 billion in assets and take until 2028 to be fully phased in. Raising the cost of capital would likely hurt the industry’s profitability and growth prospects.

It would also likely help nonbank players including Apollo and Blackstone, which have gained market share in areas banks have receded from because of stricter regulations, including loans for mergers, buyouts and highly indebted corporations.

While all the major banks can comply with the rules as currently constructed, it wouldn’t be without losers and winners, the CEOs testified.

Those who could be unintentionally harmed by the regulations include small business owners, mortgage customers, pensions and other investors, as well as rural and low-income customers, according to Dimon and the other executives.

“Mortgages and small business loans will be more expensive and harder to access, particularly for low- to moderate-income borrowers,” Dimon said. “Savings for retirement or college will yield lower returns as costs rise for asset managers, money-market funds and pension funds.”

With the rise in the cost of capital, government infrastructure projects will be more expensive to finance, making new hospitals, bridges and roads even costlier, Dimon added. Corporate clients will need to pay more to hedge the price of commodities, resulting in higher consumer costs, he said.

The changes would “increase the cost of borrowing for farmers in rural communities,” Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser said. “It could impact them in terms of their mortgages, it could impact their credit cards. It could also importantly impact their cost of any borrowing that they do.”

Finally, the CEOs warned that by heightening oversight on banks, regulators would push yet more financial activity to nonbank players — sometimes referred to as shadow banks — leaving regulators blind to those risks.

The tone of lawmakers’ questioning during the three-hour hearing mostly hewed to partisan lines, with Democrats more skeptical of the executives and Republicans inquiring about potential harms to everyday Americans.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, opened the event by lambasting banks’ lobbying efforts against the Basel 3 endgame.

“You’re going to say that cracking down on Wall Street is going to hurt working families, you’re really going to claim that?” said Brown, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee. “The economic devastation of 2008 is what hurt working families, the uncertainty and the turmoil from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank hurt working families.”

Biden’s Israel assist leaves him as remoted as Russia on world stage: Bremmer

The Biden administration’s steadfast support of Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza has cost him tremendous political capital internationally, according to one high-profile geopolitical commentator.

Washington’s stated unconditional backing of Israel — politically, financially, and militarily — has been a longstanding pillar of its Middle East foreign policy.

When Israel suffered a brutal terrorist attack on Oct. 7 by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 hostages, Biden flew to the country in a show of solidarity, pledging billions of dollars in military support. The U.S. already provides Israel some $3.1 billion annually in military aid, making it the largest recipient of American foreign aid in the world.

But in the ensuing days and weeks, the enormous and disproportionate scale of Palestinian deaths in Gaza caused by Israeli airstrikes and ground offensive operations raised anger in many parts of the world at both Israel and Biden, particularly in the Global South. Protests in major cities, including across Europe and the U.S., in support of Palestinians and demanding a cease-fire have made global headlines.

During multiple United Nations General Assembly votes calling for cease-fires, Israel and the U.S. were often the only countries or among a very small minority voting “against.”

“Biden is probably as isolated on the global stage, given how close he is to Israel, closest ally of the United States on this issue, as the Russians were when they first invaded Ukraine, which is a shocking thing to say,” Ian Bremmer, CEO and founder of the Eurasia Group, told CNBC Tuesday. “But it shows just how challenging this war continuing is going to be for U.S. foreign policy.”

A picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on December 6, 2023, shows smoke billowing during Israeli bombardment in Gaza amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. Israeli forces were encircling southern Gaza’s main city on Wednesday, battling Hamas militants through streets and buildings in some of the most intense combat of the two-month war. 

Jack Guez | Afp | Getty Images

Internationally, numerous leaders and human rights organizations have condemned the U.S. for its continued support of Israel. Biden and other members of his administration including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have said that “far too many” Palestinians have died, and that the way Israel defends itself “matters.” They have helped broker hostage-for-prisoner swaps during a fragile week-long truce and urged the allowance of more aid into Gaza.

But the administration officials hold to the position that Israel “has the right to defend itself,” which critics see as continuing to give Israel carte blanche in its military operations.

A former Egyptian foreign affairs minister, Nabil Fahmy, said last month that the U.S. is “losing a tremendous amount of credibility in the Arab world.” 

The “U.S. needs to take a serious look at its role. If it wants to support a stable world order based on rule of law, it has to demand everybody respect international law, whether friend or foe,” Fahmy, who served as minister between 2013 and 2014, told CNBC in an interview.

Since Oct. 7, more than 16,200 people have been killed in Gaza, including more than 10,000 women and children, according to Hamas-run health authorities there. Israel declared a siege of the already blockaded territory shortly after the Hamas attacks, cutting off all water, food and fuel to Gaza. Weeks later, the first aid trucks were able to enter the Strip, but the provisions that have made it in so far are woefully inadequate, according to the United Nations.

U.S. President Joe Biden is welcomed by Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

The situation is also a problem for Biden domestically, Bremmer said.

“At home in the United States this is kind of a no-win situation for Biden, because he’s got a majority of Democrats that increasingly are aligned with the Palestinian position, while the Republicans are saying he’s too soft on Israel. And so, I mean, he just really wants this war to be over. He really wants it out of the headlines. And of course, that’s exactly what’s not happening right now.”

“In fact, the war on the ground in Gaza is now expanding,” Bremmer added. “The impact on Palestinian civilians is increasing, and the proxy war in the region, particularly the Houthis in Yemen, a proxy for Iran are engaging in their most significant attacks on commercial waterway traffic and on U.S. military vessels in the last 24 hours that we’ve seen since the war started. So this is really a problem from the perspective of the U.S. and this isn’t going to get better anytime soon.”

People use the lights on their telephones to search for victims amid the rubble of a smouldering building, following an Israeli strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 6, 2023.

Mahmud Hams | AFP | Getty Images

The White House did not immediately reply to a CNBC request for comment, but spokesperson previously told CNBC that “Israel has the right to defend itself in compliance with international law, including international humanitarian law, especially as Hamas terrorists have said that what happened on October 7th ‘will happen again and again and again’ until Israel is annihilated.”

The northern half of Gaza has been decimated, with Israeli forces now moving their ground offensive into the southern half of the enclave, after 1.1 million residents of the north evacuated south on the Israeli military’s orders. Palestinians in Gaza say they have “nowhere to go” to escape the bombings, and the World Health Organization warns that Gaza’s health system has collapsed and disease is spreading among the population.

Israel says it is not intentionally targeting civilians and that it gives warnings before it attacks certain areas. Its goals are to eliminate Hamas and its military capabilities and to ensure the return of all the hostages captured by the group during its October attack.