NEW YORK – Melinda French Gates is shedding more light on her $1 billion plan to promote women’s rights, announcing Wednesday a new $250 million fund to improve women’s mental and physical health.

The billionaire philanthropist launched “Action for Women’s Health”, a fund through her organization Pivotal Ventures. Its webpage says that “women’s health has been underfunded, overlooked, and misunderstood” and that health inequities between men and women “not only impact women’s daily lives, but they can also hurt women’s futures.”

“It’s clear we need to do a better job of addressing the barriers to women’s health. The good news is that there are so many organizations around the world doing just that. We want to ensure they get the attention and funding they deserve,” according to the webpage, which directs interested organizations to apply to receive a share of funding.

French Gates previously said that after the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that let individual states decide abortion rights, the philanthropist felt compelled to offer Americans financial support for their reproductive freedoms, an issue she had been supporting internationally.

“While I have long focused on improving contraceptive access overseas, in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home,” French Gates said in a May op-ed in the New York Times. “For too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women’s rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.”

She reiterated that Wednesday in a new interview with Bloomberg. “We’re seeing the devastating impacts” of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion rights case, being overturned, French Gates told the publication. “I would like to see the US never, never roll back a law — or any country — related to women’s health.”

French Gates previously endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a CBS News interview in July, a position she reiterated Wednesday. Harris, the Democratic nominee for US president, has been vocal about women’s reproductive rights. (CNN) …[+]

NEW YORK – For the first time since AT&T was dismantled into Baby Bells four decades ago, the US government is weighing the breakup of one of the world’s largest and most consequential monopolies: Google. The US Department of Justice in a court filing Tuesday night said it may recommend dismantling Google’s core businesses, separating Google’s search business from Android, Chrome and the Google Play app store.

“That would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features — including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence — over rivals or new entrants,” the government said in its court filing.

Google, in a blog post, called the government’s potential plan “radical,” arguing it could make the customer experience worse: Google said it could “break” Android and Chrome, hamper AI innovation and force the company to share personal information with competitors, undermining people’s privacy.

“This case is about a set of search distribution contracts,” the company said in its blog post. “Rather than focus on that, the government seems to be pursuing a sweeping agenda that will impact numerous industries and products, with significant unintended consequences for consumers, businesses, and American competitiveness.”

The Justice Department’s recommendation comes after a federal judge ruled in August that Google had violated US antitrust law with its search business. The ruling, in which the judge called Google a “monopolist,” set the stage for changes to Google’s oldest and most important business and for how millions of Americans get information online.

The case centered on the exclusive contracts that Google has spent billions of dollars to form with other tech companies, including Apple, to make it the default search provider on smartphones and web browsers. US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that those deals were anticompetitive. The case had been described as the biggest tech antitrust case since the US government’s antitrust showdown with Microsoft at the turn of the millennium.

Google said in August that it planned to appeal the decision and repeated an argument it had made in court that its search engine is the most popular among consumers because it is the best. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use,” Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in a post on X at the time. (CNN) …[+]

KOLKATA – A man has been charged for the rape and murder of a resident doctor during a night shift in India’s eastern city of Kolkata, a crime that ignited nationwide protests about the country’s pervasive problem with gender violence.

In a charge sheet seen by CNN, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) alleges the man was out drinking with a friend on the afternoon of August 8 and returned to RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, a state-run institution, in Kolkata, West Bengal, where he found the female doctor asleep on a mattress. The resident doctor’s body was found the following day with multiple injuries and signs of sexual assault in a seminar hall at the hospital, local police said at the time.

The doctor trainee was resting in a seminar room at the medical college while working a night shift when the attack occurred, Kolkata’s then-police commissioner Vineet Kumar Goyal said in August. By Indian law, rape victims cannot be named. On Monday, the CBI charged the man, a civic volunteer with Kolkata police, under sections of Indian law related to rape, causing the death of a woman and murder, a source at the CBI told CNN.

The man was arrested a day after the woman’s body was found and remains in police custody. CNN is aware of the man’s identity and has reached out to his lawyers for comment. Evidence presented by CBI, according to the charge sheet, include CCTV footage of the man at the hospital at the time of the incident and DNA found on the victim that matches that of the suspect. India has struggled for years to tackle high rates of violence against women, with a number of high-profile rape cases drawing international attention. In the weeks after the alleged attack, hundreds of thousands of doctors have joined nationwide protests demanding justice and calling for improvements to women’s safety, especially better protections for health workers.

Junior doctors in Kolkata went on strike for more than 40 days and have since ceased work again, alleging the government has failed to deliver on their demands, which include enhanced security in hospitals and an investigation into corruption within the healthcare sector.  Several junior doctors at the medical college and hospital also began an indefinite hunger strike on Sunday, protest organizers told CNN, and dozens of senior doctors at the college have resigned in solidarity with those protesting. (CNN)

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