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Getting Away with Murder in Thailand

BANGKOK – A group of protestors gathered outside the Bangkok Art & Culture Center in the heart of the Thai capital wearing homemade paper masks in the likeness of a black panther.

The dozens of Thais who showed up for the improvised gathering one recent Sunday afternoon weren’t there for an animal-themed costume party, though. They were there to protest the killing of an endangered Indochinese leopard in a wildlife reserve.

Using a black bin bag and a paper cut-out of a hand-drawn machine gun, one of the protesters enacted the killing of the big cat. The black leopard was allegedly gunned down in early February by powerful construction magnate Premchai Karnasuta, whose company has long enjoyed lucrative government contracts.

The wildlife rangers who discovered his hunting party inside a World Heritage wildlife sanctuary in Kanchanaburi province in central Thailand reported that Premchai and three companions had skinned the dead predator and feasted on some of its remains.

During a subsequent meeting with police, the mogul was photographed receiving deferential treatment from a senior police officer.

“We’ve had enough of impunity for rich people,” says one protester, a young woman who studies at Bangkok’s prestigious Chulalongkorn University. “Some rich people in Thailand think they can get away with murder. We can’t accept that.”

The poaching of the black leopard has enraged Thai animal lovers. Yet despite the public uproar, local conservationists are concerned that the billionaire will be let off lightly for a wildlife crime that would likely see an average citizen sent to prison for years.

Premchai, who is facing several charges including trespassing and poaching, has denied any wrongdoing. “I didn’t do it,” he told local media. He hasn’t explained, however, why he was in the wildlife sanctuary and how the carcasses of the freshly killed leopard and several other endangered animals ended up in his possession.

“Everyone knows what happened, but we can’t do anything,” says Patcharapol Tangruen, an influential Bangkok-based street artist who uses the moniker Alex Face.

Patcharapol is famous for his trademark cartoon character called Mardi, a dour-faced child in a rabbit costume.

Incensed by the tycoon’s denials, the artist has recently spray-painted Mardi in a new getup onto a wall in Bangkok: a black panther costume with a pointy Pinocchio nose. “All I can do [about this injustice] is to paint about it,” he explains.

Lots of other graffiti artists have been doing that too. On walls around the capital and other Thai cities pieces of graffiti featuring black panthers have become commonplace. In one elaborate mural, created on a wall in the northern city of Chiang Mai, Premchai is depicted between two leopard skulls with a military ribbon rack serving as a blindfold for him.

The artwork is a poignant take on the “see no evil” stance of local authorities when it comes to powerful figures. “I try to avoid in-your-face messages in my work but in this case I felt I had to be direct,” says Piyasak Khieosaard, the graffiti artist who has created the mural. “This poaching case exemplifies what’s wrong in Thailand on many levels.”

Piyasak focuses on environmental issues in his street art and employs subtly creative imagery to bring attention to pressing environmental concerns from climate change to deforestation.

“I think as artists we should do more than just try to create beautiful images,” he says. “We should shine a spotlight on important issues.”

In a country ruled by a military government that routinely clamps down on dissent, persistent calls for justice by street artists and small groups of protesters have served to keep the focus on the poaching of the leopard as well as larger social issues.

Protesters in Bangkok re-enact the killing of a black leopard in a wildlife reserve in central Thailand. (Photo by Tibor Krausz/ucanews.com)

Without such calls, public interest in the case might have long faded from memory or might never have captured attention in the first place.

“If the leopard had been killed by an average Joe, it probably wouldn’t have received much attention,” says Sasin Chalermlarp, an environmental activist.

“But this isn’t just about a guy walking into a forest and shooting a leopard. It’s a clear case of double standards. We can’t allow certain privileged people who don’t respect laws to get away with ruining the hard work of conservationists who have been trying to protect forests and endangered species.”

Thais tend to be wary of the country’s courts when it comes to alleged crimes by the rich and powerful. In one notorious incident in 2012, Vorayuth Yoovidhaya, an heir to a multi-billion-dollar fortune as the grandson of the Red

Bull energy drink empire’s co-founder, allegedly drove his Ferrari at high speed into a policeman on a motorcycle, killing him in a hit-and-run accident. Despite having long had an arrest warrant out for him, he remains at large, carrying on with a jet-setting lifestyle.

In 2010, another scion of a wealthy family, Orachorn Thephasadin na Ayudhya, drove her car into the back of a passenger van on an elevated expressway in Bangkok, causing the van to flip over and plummet to the road below. Nine people died in the crash. Orachorn, who was 16 at the time and didn’t have a driving license, got off with a suspended prison sentence and 138 hours of community service.

She will be officially allowed to drive again next year when she turns 25.

Even court officials have come in for flak for allegedly breaking laws or at least ignoring them. In a recent case that has caused outrage, a billion-baht housing project for justice officials in Chiang Mai was found to have encroached on a protected biodiversity-rich forest at the foot of the northern province’s famous Doi Suthep mountain.

Thousands of locals have staged protests calling for the housing project to be demolished so that trees could be re-grown in its place. In response to the outcry, Thailand’s government has announced that the 45 newly built houses on the site will not be occupied and the environment will be rehabilitated.

But it’s the death of the black leopard that continues to arouse the fiercest passions. On a Saturday in early May, three months after the big cat was killed, scores of people gathered again at the Bangkok Art & Culture Center.

They came to reiterate calls for Premchai to be brought to justice.

“A lot of conservation issues fall into a gray area. This poaching case is black and white,” says Petch Manopawitr, an environmentalist who works for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“That rich guy had no business being in that forest and shooting those animals. Will he be brought to justice? Ninety-nine percent of the people I’ve spoken to think he’ll get away with a light sentence. If he was a poor villager, he’d be put away. If he does get off, that will be a slap in the face for justice and for conservation.”

By Tibor Krausz
UCANews

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

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’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.

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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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(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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Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli, To repay $6.4 Million

Washington — The Supreme Court rejected Martin Shkreli’s appeal on Monday, after he was branded “Pharma Bro” for raising the price of a lifesaving prescription.

Martin appealed a decision to repay $64.6 million in profits he and his former company earned after monopolizing the pharmaceutical market and dramatically raising its price. His lawyers claimed the money went to his company rather than him personally.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is customary, and there were no notable dissents.

Prosecutors, conversely, claimed that the firm had promised to pay $40 million in a settlement and that because Martin orchestrated the plan, he should be held accountable for returning profits.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Martin was also forced to forfeit the Wu-Tang Clan’s unreleased album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which has been dubbed the world’s rarest musical album. The multiplatinum hip-hop group auctioned off a single copy of the record in 2015, stipulating that it not be used commercially.

Shkreli was convicted of lying to investors and defrauding them of millions of dollars in two unsuccessful hedge funds he managed. Shkreli was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals (later Vyera), which hiked the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after acquiring exclusive rights to the decades-old medicine in 2015. It cures a rare parasite condition that affects pregnant women, cancer patients, and HIV patients.

shkreli

He defended the choice as an example of capitalism in action, claiming that insurance and other programs ensured that those in need of Daraprim would eventually receive it. However, the move prompted criticism, from the medical community to Congress.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Attorney Thomas Huff said the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling was upsetting, but the high court could still overturn a lower court judgment that allowed the $64 million penalty order even though Shkreli had not personally received the money.

“If and when the Supreme Court does so, Mr. Shkreli will have a strong argument for modifying the order accordingly,” he told reporters.

Shkreli was freed from prison in 2022 after serving most of his seven-year sentence.

SOURCE | AP