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North Korean Underground Christian Railroad

The journey to Thailand can take months and the path is lined with informants and extortionists. Capture in neighboring China means certain deportation and quite possibly execution.

Chiangrai News Paper – In the beginning, they arrived in ones and twos across the Mekong River. They were dirty, skeleton-thin and scared to death.

Sugint Dechkul, a small-town lawyer in Thailand’s far-northern Chiang Rai province, had no idea what to make of them. They’d wander up the riverside country road near his home, sometimes begging for food or shelter in an alien tongue.

“We’d ask, ‘Where are you from?’ They couldn’t answer,” Sugint said.

Finally, through painstaking pantomime, one of the stragglers conveyed his origins. North Korea. Nearly 3,000 miles away.

That was nine years ago. Today, the so-called “underground railroad” traveled by North Korean defectors increasingly terminates in Thailand.

In recent years, North Korean defectors’ network has discovered Thailand is the gateway to their dreams: resettlement in Seoul, South Korean citizenship and thousands in cash to start life a new life. Though this tropical nation is distant from the often chilly Korean peninsula, it is the nearest reachable ally of South Korea, which maintains a policy of financially aiding and patriating its divided kin.

“The first ones looked like they hadn’t showered in a month,” Sugint said. “My children begged us, saying ‘Mommy, Daddy, you have to help them.’ Now they come in big groups with kids on their back. They know their way and they know what they’re doing.”

The journey to Thailand can take months and the path is lined with informants and extortionists. Capture in neighboring China means certain deportation and quite possibly execution. If not killed, those returned to North Korea can expect slave labor in a string of camps believed to hold 200,000 prisoners.

Dictator Kim Jong Il

But for North Korean defectors such as Joseph, who grew up starving under dictator Kim Jong Il’s regime, the alternative was slowly wasting away on a family farm.

“We were starving,” said Joseph, using his English-language pseudonym. “So many people back home had died.”

Fleeing famine

Many escapees flee when the Yalu River, dividing China and North Korea, freezes over in winter. But Joseph’s family simply found a shallow bend to swim across. They hoped that border guards would not spot them and fire their Kalashnikov rifles.

Against the odds, they linked up with an underground Christian network managed in part by former defectors. Joseph, then 13, was taken aback by his first spoonfuls of pork and chicken while he was hiding out at a Chinese safe house.

“I had never really heard of these animals,” he said. A Chinese couple who sheltered his family at the risk of long prison terms also offered him a slice of birthday cake. It was spongy, sweet and somewhat repellent. “I didn’t like it at all. I had only eaten rice and vegetables that my parents grew.”

Along with cake, the family who housed them introduced Joseph and his family to another foreign concept: Jesus.

“No one in North Korea knows about Christianity,” he said. “But they told me about it and I was saved. I know now that God had helped us many times.”

Christianity, practiced by roughly one-third of South Koreans, is the de facto faith of the so-called “underground railroad” network, said a long-time activist with more than a decade’s experience on the circuit.

Despite several stints in Chinese prison, a U.S.—based South Korean native — who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of punishment by the Chinese government — said he still helps with escapes funded by donations raised in America. He also claims to have branded these routes the “underground railroad,” a nod to escape trails used by American slaves in the 1800s.

“When they first get out of North Korea, they look really shabby and skinny,” he said. “We make them stay at a church member’s house for a month, just to eat.” It usually takes a month’s worth of steady meals, he said, to put meat on their bones.

“After eating, they look more or less Chinese and we can put them on public transportation,” he said. ““We give them new clothes, new shoes, sometimes fake Chinese IDs.”

The mission, he said, is to slip them out of China, where agents actively pursue escapees and their guides. “Phone calls? 100 percent, they’re listening. Emails? 100 percent, they’re reading,” he said. “Nothing is safe in China.”

The second escape

In the 1990s, the network had luck shuttling North Koreans along a 15-hour bus route to Mongolia. This method was cheap, he said, costing the network only about $500 per refugee.

North Korean defectors’ network has discovered Thailand

But the Chinese clamped down and fortified the border with guards and spies. Networks have since shifted towards southwest China, where state control is a bit looser, and into bordering nations such as Vietnam, Laos and Burma. From there, many hope to reach Thailand.

These routes expose escapees to more than a week’s worth of bus and train rides riddled with random checkpoints. The totalitarian regime in Myanmar (Burma), and communist-ruled Laos and Vietnam, have proven largely unsympathetic to North Korean refugees.

“My family made it to Laos, but we were caught,” Joseph said. “We tried to say we were South Korean missionaries, but they didn’t believe us. We had no passports or South Korean money.”

Mercifully, they were only bounced back to China. The family was later spirited into Burma near treacherous jungles controlled by the United Wa State Army, a heavily armed ethnic militia funded largely by methamphetamine production.

Again, Joseph and his family were caught by police. But somehow, he said, a South Korean diplomat found them in a Burmese prison, paid for their release and brought the family to Thailand under the South Korean government’s care.

Joseph is now 24 and working for a Seoul-based network, Durihana, who helps fellow North Korean defectors. Born into severe malnutrition, he stands only 4’11.” “I’m still pretty skinny,” he said.

“Thailand is different from the other countries,” said the veteran U.S.-based activist. “They don’t exactly welcome them because they’re illegal entrants. But the refugees know if they surrender, they’ll be safe in a detention center and handed over to the South Korean embassy.”

Thailand’s immigration police detained only 46 North Korean illegal migrants in 2004. But last year, according to their figures, police processed nearly 2,500.

“I know it’s a human rights issue and, in my heart, I like to see them get help,” said Gen. Pansak Khasemasanda, a senior-ranking member of Thailand’s immigration police. “But whoever comes illegally, even if they’re North Korean, has to follow the law.”

“The burden lands on us,” he said, “because they sleep right in this cell over here.”

North Koreans who reach Thailand, however, are almost guaranteed support from South Korea. Once vetted, they’re released at a less intimidating Thai border — Bangkok’s chief international airport — with a light fine and a plane ticket to Seoul purchased by the South Korean government.

What follows is interrogation by South Korea’s CIA equivalent, months of rehabilitation and release into society with an initial payment of roughly $3,000, according to sources in the defectors’ network. About half of that payment is often owed to the network that funded their months-long escape.

Despite repeated enquiries, South Korea’s Bangkok embassy would not discuss their system of aiding North Koreans caught in Thailand. At Bangkok’s North Korean embassy, a man who answered the main line became irate when the subject was raised.

“Maybe you should just talk to these brokers because they’re the ones who allow these actions,” he said before hanging up.

These days, many escapees reach Thailand’s far north by hitching a ride on Chinese cargo ships that travel several hundred miles down the Mekong River, said Sugint, the lawyer in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province.

“For a little money, I think, a Chinese border guard might close one eye,” he said. The less fortunate have to take the old-school route: plodding the jungles of Laos undetected.

As they did nearly one decade ago, refugees continue to drift across the Mekong River at a port near Sugint’s home office, he said. But they are seldom as panicked and ragged as they once were.

He recalled a refugee years ago who was held at a police station for several hours until a bewildered cop, unable to communicate with the detainee, rolled back the cell doors and signaled for him to walk out. The frightened man gripped his seat and refused to budge.

“Now, they seem more relaxed, look clean and can even speak a little Chinese,” said Sugint, who has made a hobby of helping them fall into police custody safely. He’s even prodded his son to learn Korean and serve as the family’s pro bono translator.

“They’ve actually have money on them now,” Sugint said. “The first thing they want are cigarettes and a phone card to start making calls.”

Press Release: Chiangrai Times

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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