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Acid Attacks, Beatings, Crowdfunding: ABC of Thai Domestic Violence
BANGKOK – Assaulted with acid by her husband as she slept, Chorlada Tarawan died hours later, refused treatment by a Bangkok hospital as a final indictment of her worth.
Brutalised in life, ignored in her hour of pressing need, Chorlada has galvanised Thailand in death and become a symbol of the pervasive and persistent violence so many Thai women face.
Activists protested with her coffin outside the hospital, and petitioned the health ministry to investigate the hospital’s “moral negligence”.
The husband has been arrested, said police officials, under pressure to act after a surge in grisly stories about male-on-female violence.
“To be abused by her husband, then denied by the hospital shows how we treat abuse victims,” said Jadet Chaowilai, director of advocacy group Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation.
“Everyone failed her. Particularly the society that regards domestic violence as a private matter, and tells women to stay quiet,” he said, ahead of Sunday’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
The statistics make for grim reading.
One in three women around the world has experienced physical and/or sexual violence by their partner, according to the World Health Organization.
Of women who were victims of homicide in 2012, nearly half were killed by intimate partners or family members, it said.
Yet women who experience violence are often blamed and their testimonies doubted, said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of United Nations Women.
“Fear of reprisals, of not being believed, and the stigma borne by the survivor have silenced the voices of millions of survivors of violence and masked the true extent of women’s continued horrific experiences,” she said in a statement.
SILENT EPIDEMIC
Across the world, women of all ages endure violence despite legislation to prevent it. Male-dominated societies and deep-rooted traditions are often blamed – whatever the cause, the same pattern of degradation repeats.
In Mauritania, violence against women is seen as an act of love and an accepted practice among some ethnic groups.
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In Britain, the government has proposed new measures including electronic monitoring devices for abusers to tackle the “silent national health epidemic” of domestic abuse.
Russia last year eased some penalties for domestic violence, while a long-awaited law in Morocco does not go far enough to protect women from abuse, activists say.
In Thailand, the Domestic Violence Victim Act was enacted in 2007, vowing harsher punishments for abusers and better protection for women.
But this has not proved a major deterrent, as few cases are reported, said Busayapa Srisompong, a lawyer and founder of a non-profit that helps victims of domestic abuse.
Busayapa, herself a survivor of domestic violence, said even she had struggled to file her complaint, with the police advising her to “go back and work things out”.
She persisted and won her case, but that is rare.
“Domestic violence has been normalised and justified for so long that even the few women who dare to speak up and go to the police are discouraged from filing a report,” she said.
“Even in court, the prosecutor will often tell the victim to go back to her husband for the sake of the family. Imagine the effect it has on a traumatised woman,” she said.
There is scant official Thai data on violence against women.
A survey of about 2,500 Thai women in four provinces showed one in six women faced intimate partner violence, according to a study by researcher Montakarn Chuemchit at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, published earlier this year.
But nearly 90 percent of rape cases go unreported, according to a study published last year by U.N. Women.
PRIVATE MATTER
Local media have carried a slew of stories detailing graphic attacks on women, a phenomenom that appears to be on the rise.
Earlier this week, a man was arrested for killing his pregnant wife and mutilating her body.
In June, a man confessed he had beaten his ex-girlfriend with a hammer, then cut her body into pieces and disposed of them in a wooded part of Bangkok.
The same month, two men separately shot their ex-girlfriends to death in public.
One man beat his girlfriend live on Facebook.
In another case that made headlines, a man sued his ex-girlfriend for defamation after she wrote on social media that she had suffered abuse. She did not name her abuser, yet the man sued her in a provincial court.
His lawyer told the judge that domestic violence was “a private matter,” said Busayapa, who represented the woman.
As the woman struggled to pay mounting bills, Busayapa set up a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to help her, garnering about $1,500.
The man dropped the case a few weeks later.
“Despite the difficulty of going to a distant court, we pursued the case – for her sake, and to show other victims that domestic violence is not a private matter, and that we are not to blame,” Busayapa told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Thai police cadet academy’s decision to admit only male candidates from next year could discourage reporting of sexual assaults and domestic violence, she said.
TIME UP?
Be it #MeToo or #TimesUp, #BalanceTonPorc or #HollaBack!, global movements this past year have encouraged women from the United States to India to speak up and speak out.
They have had little effect in Thailand, despite local efforts to highlight the crisis and force some sort of progress.
Model and television host Cindy Bishop earlier this year curated an exhibition in Bangkok of clothes worn by girls and women when they were sexually assaulted to highlight victim shaming.
Last week, she launched a campaign to encourage women to shed traditions that encourage them to keep quiet about abuse.
“There are several sayings in Thai about keeping family issues private, and how quarrels between a husband and wife are normal. But violence is not normal or a private matter,” she said.
“The law alone is not enough. It will take a massive, combined effort by men and women to change how we think and act towards women.”
By Rina Chandran- Reuters
News
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.

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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 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.
SOURCE | CNN
News
2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Washington — Trump Media, The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.
The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.
The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.
The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.
Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.
The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.
SOURCE | AP
News
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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