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Australian Filmmaker David Tucker Makes Documentary about the Bloody Events at Bangkok’s Thammasat University on Oct. 6, 1976

Australian filmmaker David Tucker, left, and his colleague Patron Phoothong walk through a residential neighborhood near Thammasat University in Bangkok
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BANGKOK – A battered body hangs from a tree as a man swings a folding chair over his head, preparing to smash it into the corpse. Spectators watch intently at a slight distance, some smiling, as if watching a Punch and Judy show.
A photo of that moment immortalizes the bloody events of Oct. 6, 1976, when heavily armed security forces shot up Bangkok’s Thammasat University campus and killed scores of students, while right-wing vigilantes captured and lynched would-be escapees. Even so, what happened there, and why, is to some degree forgotten in Thailand.
“Younger Thai people look at the photo and ask where it is from,” said Australian filmmaker David Tucker, who is making a documentary about the killings. “They have no idea about the sixth of October. Some say, ‘It must have come from another country. It couldn’t have happened in Thailand.’ People old enough to remember October 6 can guess where it is from and some have seen the picture before, but generally speaking, people are reluctant to talk.”
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How reluctant? No one in that Pulitzer Prize-winning photo – the victim, the attacker or any of the dozens of spectators – has been identified in the 40 years since Associated Press photographer Neal Ulevich shot it.
That fact intrigued Tucker, who has teamed up with Thai researchers who are attempting to put names to the long-ago faces. They hope to harness the power of social media to elicit more information, and this week their website, www.6Oct-photo.com , went live.
“It’s something the government doesn’t want them to talk about,” Tucker said, “but I think also a reluctance because the event is hard to reconcile with how Thais see themselves. They are famous for being a gentle and harmonious society and yet right here in the middle of their history is an event that is characterized by savagery and violence, right in the middle of downtown Bangkok.”
Anocha Suwichakornpong, a Thai director who has made a film inspired by the events of Oct. 6, sees parallels with modern-day Thailand. The military seized control from an elected government in May 2014, following months of sometimes violent protests, and appears assured of maintaining control for the next several years.
“I feel the political climate of the recent years has been quite similar to that of 1970s Thailand, especially in the days leading up to the last coup (in 2014), whereby right-wingers and ultra-royalists were becoming more extreme and at the same time the military has been gaining more power. It’s almost like we are living in a time warp,” she said.
Three years before the 1976 killings, students spearheaded protests forcing Thailand’s unpopular military dictators to flee the country, ushering in real parliamentary democracy. It was a tumultuous time to manage such a transition. In 1975, three neighboring countries – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – had been taken over by communists. Thailand had been a staunch ally of the United States in the Vietnam War, but Washington was now turning tail in Southeast Asia, and its protective shield carried no convincing guarantee.
To Thailand’s establishment, democracy looked messy, divisive, pitting farmers against landowners, workers against employers. The Marxist rhetoric of student activists hinted at an enemy within.
In the autumn of 1976, the students overplayed their hand when they protested the return to Thailand of one of the ousted dictators. A skit meant to represent the police killing of two activists was misrepresented by right-wing media as insulting the country’s revered royal family. Students kept up their protests even as army-backed right-wing groups began to howl for blood.
By midnight Oct. 5, the 3,000 to 4,000 protesting students inside Thammasat were under siege. Irate royalists and organized thugs gathered outside gates that the students had locked for their own protection. Police, many from heavily armed special units trained for combat, fired revolvers, assault rifles, grenade launchers and even anti-tank weapons upon the students, a handful of whom are believed to have returned fire with small arms.
By midmorning, the police were sweeping the university grounds and buildings, making their student prisoners strip off shirts and lie face down on the central athletic field. Thugs rushed in unimpeded, trying to snatch vulnerable students on the fringes, even seeking to take the wounded from ambulances.
Hanged bodies were battered until unrecognizable. Corpses had stakes driven into them. A pyre was made of four casually stacked victims. All of it was in plain view on a public field outside the university.
Ulevich took the photo of the hanging, one of 12 photos of the scene that earned him a Pulitzer, just after leaving the university grounds. He had been anxious that if he stayed too long, his film might be seized.
“When I got to the campus gate,” he said in an interview at his Colorado home last week, “I saw a commotion under two trees in the large common field that is in the center of Bangkok.
“I walked over to one and saw the man with the chair beating one of the hanged bodies over the head. Two trees away there was another hanged body. They were both quite dead by that time.”
The official death toll was 46; more reliable estimates from scholars put it upwards of 100.
When the army seized power later that day, it imposed a news blackout. Newspapers were temporarily shut down, film and notes seized from reporters. A TV announcer who put footage of the carnage on air was immediately fired.
But pictures from international news and broadcast agencies beat the blackout. Newspapers around the world published the shocking images.
It was 20 years before Thais even began commemorating the massacre, with a mass gathering at Thammasat and the organized publication of many books. Smaller commemorations then became a tradition, but in 2014, the military government ordered politics to be kept out of the proceedings.
The junta has shown no signs of interfering with this year’s commemorations, though its critics are among the organizers and events have been expanded for the first time to two other Bangkok universities.
Ulevich’s photo is the main design element for many of the posters marking the 40th anniversary. It also has been an inspiration to Thai artists, including Anocha, whose independent feature “By the Time It Gets Dark” is making the festival rounds. The movie is about a filmmaker working on a movie based on a writer who had been a student activist in the 1970s.
Ulevich’s photo, she said in an email, “has served as a reminder (to those who have forgotten) to which depth Thai society can sink into in the grip of hysteria and madness. And to those who had not lived through the experience, to ignite something in them that hopefully can help prevent such barbarity from happening again.”
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AP video journalists Jerry Harmer and Tassanee Vejpongsa in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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
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.
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
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