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China and South Korea Implicated in Cold Pill Scam

The Department of Special Investigation (DSI) will visit South Korea to investigate the export of about 40 tonnes of pseudoephedrine-laced cold medicine to Thailand, after a company under suspicion claimed its name was used without permission on false declarations for the medicine.

 

CHIANGRAI TIMES –  Thai Department of Special Investigation (DSI)  are extending their inquiry in to the diversion of chilled tablets for the production of the illegal stimulant methamphetamine abroad after finding that sizable quantities of the pills may have been illegally imported from China and South Korea.

Department of Special Inquiry Director-General Tharit Phengdit said Thursday that his agency found documents about a Thai company’s deal to buy ten billion pseudoephedrine-based chilled pills from a Chinese firm. They said it also found facts of illegal purchases and shipments of such drugs from South Korea.

Thailand is a major market and transit point for methamphetamine. Tharit said the smuggled medicine was sent to drug dealers along the Thailand-Myanmar border. Myanmar is a major producer of the forbidden drug.

Tharit said Thai officials will meet with staff from the Chinese and South Korean embassies in Bangkok before investigators travel abroad.

The DSI has been inquiring in to hospitals, clinics and pharmacies around Thailand that made suspiciously giant orders of pills containing pseudoephedrine, which is often used in the production of methamphetamine.

The agency began its inquiry after the discovery in February of discarded packaging for one.2 million chilled tablets in northern Thailand.

Since then, investigators have found that over 11 million tablets went missing from at least 12 hospitals nationwide. Hospital directors and pharmacists were called in to give testimony and some were removed from their posts. – Anna Wong

Officials find another order for billions of tablets

Shipping firms to be charged for falsely declaring shipment in custom

Investigators checking the premises of an electronics parts importing company found an order to purchase 10 billion tablets from China. The firm is believed to have been involved in making false customs declarations to smuggle 40 tonnes of pseudoephedrine drugs from South Korea previously.

Meanwhile, apart from labelling all “callcentre scams” as special cases yesterday, the Special Case Committee also agreed to have the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) take up and investigate all pseudoephedrinesmuggling cases.

DSI chief Tarit Pengdith will lead the investigation to be conducted jointly by the DSI, public prosecutors, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other related agencies.

Tarit said that besides the contract to purchase 40tonnes of the drug reportedly from a South Korean firm by UTAC Thai, the officials also found another purchase order for 10 billion tablets from China. He said the contract was two years old and showed that the first lot of 2 million tablets had been delivered on July 31, 2009. The DSI chief went on to say that the tablets ordered from both South Korea and China were of the COLCOLCO brand.

The DSI has also found images of those who moved the medicines out of the cargo building, he said, adding that initially investigators would hold the shipping company responsible because in the import documents, the shipment was falsely declared as antibiotics and electronic parts. However, the shipment was not falsely declared in South Korea because there the drug is not illegal.

Tarit added that UTAC Thai has been insisting that its name is being used falsely and that it has nothing to do with the crime. The DSI chief said that investigators needed to visit South Korea to inquire about the purchase contract and the import procedure.

A DSI source said that both Thai and South Korean FDA officers had detected false customs declarations made in Suvarnabhumi Airport from February 23, 2010 to May 8, 2010 of shipments ordered by UTAC Thai. The shipping firms involved are IndoChina Inter Group, Two Supply, Oversea Product and Chanthawat Enterprise.

Meanwhile, in Lamphun’s Muang district, police yesterday searched for more documents at Sirivej Hospital after finding that this 10bed facility had ordered more than a million tablets of pure and mixed pseudoephedrine tablets last year but did not report the purchases to the provincial health office.

Sirivej Hospital director Dr Chote Nisung yesterday insisted that the hospital staff had nothing to do with the forged purchase orders for the pills and clarified that the hospital had ordered 350,000 pseudoephedrine tablets last January and February from the firms Asean Pharmaceutical and Milano Factory. He added that this shipment was meant to cover the entire year and the hospital did not order any more after that. In March, the hospital received 100,000 tablets from Milano Factory and 150,000 from Asean Pharmaceutical, but since these drugs were reportedly not ordered, the hospital told the two companies to pick them up, which they did, he said.

Chote added that the FDA had found that the hospital had ordered some 900,000 tablets from the same two companies on nine occasions from May to September, even though no such orders had been made. He went on to say that since the hospital had not ordered the pills and had not received them, they did not report it to the provincial health office. Insisting that the hospital staff had nothing to do with the crime, he added that a gang of drugtraffickers may have used the hospital’s name to order the drug and salespeople from pharmaceutical companies might be at fault. He explained that this was the reason why the hospital had filed a police complaint against the two firms.

Provincial Police Region 5 deputy chief Pol MajGeneral Chamnan Ruadraew said his investigation team had made good progress in its probe into the Central Memorial Hospital in Chiang Mai and Sirivej Hospital in Lamphun, and that it would soon seek an arrest warrant for at least one more suspect.

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

Google

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

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.

google

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.

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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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2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

trump

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.

trump

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

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.

musk trump

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.

He also welcomed back a vast list of previously banned users, including Trump, and endorsed him for the 2024 presidential election.

SOURCE | AP

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

Supreme Court

(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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Could Last-Minute Surprises Derail Kamala Harris’ Campaign? “Nostradamus” Explains the US Poll.

Scientists Awarded MicroRNA The Nobel Prize in Medicine.

US Inflation will Comfort a Fed Focused on Labor Markets.

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