Teen carries out mass shooting at Thai school

0:03Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. We're beginning with the news of a school shooting in Thailand, an attack that happened mid-morning local time. Police say that a 14-year-old boy first shot his grandparents and then with a handgun that belonged to his grandfather went to his prestigious school on the outskirts of Bangkok and shot dead five teachers and injured more than 30 others on the school campus. The boy is then reported to have shot and killed himself. This footage was recorded on a mobile phone by a student in one of the classrooms.

0:52Three shots, but you could also probably just hear there the gasps later on. You hear on this bit of footage stifled weeping as the pupils clad in their blue uniforms crouch on the floor underneath their tables, trying to stay as quiet as possible. These students later talked about what they had witnessed. I was working in the room when I heard a gunshot, followed by several more continuously. At first, I thought somebody was playing with a gun, so I called my friends to hide inside the room. He first opened fire underneath Building 5, then went up the building shooting students as he went. After that, he went up to another building, Building 4, and shot at every room.

1:37I don't know why. One of my friends got shot. He walked up to the door and just fired. I don't know the shooter, but he seemed to be a student with special needs. A little later, the Thai Prime Minister, Anutin Chanwira Kun, arrived at the school and revealed that a friend of the shooter had told the police that the boy had been under great stress. And the Prime Minister had this message for those who said, there needs to be better screening to stop weapons being brought into places such as schools. This really has nothing to do with security measures in the school. And in talking about this particular case, the gun is a registered one and it is kept in the house.

2:30some way, somehow, we don't know how this child got access to the gun. The Thai Prime Minister speaking a little earlier on today. The BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head, is based in Bangkok. He's been at the school today. Jonathan, what more have you been able to learn about how this shooting unfolded? well the same way you know this as you've just done listening to the terrifying testimony of the students and teachers who witnessed it i'm actually standing in the enormous basketball covered basketball multi-purpose court in the school where we've been based since they opened the school up i'm facing one of the buildings where the shootings took place and one teacher described to us how he went up to the fourth floor now to get a sense that it's a very big schools, 3 ,000 students, so there's an awful lot of classrooms.

3:25It's very typical of schools in this part of the world. You have access to the classes on an outside corridor, sort of like a long balcony facing open to the air, and that he was going along this out sort of corridor, simply firing repeatedly into each of the classrooms. So, you know, we've heard very vivid accounts, very scary accounts. I mean, one girl describing watching her teacher being shot And the fact that so many teachers were killed might suggest that this young teenager, this 14-year-old, had a grievance against them. The police have said he was extremely accurate. They're very surprised at how many lethal shots he fired and was able to kill the teachers that he targeted.

4:11But, of course, he's hit a lot of students as well. And some of those remain in critical condition in hospital. But very many questions. I think the biggest one of all will have to be not about gun laws so much in Thailand more about enforcement and more about gun culture. There are just so many guns in this country. I mean more than 10 % of the population own a gun. There are more gun deaths in Thailand every year per capita than there are in the United States. And those are issues that have come up before in previous shocking incidents involving gun crime that I've covered and that have happened many times before.

4:45Up to now I've never seen anything much done about it. The Prime Minister talked about toughening the laws again, but the laws were very strict. It's very hard to get a gun licence, and this appears to have been a licence gun. It's more the culture of guns, that people love them, they have them hanging around, and clearly if this young man did get the gun from his grandfather, who we think is now one of his victims, there was very lax gun culture in that house. So unlicensed guns, but you're saying ready access to those guns? yes i mean there are thought to be about six million licensed guns in thailand and the thing about a gun license is they can be passed on hereditory you can pass them down to your son so somebody who got a gun license back in the 1950s could have passed that all the way down through his or her descendants which means that the number of licenses is very high now caps been put on that now but the other problem in thailand is is i can tell you because i know people who've done it.

5:43It's very, very easy to get an unlicensed gun here. It's all about money. Thailand has very porous borders. There are a lot of guns washing around in the country. The armed forces and the police, who are very well armed, are not always good at keeping tabs on those weapons. Guns involved in crimes have often been found to originate in either the military or the police. And then you've got a war going on in Myanmar on one border. You've got massive smuggling that goes across other borders. There are a lot of guns in Cambodia as well. It's just there are an awful lot of guns about. And if the authorities want to tackle gun culture, which is really, I think, the problem here and behind many other incidents, that would involve much bigger changes than just changing the law.

6:25And just in terms of this particular incident, Jonathan, I mean, as you say, there are much bigger questions perhaps for Thailand to answer. But just in terms of the sort of methodical nature in which this teenage gunman appears to have been operating. I mean, from what I was reading, the initial reports of gunshots came in at around 10 o 'clock this morning. It seems as if it took the police some time to arrive. Is that correct? No, I think the police were here pretty quickly, and they nearly always are. And this is, Nontaburi is a big urban area on the outskirts of Bangkok. It's got a lot of public facilities, including police stations.

7:06There were ambulances here very fast as well. Their problem is, it's an absolute warren, the school. It's so big. Imagine 3 ,000 schools, lots of stories. They were trying to track down where he was. I think it did take them more than an hour. But he appears to have, you know, he shot himself and killed himself. And they found multiple rounds of ammunition on him. He appears to have just decided just to end it by himself. I don't know, to be honest, whether they could have moved faster, but I doubt it would have made a difference to the casualties. I mean, there may be some questions, which obviously the Prime Minister has raised, about the mental stress he's under.

7:43Thailand has not in the past been very good at dealing with mental stress issues in the population. There have always been issues in schools, too, about severe punishments, severe rules. Again, we don't know whether that really was a factor here in this school. There's a lot to be found out yet about how a 14-year-old could do something so terrible. Indeed. Jonathan Head at the scene of that shooting. Thank you very much. US researchers say they have used artificial intelligence to design completely new viruses, the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI. The advance has been heralded as a very significant moment for science, but significant potentially in two contending ways.

8:24as a revolutionary new tool for creating drugs and treatments, but also one that could perhaps be used maliciously to create new harmful pathogens. Simon Clarke is a microbiologist at the University of Reading in England and joins us now. Dr. Clarke, thank you for your time. This was a very specific sort of virus that was created. Tell me about it. Yeah, they're called bacteriophage. and they're viruses that infect bacteria and lyse them. They pop them when the virus reproduces inside it. And that has meant that some people have suggested that they could be used to treat infections that are resistant to antibiotics.

9:11Right. And the idea is that, I mean, synthesising viruses has been done before, but what is new here is that this artificial intelligence model created an entirely new virus. Yes, these are viruses that don't exist in nature. And that's interesting from an evolution, this study of evolution, but it presents a number of potential problems for safety and ethics. Yeah, I want to get on to that. But before we do, and it is hugely important, as I think you've been signalling, just about the process. And And one of the parallels that I saw that has been drawn and is perhaps useful for non-scientists such as me is that we're sort of used to AI models that are very adept at reading, in my case, English, trawling the English language through these large language models to suggest sort of new bits of text.

10:15this AI model trawled DNA. I mean, the sort of the language of life in order to come up with a new model. Is that a reasonable parallel? Yes, it is. Language, words are just code, and that's what DNA is as well. So the same principles have applied. And in terms of, let's talk about the promise before the potential danger. The promise of this, presumably is that you could create not just new types of viruses to deal with bacteria, but new vaccines maybe, new antibodies to help those with immune problems? Yeah, I mean, this work directly doesn't facilitate that, but it certainly has been suggested that AI can be applied to those challenges and people are working on that.

11:09Right. And in terms of the potential peril here, explain to me how that might be the case where there not to be significant guardrails put in place. well this study has come up with versions of a virus that are fitter they're better able to replicate and what these researchers have done is disabled their their ai model so that it cannot make versions of viruses that infect us or animals etc but of course the genie is out of the bottle this is proof of principle and there are lots and lots around the world of different ai models And there's nothing to stop somebody generating their own AI model using genetic code from viruses to generate viruses that could infect us, could cause a problem.

12:05And that presumably also we would have difficulty detecting because they would be brand new. They would be brand new. They could potentially spread pretty rapidly. and vaccines and treatments that we already have might not work against them. But it's a might, not a wouldn't. Understood. Dr Simon Clarke, microbiologist from the University of Reading, thank you very much for such a clear explanation of what sounds like a potentially very significant development involving the use of artificial intelligence in designing these completely new viruses. More about it from our health correspondent, James Gallagher, if you want to read about that on our website, bbc.com forward slash news.

12:59And coming up on the programme, the Iranian political prisoner, Morad Tarbaz, talks to me about his new memoir relating to his time in Iran's notorious Evin prison. I did not want to write just the tale of all the trauma that occurred during this almost six years of my imprisonment. I had set out to write something about how I was able to keep my sanity. That interview coming up in 30 minutes. Our main headline from the BBC newsroom this hour. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have signed a mutual defence agreement. We'll be talking about that in 15 minutes. And as we've been hearing, a teenage boy in Thailand has shot dead at least seven people, including teachers and two of his grandparents, before killing himself.

13:59This is NewsHour. It's live from the BBC in London. I'm Tim Franks. The story now of a rescue mission unlike any other. Never before had a plane landed in eastern Antarctica in July in the depth of the Antarctic midwinter, amid some of the most hostile conditions the continent could throw at the crew. They were on an urgent mission to rescue a US expedition member who'd been taken ill at the McMurdo Research Station on Ross Island. One of the four pilots on board for the five-hour flight from Hobart, Australia, was Captain Louise Robertson. The Antarctic conditions are probably the most inhospitable for aircraft or people or operations in the world.

14:42Not only cold and dark conditions, but strong winds and weather conditions are very likely. So we had to collaborate with the forecasters to make sure that we were getting the best possible weather window and make sure that also the runway would be available after a large snowstorm that occurred. the day before we were due to go down there. And then for the actual operation and arrival, we were battling with the minus 40 plus degree temperatures, which meant there are a lot of calculations and corrections for our heights and altitudes for our approach. Why does the extreme cold affect your flying in such an extreme way?

15:26There's limitations on the minimum temperature for the aircraft to do with the fuel temperatures and operating temperatures. And then because the air is so cold, it's so dense, the aircraft is then actually flying at a lower altitude than what we would expect it to be. The aircraft may be aiming for, say, 3 ,000 feet, but in reality it's more like 2 ,500 feet. So we apply the correct temperature correction to make sure that we're actually at 3 ,000 feet. That must be rather unnerving. I mean, I'm sure in your great experience as a pilot, you take a lot of this in your stride, but it sounds as if these were calculations that you were almost having to make on the fly and that get it wrong, and it could potentially have very serious consequences.

16:13Absolutely. It is another consideration that you wouldn't have for a normal flight. And I guess, I mean, the whole time you must be having to balance, is this flight feasible? Is it getting to the point where it actually may be dangerous for us to embark against the fact that you're trying to respond to a medical emergency? Yeah, we have a very strict set of guidelines that we follow as a company that we've set up over the many years that we've been operating to Antarctica. If the weather approaches any of those limitations, then we will not continue the flight and we'll turn around and go back to the mainland.

16:48Tell me about the people who had to prepare the runway because I guess the conditions on ground must have been absolutely miserable. Yeah, they did a phenomenal job. They're the crew at McMurdo Station that are there for the winter. It's a compacted snow runway, so it's a three kilometre long runway surface that they groom to give not only a flat surface, but also it has to have a certain amount of friction, so it can't be ultra smooth because otherwise it's too slippery for our aircraft to land on and break. So there was a snowstorm on the day before we went down and they had to get their groomers out and go and do about six hours of work to make sure the runway was operational for our arrival, which at minus 40 plus degrees, strong winds and snow showers was a fairly incredible feat for them to complete in that time frame.

17:43Yeah, and this is midwinter as well in Antarctica, so presumably there isn't much light. That's correct. Yeah, we aimed to land at nautical twilight which would have given us the greatest amount of light but in reality it was still pitch black so we had very little light for our arrival. We could very clearly see the runway and the lights around the runway but there was no other lighting in the area so it was very hard to judge the depth and the length of the runway. It was quite a visual illusion. How quick was the turnaround? We're on the ground for exactly one hour. And the other pilots, this is your husband?

18:21My husband was in the cockpit with me when we did the landing. It's a small team at Sky Traders, so we do all tend to fly together fairly regularly. And we're both captains with the airline, so quite often we can sit in either seat and fly together. And how's your patient doing? Do you know? We're not up to date, except that we've heard he's recovering well. Captain Louise Robertson with that rescue in the deep midwinter in Antarctica. Welcome back to News Hour. One of the questions that's been posed by the US-Iran war is how the region might be reconfigured, perhaps new alliances forged. Well, maybe one sign of that came today with the signing in the Saudi city of Mecca of a defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, a pact that seems to carry deliberate echoes of the transatlantic NATO alliance with the mutual promise that an attack on one would be seen as an attack on all.

19:19The BBC's Joe Inwood is here in the News Air studio. Joe, what do you think this pact actually means in concrete? I mean, I think the heart of it is that idea of mutual defence. And that was, I've read the statements, the official statements of all three of the countries. And that's the main thing that they all emphasise. I think it's, although, and that has led, of course, it was signed in the city of Mecca, the holy city of Mecca. And that's led some, you know, that's not a coincidence. and it's led some people to sort of suggest this might be a Muslim NATO is the phrase that was used. I think most of them are trying to row back from that, saying they're not going for something that's exactly the same in NATO or replaces NATO.

19:57Certainly experts I've been reading were saying that they think this is a different beast. But it is a significant development, I think. I think one important bit of context is we should note that this actually whole process has been going on long before the war with Iran happened. So we shouldn't just read this as a direct response to that, but possibly more as a direct response to the increased instability in the region that we've seen over the last few years. And does it also suggest that there's a sort of there's a new alignment of interests as well? Because, I mean, certainly for a time, from what I recall, I mean, when it comes to the chaos in Libya, Turkey and Saudi Arabia were not necessarily on the same sides there.

20:40But is there a sense that they are sort of becoming more aligned on these extraterritorial issues? Yeah, I think, as you say, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have had fairly fractious relations in the past, haven't they? But there's been a real coming together, really quite incredible speed that this has happened. That's changed. I think, obviously, a lot has happened in terms of Turkey's much more frosty relationship with Israel over the last few years. And actually, there's a lot of suspicion that the role of Israel is quite significant in this. And specifically, the thing that's cited by many people is the attack on Qatar last year.

21:18I think for many Middle Eastern states, that was the fact that the Israelis launched a kind of surprise attack, obviously not targeting Qatari officials, but targeting Hamas officials who are gathering in Qatar, I think was seen as a real shock to the system, and it's led to quite a lot of countries having to reassess things. And I think this can be seen in that context. But also the fact that there's going to be a reassessment going on at the moment because of, shall we say, the shock to the system that we have had as a consequence of the Iran war and the fact that Saudi Arabia has been directly attacked and having the alliance with the United States has not proven necessarily to always be the protection they thought it would be.

22:02Joe Winwood, our reporter, covering that story of the Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani defence alliance. Thank you very much for coming into the studio.

22:20You're with NewsHour. It's live from the BBC. I'm Tim Franks. A judge in the US state of New Mexico has fined the social media giant Meta more than half a billion dollars for failing to warn the public about the dangers that his platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, pose to children. It's the largest ruling against the company over the issue of child safety. The judge said Meta had significantly added to the mental health crisis among the young and so that the company's actions could be classified as a public nuisance. juliana arnold's teenage daughter coco died in 2022 after a person she met on instagram sold her pills laced with fentanyl she blames the app for her daughter's death and gave the bbc her reaction to the ruling it's obviously you know very bittersweet but it is finally feels good to know that the court didn't just say metal failed kids you know it put a number on it and $567 million has meaning.

23:21And the fact that the judge found Meta knowingly built the products, you know, that harmed our children, and then just treated the harm as a cost of doing business, like it didn't care, really felt a little bit like a little bit of justice being done, and showing that we're moving in the right direction of holding these companies accountable for the harm that they're doing to our children. Chris Stoker-Walker is a tech journalist who's been covering this story. What has he read into the judge's ruling? Judge Brian Beidshide here basically said that they cause an enormous amount of psychological harm and sexual exploitation to children.

23:57He equated it to the idea that they are effectively polluting our lived environment by bombarding young people effectively with inappropriate content, stuff that makes them feel really bad, harms their mental health. And it was this fine that was subsequent to the one levied actually for the harm caused in March that is trying to remedy that, effectively saying because of the harms that Meta is now decided to have caused by this judge, they must offer some sort of funding to try and compensate for that by allowing New Mexico to use this to sort of support to those who might have been harmed. You mentioned that this is the second of two cases in New Mexico and I think if my arithmetic is correct we're getting on for almost a billion dollars in damages being awarded against Meta but I mean that is a fraction of their operating profit isn't it?

24:54In those terms it's presumably not that swinging for Meta. Not enormously. They make that back in revenue terms in about a day and a half probably a little bit less than maybe 30 or so hours. They They turned over$61 billion in revenue in the last quarter. So not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things. But I do think that it is an indication, at least, that if this is just one of many cases, suddenly those could all start to add up. And that really, I think, will be what's causing Meta to change. As you point out, Chris, this is but one of a huge wave of lawsuits. Yeah, we're talking in the hundreds here.

25:34And really, it was opened up the floodgates by that decision that we saw here in New Mexico, but also a subsequent one in California, a teenager called Kaylee, who had alleged much of the same thing. And basically, her solicitor, her lawyer, took an interesting approach to trying to argue this case, because often these tech companies defend themselves by saying, well, we are but platforms. We just pass through what happens. What the solicitor who was representing that teenager, a 16-year-old who had been severely harmed there, was that actually they ought to be judged as if they were defective products of saying, well, if we had defective razor blades or we had defective deodorant or we had defective foodstuffs, you would be liable for this.

26:17So why are we not treating these social media platforms in much the same way? Do you think this sort of patchwork of cases that we're seeing in US states could lead to the sort of political pressure where you will actually see the US government federally try and bring in some sort of new regulations? Or is that unlikely to happen, particularly in the US with the current administration? Yeah, I think it's unlikely to happen, Tim, precisely because of who is in the current administration. Donald Trump has signaled that he is very much in favor of American supremacy in all sorts of areas of technology.

27:00But ultimately, America has kind of sorted it out in a very stereotypically American way. Rather than taking the approach that Europe does of regulation and trying to chop big companies down to size that way, they've taken it to the courts. And often in America, the courts rule all. and that was the tech journalist chris stoker walker kelly stone lake is a former meta executive turned whistleblower and advocate for children's online safety she began working at meta then facebook back in 2009 spent nearly 15 years at the company rising to director of product marketing she left though saying that she'd faced harassment for raising concerns around child safety and has since sued the company it's a case that is still underway in the meantime she's also been a witness political inquiries into social media platforms and civil trials.

27:49And Kelly joins us now. Thank you for your time, Kelly. How significant do you think this judgment is? Oh, thank you so much for having me. This judgment is enormously significant. It was significant when it was a$375 million judgment the day before the Los Angeles trial verdict on the young woman named Kaylee that was just mentioned. But now we're talking about nearly a billion dollars, which while it's true, certainly that Meta makes, as we just heard, $60 billion a quarter, that's gross profit. Excuse me, that's gross revenue. Profit is about $60 billion a year. And a billion of that is more than a percentage point.

28:40And so when we start thinking about how you extrapolate the damages to children on a state by state or a per capita level. We're talking about a meaningful impact on their bottom line, which is the only way to get their attention and to drive actual change. Well, you say to drive actual change. I mean, we did ask Meta to come on the program. They declined, but they did give us a statement saying we work hard to keep people safe on our platforms. We've been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors in the harmful content. And we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.

29:17Now, I mean, you know, they are saying that they are driving change themselves. Yeah, I think that Meta is the only confident party in the changes that they're making to keep kids safe online. Because what the public gets to see and what jurors get to see and judges get to see is a mountain of evidence that makes very clear that the opposite is true. That Meta knows their products cause harm, don't do enough to change that, and then really tries to perform care in the way you just mentioned. I mean, for example, MetaTeen accounts, which are meant to create a safer version of their products that are safe for teens, when those were independently tested, 47 % did not work as described.

30:07Like some did not even work at all. And giving parents the, quote unquote, peace of mind of parental controls or oversight, them not actually working and then blaming parents and lobbying to keep them out of courtrooms is a real, you know, it's a real move in deflection and smoke and mirrors. So is your argument that these safety tools, some of the selective bans that governments are bringing in, that these don't work and that you really have to talk about redesigning entire platforms? Yeah, you have to put on your hat as if the job was to keep people that use your product safe and to deliver on the promise that technology should improve our lives.