Heat up the coffee and stay alert, it's minutes before midnight and the sea is running hard….
January 20, 2014 Leave a Comment
The Victory Monument rally site was rocked by two grenades Sunday, wounding 28, the second such attack in two days The bombs were of the same type as the one used in yesterday’s bombing and this time there is a clear CCTV image of the assailant. Bangkok Post more at BBC.
December 2, 2013 Leave a Comment
The week-old campaign of antigovernment protests in Thailand entered a dangerous new phase on Sunday after shootings involving rival political camps left at least three people dead and more than 110 wounded in Bangkok.
November 30, 2013 Leave a Comment
With every good reason folks have been demonstrating in Bangkok against what they perceive are the operating ties between the current Prime Minister and her predecessor, her brother, who has self-exiled to escape prosecution for corruption. However, the turn today into brick throwing —if the reports are accurate– against other citizens supporting the government, can not be good.
Anti-government protests turned violent Saturday with at least one person killed in the Thai capital after opponents and supporters of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra clashed.
Protests had remained relatively peaceful over the last week as the two sides essentially stayed apart during daily demonstrations. But on Saturday, opponents of Yingluck gathered near the site of a pro-government rally being held inside a stadium.
Using sticks, stones and chunks of concrete, several hundred protesters, many of them students, took aim at government supporters some 50 yards away up a dark street behind Ramkhamhaeng University.
Soon, small explosions and what sounded like gunfire rang out. “Run back,” shouted some of the 60 or so anti-government students.
That is how civil disobedience turns un-civil and then the army wins… Not the way to get to where you want to go.
August 30, 2013 Leave a Comment
On the tourist route in Thailand are rubber plantations — great groves of tall slender trees. If you’re there in the right season you’ll even see the white latex dripping into buckets. Very bucolic; peasants working out in nature and all of that.
Of course that’s a cartoon image – especially when the prices fall and the grueling work does not bring in enough to keep a body knit together.
The rubber farmers of southern Thailand are inured to hardship, whether from the toilsome predawn harvests in mosquito-infested plantations or the vagaries of the market for their latex. But this month, they snapped.
After two years of falling rubber prices had driven many farmers into debt, hundreds of them blockaded the region’s main north-south road and railroad to protest.
“This was our last resort, our only option,” said Thaworn Ruengkling, a rubber farmer who says he can no longer earn enough from farming to cover the cost of fuel and fertilizer, never mind feeding his family.
July 19, 2013 Leave a Comment
Making headlines far outside of Thailand, Luang Pu Nenkham, a fabulously wealthy Buddhist monk, father of a child by a minor child and beguiler of the rich and famous, seems to have outed himself with posts on his own website. Thai police have filed charges and the now defrocked monk has fled France for the wider reaches of the United States.
Born in the poor northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani, he entered the monkhood as a teenager and gained local renown for claims of supernatural powers like the ability to fly, walk on water and talk to deities. He renamed himself, Luang Pu Nen Kham, taking on a self-bestowed title normally reserved for elder monks.
Gradually, he cultivated wealthy followers to help fund expensive projects in the name of Buddhism — building temples, hospitals and what was touted as the world’s largest Emerald Buddha. The 11-meter (36-foot) high Buddha was built at his temple in the northeast, touted as solid jade but made of tinted concrete.
Thailand’s Anti-Money Laundering Office has discovered 41 bank accounts linked to the ex-monk. Several of the accounts kept about 200-million baht ($6.4-million) in constant circulation, raising suspicion of money laundering.
Investigators also suspect that Wirapol killed a man in a hit-and-run accident while driving a Volvo late at night three years ago.
Critics say Wirapol is an extreme example of a wider crisis in Buddhism, which has become marginalized by a shortage of monks and an increasingly secular society. The meditative lifestyle of the monkhood offers little allure to young Buddhists raised on shopping malls, smartphones and the Internet.
…During a shopping spree from 2009 to 2011, Wirapol bought 22 Mercedes worth 95-million baht ($3.1-million), according to the DSI. The fleet of luxury cars were among 70 vehicles he has purchased. Some he gave as gifts to senior monks, others he sold off as part of a suspected black market car business to launder his money, Pong-in said.
Luxury travel for the monk included helicopters and private jets for trips between the northeast and Bangkok.
“I always wondered what kind of monk has this much money,” said one of his regular pilots, Piya Tregalnon. Each domestic roundtrip cost about 300,000 baht ($10,000) and the monk always paid in cash, he said in comments posted on Facebook.
“The most bizarre thing is what was in his bag,” Piya said, referring to the typical monk’s humble cloth shoulder sack. “It was filled with stacks of 100 dollar bills.”
Like many people, Piya only went public with his suspicions after the scandal erupted. Dozens of pictures have been posted in online forums showing Wirapol’s high-flying lifestyle — riding a camel at the pyramids in Egypt, sitting in a cockpit at the Cessna Aircraft factory in Kansas. According to the pilot and investigators, Wirapol was interested in buying his own private jet.
Even more incriminating were accusations of multiple sexual relationships with women — a cardinal sin for monks who are not allowed to touch women. Among them was a 14-year-old girl with whom he allegedly had a son, a decade ago. The mother filed a statutory rape case against him last week.
Here, more here and here. Court accepts case for pedophilia
I am struck, as I usually am, that the climb to wealth and (abuse of) power is enabled by the gullible all along the way: ability to fly, to walk on water, indeed…
May 25, 2013 Leave a Comment
Around 200 people participated in a “peace walk” in the northern town of Anlong Veng on Friday.
The walk was part of a Buddhist ceremony and was held near the Thai border, where organizers say many Cambodian migrants have been shot and killed by Thai border patrols.
The walk marked Visak Bochea Day, an annual holiday celebrating the life, death and enlightenment of Buddha.
…Bo Pao, a member of the Working Group for Peace, said Anlong Veng was chosen as the site of the march because there are frequently reported shootings of Cambodians who illegally cross into Thailand near here.
“We are celebrating the peace walk here to send a message to Thai border patrols, not to kill people, but to solve problems by legal means,” he said. “We are neighbors—and Buddhists.”
March 23, 2013 Leave a Comment
Still getting my feet under me after five weeks in Southeast Asia — Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. It’s strange once again, after 37 mornings of 6 a.m. wake-up calls and eating around hotel tables with traveling friends, to be quiet with the morning NY Times and brief exchanges with the dear reader across from me.
As is usual, places that we’ve been leap out from the pages. Sadly, this morning, it is the rioting in Myanmar, and not just along the coast where it has occurred in recent month, but inland, at Meiktila– the scene, as it happens, of the last enormous battle between the Japanese and the Allies at the near-end of WW II. If the reporting is right, the saddest of sad things is that the anti-Muslim rioting, and threats against reporters, are being lead by Buddhist monks with sharpened weapons.
Having been with a guide in Burma who was not shy about voicing his quarrels with the government — as well as his hope– and having just seen Luc Besson’s fine movie, The Lady, about Aung San Suu Kyi and her fifteen year struggle it is strange indeed to see the red neckerchiefed police acting as police are supposed to act — stopping communal rioting and making space for cooler heads….
Rioting and arson attacks spread on Friday to villages outside Meiktila, as mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage through Muslim areas. Witnesses reached by phone said security forces did little to stop the violence.
“Mobs were destroying buildings and killing people in cold blood,” said U Nyan Lynn, a former political prisoner who witnessed what he described as massacres. “Nobody stopped them — I saw hundreds of riot police there.”
News services, which had reporters in the city, said that Buddhist homes had also been set on fire and that while thousands of Muslims had fled to a stadium for safety, at least some Buddhists were also taking shelter outside their homes, in shrines.
Images from Meiktila showed entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, some with only blackened trees left standing. Lifeless legs poked from beneath rubble. And charred corpses spoke to the use of fire as a main tool of the rioting mobs. NY Times
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In Thailand’s north west, which we didn’t get to, but heard of quite often, Karen refugees have piled up in make-shift camps, fleeing from fighting between the Myanmar army and Karen separatists. A fire broke out yesterday, killing 30. Likely started from the slash-and-burn farming which takes place all over Southeast Asia and is much in evidence in the air almost everywhere, as we did experience.
February 15, 2013 Leave a Comment
It’s always interesting to travel to a place which has been mostly a name and a location on the map, particularly if there are English language newspapers to sweep you into the daily concerns of those living there.
Bangkok is hot enough for us, in the low 90s, with an overcast, and its not even the hot season yet. That comes up in April — and big problems are in the offing.
Thailand’s energy authorities are scrambling for ideas to prevent a possible power shortage in April – the hottest month every year – as Myanmar is shutting down two gas fields that have supplied one-fourth of the Kingdom’s natural gas demand.
My guess is that a unsubstantial majority of Bangkokese don’t have air conditioning in their homes but that those who do will have the megaphone to make their views known.
It’s not a matter of politics or national retribution but an engineering problem of significant proportions.
Pongsak said the rig in Yanada field experienced destabilisation and needed to be fixed at its base on the seabed before the problem got worse. Therefore, Myanmar had decided that it would shut down the gas-supply system in both Yetagun and Yadana for repairs.
And if that’s not enough to worry the authorities, how about a sewage problem? And, interesting to me, is that this is on the second page of the paper, not buried away as a cub reporters story.
If there is no effective waste management, Bangkok will be overwhelmed with garbage in 2015 when the integration of the Asean community allows the free movement of workers within member countries.
“With a higher ratio of garbage per head than other capitals, we need to adopt a ‘think new and act new’ approach to manage the problem,” said Assoc Prof Sirinthornthep Taoprayoon, director of the Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment (JGSEE).
The modern world needs to look at garbage from a new perspective. What was earlier considered a “problem” or that “disgusting thing that should be destroyed quickly”, it is now seen as a valuable resource provided a good management system is adopted right from the start. The number of landfill gas projects across the world, which convert methane gas emitted from decomposing garbage into electricity, rose from 399 in 2005 to 594 in 2012
And, in a separate article, the writer informs Thais of the need to shift their energy supplies, in good part because of climate change being forced by released carbon. He knows that garbage in can be energy out.
Biogas digestion offers a good source of renewable energy as it deals with harnessing the methane gas that is released when waste breaks down. This gas can be retrieved from garbage or sewage systems. Biogas digesters are used to process methane gas by having bacteria break down biomass in an anaerobic environment.
One of the first things we did after checking into the hotel was find the nearest park, a nice big one with water features, birds and folks setting up lunches around tables. However, all is not well, it seems. That afternoon the paper reported:
Bangkok has one of the lowest percentages of green areas of any major capital in Asia; it’s time residents got new parks to breathe in…
In Asia, on average, urban people enjoy 39 square metres of green space each. Bangkok has 5.7 million permanent residents (probably twice as many unofficially) on 1,569 square kilometres, meaning they have to make do with a mere three square metres each, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Asian Green City Index 2011, commissioned by Siemens. Singapore, with 5 million people squeezed into 715 square kilometres, offers 66 square metres of green space per person.
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