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/ 22 September 2006
Tanks on the streets, television stations going off air and generals claiming to have seized power were events that had been consigned to history in Thailand. Or so most of the country thought, until Wednesday. For, despite the political crisis that has engulfed the country over the past nine months, no one predicted the impasse created by opposition to Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s alleged corruption.
Four villages and 19 factories have been submerged in a 240ha sea of mud in East Java that is growing up to 50 000 cubic metres a day in a major environmental disaster triggered during an oil exploration venture. A few rooftops are still visible, along with hastily constructed dykes that could not hold back the flow of toxic mud that began on May 29 around an oil exploration drilling rig.
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/ 27 February 2006
Six teenage rugby players rush forward to protect their teammate, who is charging into the opposition with the ball tucked under his right arm. Within seconds, they are all on the sodden ground, laughing. ”No, no no,” hollers their coach in a northern-English accent. ”You’ve got to stay on your feet.”
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/ 18 December 2005
Seven Acehnese young men living in a rough, homemade wooden shack on stilts in the village of Lampuuk, 30km from the northern tip of Sumatra, are learning self-sufficiency the hard way. All are the only members of their immediate families to survive last year’s Boxing Day tsunami and rather than be packed off to distant relatives they decided to band together and form their own ”family”.
The conditions in Nurma Sulaiman’s tiny room in one of Nusa’s six barracks have just become a little more cramped. But neither she nor her husband and four children are complaining, because the cause of their discomfort is the arrival of a sewing machine. ”Twenty-eight of us have been given these,” she said.
Indonesian security forces and local militia leaders responsible for crimes against humanity in East Timor in 1999 should face an international tribunal if Jakarta does not prosecute them effectively, a United Nations panel of legal experts has recommended.
The aviation industry will have to cut costs and reform business structures to defray billions of dollars in losses from soaring fuel prices, the world’s air transport bosses warned last week at their annual summit in Singapore. The International Air Transport Association promised to introduce electronic ticketing by 2007 and proposed barcode technology on boarding passes.
Think Thailand and what comes to mind? Paid-for sex? Plentiful drugs? But Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra would rather the mention of his country evoked images of world-class football. To help us get the right idea he announced this week that he wanted to buy a significant stake in Liverpool Football Club.
The recently planted rows of pineapple plants in the one and a half hectare field on one side of the Malayon family home look neat and well-tended, but are otherwise not really worth a second glance. But what occurred last year on and around this plot in Kalyong village, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, is threatening to turn this unremarkable field into a battleground in the war over genetically modified crops.
Thousands of endangered species should be saved from extinction thanks to an ambitious plan to expand the world’s protected areas and improve their management approved last week by more than 120 countries. Twelve days of often fractious negotiations in Kuala Lumpur resulted in a concrete programme to ensure the ”significant reduction of biodiversity loss by 2010”.