MANILA: The death toll from a massive Philippine landslide near a gold mine abruptly rose to 54 on Sunday (Feb 11), local officials said. Nineteen bodies were recovered from beneath the rubble in the southern mountain village of Masara on Sunday, with 63 other miners and residents still missing, said theContinue Reading
YANGON: Myanmar’s junta is enforcing a law allowing the military to summon all men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 to serve for at least two years, it said on Saturday (Feb 11), as it struggles to crush opposition to its 2021 coup. Myanmar has beenContinue Reading
Ganjar-Mahfud campaign team leader Arsjad Rasjid was quoted by Kompas as saying that the people’s voice will be heard on polling day, and not in surveys.
“We also hope that the outcome is a fair, truthful and factual one that follows the democratic process,” he said, reiterating that state apparatus should remain neutral during the hustings.
This comes amid allegations that President Joko Widodo has allowed the deployment of public officers to support Mr Prabowo’s campaign and undermine that of his rivals, sparking protests from various groups.
Jokowi, as the popular president is widely known, previously said the head of state is legally allowed to campaign, but on Wednesday told reporters he will not be doing so.
Dr Ian Wilson, a senior fellow at Murdoch University’s Indo-Pacific Research Centre, told CNA he was wary of the latest Indikator Politik survey as it uses multistage sampling of 1,000 people.
In multistage sampling, a target population is first defined before being divided into smaller and smaller clusters until a desired sample size is achieved.
This method is often used to collect data from a large, geographically spread group of people in national surveys as it is cheaper and easier to conduct, although not the most representative.
“I’m very sceptical of accurate extrapolation using this sample size and method for a voting population of 204 million, especially when everything is so dynamic,” Dr Wilson said.
The analyst said the Prabowo campaign team would at this point have hoped for a convincing first round win “in the bag”, especially with Jokowi seen to be more overtly campaigning over the past few days.
Jokowi has been spotted dining privately with Mr Prabowo on recent occasions and has been accused of mobilising social aid programs to shore up support for the current Defence Minister.
“I think now many of them (in Prabowo’s campaign) are coming to the conclusion that it’s probably going to go to a second round,” Dr Wilson added.
China’s travel agency giants expect visa exemption to keep Singapore attractive beyond the seasonal jumpstart.
“If we look at the areas that have been doing very well over the past year, the first are GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries in the Middle East. Qatar and Dubai have favourable visa policies and make arrival convenient; other nations have online visa application procedures that are convenient and easy.
“Now that Singapore and China will be implementing reciprocal visa-free travel, we certainly see more Chinese travellers choosing to visit Singapore due to the increased convenience,” Mr Edmund Ong, general manager of Trip.com Singapore, told me.
It may appear, wishfully, that China is finally unleashing its revenge travellers in full force. But China’s economic troubles are too big to ignore.
The slow return of outbound travel was largely attributed to China’s disappointing economic restart coming out of the pandemic. As of September 2023, Chinese outbound tourism expenditure was still down 18 per cent from pre-pandemic levels, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
Economic forecasts for 2024 have only gotten worse, with various experts projecting China’s GDP growth to slow from 5.2 per cent in 2023 to between 4 and 4.6 per cent in 2024.
The country cannot conceivably get out of its litany of economic troubles any time soon: A serious deflation spiral, record drops in salaries, a property market crisis, high youth unemployment rates – and the list goes on.
In this climate, perhaps the foremost question is not where, but how the Chinese would be travelling in 2024.
Already emerging is a picture of the prudent Chinese traveller, mediating economic anxieties while they vacation – whether by planning their academic journey overseas, or hitting multiple destinations to stretch the flight buck.
The current sources of online gambling Thailand are illegal and have long been connected to various criminal activities, such as money laundering, drug and human trafficking.
Extensive scamming operations working in close proximity to gambling dens in border areas have been well documented.
Thai police officers have also been connected to such illicit activities. Last September, several officers were found to be involved in running illegal online gambling sites, which led to raids at multiple locations, including houses belonging to Thailand’s deputy national police chief Surachate “Big Joke” Hakparn.
At present, it is estimated that vast sums of Thai money are leaking out of the country via illegal gambling, offshore and online.
Legalising on-site casinos has been framed as one solution to diverting money away from such activity, into the coffers of the government instead.
Mr Karit Pannaim, a Move Forward Party MP and member of the parliamentary committee studying the legalisation proposal said he believes legal casinos could make a dent in the illegal activities occurring in border gambling dens, including in the province he represents, Tak, on the border with Myanmar.
“If we have an entertainment complex, we will reduce the money that flows along the borders,” he said.
But identifying the scale of illegal gambling in Thailand is very difficult, according to Dr Nualnoi. She said the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a sharp rise in online gambling within the country, when gamblers were unable to cross the border.
Her centre’s research found that the number of online gamblers in Thailand doubled to 1.9 million people in 2021 during the worst of the lockdown periods. Gross gaming revenue in the country was estimated at US$2.8 billion for that year.
“A lot of them play inside the country now. And the ones who are providing this online gambling are all Thai,” she told CNA.
“If you have legal casinos, it doesn’t mean illegal casinos will disappear. It’s another story,” said. “When you have legal casinos, you need to supplant the illegal ones, otherwise they’re just other places for people to gamble in the country.”
Mr Thanakorn Komkris, the secretary-general of Stop Gambling Foundation, said without a proper crackdown on such illegal operations, Thailand cannot hope to have a sustainable gambling industry.
“If we don’t want the people to spend money outside the country, the government should put pressure in every way possible to stop people from accessing this (illegal gambling). Legal gambling doesn’t decrease illegal gambling,” he said.
The government announced last year that it had shut down thousands of gaming sites and dealt with thousands of illegal gambling cases.
Mr Thanakorn said he is still worried that the government will rush legislation that does not ensure the industry is properly controlled and managed.
“I’m also afraid that it will be done in a way that it’s an excuse to do a ‘sandbox’ or they legalise it first and do the control measures after, like the decriminalisation of cannabis,” he said.
The legalisation of cannabis in Thailand in 2022 – namely allowing its possession, cultivation, distribution, consumption, and sale – came hard and fast.
Throughout the country, especially in popular tourist cities, marijuana dispensaries surfaced at a rapid pace and the industry had enjoyed freewheeling liberties to expand. This month, the government said it would urgently introduce a bill to ban recreational use of the drug.
“We have a lot of lessons about doing it first and fixing it later. We can’t do this because we will not be able to catch up with problems or stop it later,” Mr Thanakorn said.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s army chief congratulated the country on Saturday (Feb 10) for the “successful conduct” of its national elections, saying the nation needed “stable hands” to move on from the politics of “anarchy and polarisation”. The nuclear-armed South Asian nation voted on Thursday in a general election that remains undecided,Continue Reading
MANILA: A magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck Mindanao, Philippines, on Saturday (Feb 10), the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) said. The quake was 10km deep, GFZ said. The Philippine seismology agency had a different reading, saying it was a magnitude 5.9 earthquake with a depth of 27km. The Philippine agencyContinue Reading
So what are the prospects for women’s representation in the upcoming elections?
The barriers to women’s election have not changed and are unlikely to change in the short term. As a result, incremental progress is the best that can be hoped for.
Several women politicians were instrumental in the passage of the Anti-Sexual Violence Bill that passed last year. It’s possible that this increased visibility will give women a bump.
On the other hand, gender issues have not been central to the presidential or legislative campaigns so are unlikely to be uppermost in voters’ minds.
In fact, we may have reason to be more pessimistic. A seemingly minor change to the regulations on quota implementation means that for the first time in three elections, the requirement for a 30 per cent candidate quota will not be applied in every electoral district party list, but instead for the total number of women candidates of each party.
The changes date back to a controversial regulation issued by the Indonesian Electoral Commission (KPU) in April 2023. The regulation allowed rounding down when assessing the number of women a party has on a candidate list. For example, in electoral districts with eight seats, 30 per cent is 2.4 candidates. Previously, a party would have had to field three women candidates. Now, fractions can be rounded down if under 0.5, so in our example, parties are only required to field two women candidates.
A coalition of democracy and gender activists appealed against this regulation to the Supreme Court, and they won. But the electoral commission has indicated it will not enforce the court’s decision in this election. Democracy activists say that this means almost 18 per cent of party lists do not meet the requirement for 30 per cent women candidates.
It could be that these changes will have little impact. After all, we know that most candidates are elected from the first position on the list.
However, it sets a worrying precedent for women’s representation going forward. Our research shows the 30 per cent candidate quota for women is widely supported in Indonesia. Yet, it has effectively been watered down without public discussion and against the advice of the Supreme Court.
The actions of the electoral commission, apparently at the direction of a male-dominated parliamentary commission, underline again how the foundational institutions of Indonesian democracy are being eroded by the political elite.
Sally White is research fellow at Australian National University. This commentary first appeared in The Conversation.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on Friday said that the Federal Court’s ruling was purely about determining and distinguishing the powers of the federal government and the state government.
He said the issue was being played up by the opposition to discredit the federal government.
“They are using the issue to create a sentiment among the Muslims in the country that the federal administration under Anwar’s leadership is against the Syariah.
“Don’t they know that the matter is purely about the powers between the state and federal governments?” he was quoted as saying by the News Straits Times at an event.
He also said that the constitutional challenge was initiated at the Federal Court and not in the cabinet or against the prime minister.
“Having said that, what did PN do when the constitutional challenge was initiated? Why did they not challenge it back then when they were in power? Only now they are speaking about it, trying to politicise the issue,” he said.
Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Religious Affairs) Dr Mohd Na’im Mokhtar said in a statement on Friday that the decision did not affect the position of the Syariah Courts as it remains strong as guaranteed in the constitution.
He said that if there was a need for amendment or reform of the law related to the Syariah Court, it would be done immediately.
He added that all stakeholders and parties involved with the Court will be promptly convened to discuss and assess the next steps for its empowerment.
Malaysian opposition leader Hamzah Zainudin, who’s PN’s secretary-general, said that the decision hurt the feelings of Muslims in the country especially as Islam was the official religion as stated in the constitution.
In a statement he said the development showed a serious weakness in the majority’s right to practice and profess their religion.
He also claimed that the decision would challenge the Syariah criminal enactment in all states, exposing them to the risk of annulment.
“If viewed from the naked eye, this decision could significantly erode the powers and jurisdictions of the Malay Rulers,” he said, adding that he had requested for audiences with the Malaysian King as well as the ruler of the Selangor state.
He also hoped that all parties that had an interest in the matter, regardless of their political affiliation, would work together on the issue.
Earlier on at the court, Islamist party Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) secretary-general Takiyuddin Hassan, whose party is part of the PN coalition, claimed that it was a “Black Friday” for the Syariah Court and that the judgement could affect Syariah laws in other states.
“When one law is nullified in one state, it means that the Syariah laws in other states are also in a dangerous and critical situation,” he said.
The petition to the Federal Court was filed by Kelantanese lawyer Nik Elin Zurina Nik Abdul Rashid and her daughter Tengku Yasmin Nastasha Tengku Abdul Rahman.
They had filed a constitutional challenge against 18 provisions under the state’s syariah criminal enactment.
The Court ruled that two of the provisions were constitutional and valid as the subject matter in the provision were within the state list.
