KUALA LUMPUR: Barisan Nasional’s (BN) supreme council has unanimously agreed to support the unity government led by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, said its secretary general Zambry Abd Kadir. “Barisan Nasional is committed to jointly develop the people’s policy agenda and continue to implement it,” he said in a statementContinue Reading
The first shipment of 78 Thai residents from army – torn Sudan arrived at Bangkok’s Don Muang Royal Thai Air Force Base on Thursday evening.
The evacuees- 40 women and 38 men- were welcomed by caregiver Prime Minister and Defence Minister Prayut Chan – o – cha, Defence Forces chief Gen Chalermpol Srisawat, Air Force commander ACM Alongkorn Wannarot, Foreign Affairs Minister Don Pramudwinai, Prime Minister’s secretary – public Pirapan Salirathavibhaga, and other big – ranking officials. & nbsp,
Gen Prayut thanked executives from all authorities involved in the elimination activities. The next batch of residents is expected to arrive in Thailand on Saturday.
An Airbus A340 – 500 aircraft transporting the 78 residents departed from King Abdulaziz aircraft in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and arrived at Wing 6 around 10pm. The riders included 73 academics and five leaders from the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Most of the students were studying remedy, Muslim law, and faith in the African land.
There are 132 more Thais awaiting travelling up to Thailand. Of them, the second class of 66, who boarded the Air Force C – 130 from Sudan, had already arrived in Jeddah and met with Thai Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Darm Boontham, and mind of the Air Force’s removal company in Jeddah, Capt Anurak Rommarak. & nbsp,
The second class of 66 residents had come from the Port of Sudan to Jeddah by fleet, with more people actually joining them. The Air Force has carefully coordinated with the Foreign Affairs Ministry to ensure the safe elimination of all Thais.
The Airbus A340 – 500 is expected to return to transport them & nbsp, from Saudi Arabia, and there are two Air Force C – 130s available there.
Caretaker Prime Minister Prayut Chan – o – cha leads senior officers and officials to welcome the Thai evacuees from Sudan at Wing 6 at Bangkok’s Don Muang Muang Royal Thai Air Force Base & nbsp, on Thursday night. ( Photo supplied / Wassana Nanuam )
On Thursday, & nbsp, Syrian fighter jets pounded military posts in Khartoum while terrible fighting and looting flared in Darfur, despite the army and a foe force agreeing to enhance a peace deal.
SINGAPORE: The prosecution and defence both turned to the High Court to appeal in the case of a Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) captain, whose rash act caused a full-time national serviceman (NSF) to be crushed to death by a Bionix vehicle. The prosecution found the five-month jail term meted outContinue Reading
shabby picturesBest wrestlers have requested that a case be filed against the head of the league that oversees their hobby, and India’s Supreme Court will hear their petition.
Due to claims of sexual abuse made by many female athletes, they have been requesting Brij Bhushan Singh’s imprisonment.
The accusations have been refuted by Mr. Singh.
After the government promised to look into their claims, the athletes called off their demonstrations in January.
However, they relaunched the agitation last week, calling for swift action against Mr. Singh, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) and the Wrestling Federation of India( WFI ).
The activists also claimed that despite many female athletes filing complaints accusing Mr. Singh of sexual abuse and criminal harassment, the Delhi Police did not file a case against him.
The petition’s allegations were” serious ,” according to the top court, which requested an explanation from the Delhi Police. The police added that they were ready to conduct a” initial investigation” immediately if the court instructed them to do so after stating the necessity of doing so prior to filing any charges.
One of India’s most well-known athletes and the president of the Indian Olympic Association( IOA ), PT Usha, incited outrage on Thursday when she claimed that the protesting wrestlers were” protesting on the streets” and damaging the reputation of their nation. Instead, she claimed, they ought to have contacted the IOA’s athletes’ direction.
Opposition lawmakers and the protesting athletes responded angrily to her remarks.
Shashi Tharoor, the president of the Congress, tweeted that India’s reputation would only be damaged if the worries voiced by the athletes were disregarded.
Olympic medalist and protestant Wrestler Sakshi Malik questioned whether the demonstrations amounted to misbehaviour given that they were happily expressing their concerns. She claimed that because she is a female swimmer, she doesn’t pay attention to some female athletes.
The athletes have some well-known athletes who have supported them. Neeraj Chopra, who took home the gold medal in javelin at the most recent Olympics, expressed his pain at witnessing Indian athletes having to demand justice by walking the streets and urged officials to handle the situation in an” independent and clear” way.
Abhinav Bindra, another Olympic medalist, stated that the athletes’ problems may be” heard and addressed pretty and independently.”
One of India’s most accomplished female athletes, Vinesh Phogat, claimed in January that at least ten other ladies had told her that Mr. Singh had sexually exploited them. She and other activists also criticized the WFI’s operation and claimed that some instructors had mistreated sports. The WFI had previously refuted all of the wrestlers’ claims, including the one of intimate misconduct.
In the end, the government appointed a panel to handle the federation’s operations and asked Mr. Singh to step down temporarily. A committee was already established by the IOA to look into Mr. Singh’s claims.
Although the committee’s report was released in April, its conclusions have not yet been made people.
In order to monitor the WFI’s everyday operations and hold elections for its executive committee, the IOA has already established a screen.
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Framed by steel girders and bricks, a floor-to-ceiling glass façade looks onto lotus-strewn wetlands where buffaloes wallow in Hoi An, the ancient trading port of central Vietnam.
As a visitor turns under the beat of high ceiling fans, an outsize 1210mm camera lens stares back at them through the black steel sliding door. This is the Imaginarium of Boris Zuliani, also known as Black Hands Studio, where the entire studio is itself a massive functioning camera shooting photographic images directly onto glass panes as large as 2x2m.
“I like the fact that this is a difficult process, the need for specific chemicals, the precise handling of the glass plates, the need to work fast,” said Zuliani, sharing his fascination with this demanding technique. “We must combat threats of potential failure on so many fronts, so each shot is truly a one-off with its own character.”
He refers to the final creations as ambrotypes, a word of Greek derivation which roughly translates as an “immortal impression”.
Originally from France, Zuliani has been in Vietnam since 2007 honing his obsession with what he calls “light painting”, pushing the envelope of photosensitive materials to create unique textures and tones with his lens. Based in Hoi An, Zuliani is furthering his mission to defy digitalisation of the photographic arts and create something uniquely retro-analogue.
Their current exhibition, WANTED, a series of portraits of Vietnamese workers, is part of that mission. So too is the physical structure of the expansive Black Hands studio, where Zuliani and his team have worked for the past year. There, the lens sits in the door while the subject poses in the main room. Light comes through the lens and onto the glass plate positioned in the darkroom, where the ambrotype is made.
It’s the kind of technique that has helped Zuliani stand out in Vietnam.
Even as he first settled into the photography scene there, his style caught the attention of Nguyen Qui Duc, the creative force behind Hanoian cultural space Tadioto.
The 2009 exposition Les Mots Bleus featured works Zuliani shot on Polaroid film exposed via a self-made pinhole camera, and then enlarged onto canvas which filled the walls at Tadioto’s gallery.
“Over the past 15 years, I have seen Boris continually challenge the limits of his materials. Whether shooting onto polaroid, canvas or glass plates, it’s his exacting professionalism and mad genius innovation that has remained constant as he strives to create his art,” said Duc.
As a journeyman photographer, Ziuliani was initially schooled in high fashion precision camera shoots at Studio Des Plantes in Paris. After several years in the business, his imagination was caught by an encounter in Vienna with The Impossible Project, which sought to promote analogue instant film techniques when Polaroid announced it was shutting down production.
“I suddenly realised that Polaroid film had a limited supply, so I bought 5,000 boxes and found myself at the airport en route to Vietnam,” Ziuliani recalled. “When I arrived in Hanoi, the customs authorities could not understand why I had such quantities of film for my own personal use, so that took a lot of explaining for me to get them into the country.”
While working for fashion assignments in the bustling cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, he continued to pursue his own artistic output on the side – including a series of moody polaroid portraits of lovers on the Gustav Eiffel-designed Long Bien bridge which spans the Red River on Hanoi’s eastern fringe.
This analogue style would help inform his later works at the Black Hands Studio.
In that space, Zuliani’s rangy studio assistant Hugo Armano casts a long shadow in the afternoon light. His sharp eye and organizational acumen holds the operation together and keeps the studio shipshape.
Together the two Frenchmen extract magic from a volatile process approaching alchemy – pouring a stream of collodion by hand to coat individual glass plates before soaking them in a bath of silver nitrate. This is wet plate collodion photography, originally developed by Frederick Scott Archer whose scientific breakthrough in 1848 quickly replaced daguerreotypes and paved the way towards modern photographic techniques.
‘’We named the studio Black Hands because of the chemical residue we would get on our skin,” Armano said, casually noting that one stray drop of silver nitrate could burn through skin in a few seconds.
A very physical series of steps begins with ensuring the plates are perfectly clean before applying chemical reagents in the darkroom. The coated plate is then secured in a sealed wooden box before being loaded into the back of the camera, behind the bellows.
The subject is positionally primed in advance, and after any final adjustments to the framing, the ambrotype is captured onto the glass plate in rich silver and black tones. The end result is an uncanny combination of negative and positive image, which has a varying depth depending at which angle the viewer looks at the finished work.
“We called the current exhibition WANTED partly because the portraits have an element of the American Wild West,” said Zuliani, noting the intersection of that frontier era with the emergence of collodion photography.
The title also reflects the scarcity of supply for artisans and workers with the skills needed to build Kyara Arthouse in central Vietnam, a key partner of Black Hands and the host of its exhibition, as the Covid-19 lockdowns intensified.
“We asked each of them to bring their most important tool with them – you can see such pride in their work etched in their faces,” Zuliani said.
The WANTED collection was shot on 50x50cm glass plates, using a refurbished 150-year-old camera. Initial success with this model found on eBay inspired Zuliani to keep pushing after meeting fellow photographer and skilled carpenter Francis Roux, who had also relocated to Hoi An.
Together they designed an upscaled model, with Roux crafting a bespoke bellows camera housing out of walnut wood, which accommodates a 1x1m glass plate.
‘’Making the 1x1m format camera only made me want to go even further,” enthused Zuliani.
Encouraged by their success, they soon acquired the 1210mm lens to install in the door and expanded to the 2x2m glass plates to complete the Imaginarium – for now.
“We had been working out of such a small garage, so thought why not make the new studio building itself into the housing for a larger-format camera set up,” he said. “It is quite a surreal concept, but when we shoot with the big lens the photographers are inside the camera itself.”
WANTED Photo Exposition: A Collaboration between Black Hands Studio and Kyara Arthouse is on show until May 14th 2023, including over the International Workers Day holidays, at Kyara: 234 Tran Nhan Tong, Cam Thanh Ward, Hoi An, Vietnam.
Web: https://blackhandsstudio.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kyarahoian and Instagram: @kyarahoian @boriszuliani
James Compton is a writer focused on the intersection between arts, culture and nature conservation in Asia. He is based in Hoi An, Vietnam, where he co-manages Kyara Arthouse as a hub for artistic practice and exchange.
The US debt ceiling will be increased by$ 1.5 trillion, according to a deal between Democrats and Republicans. Markets do not, however, expand quickly, and the price of default insurance ( CDS ) on US government bonds is still skyrocketing.
Why don’t people support the bill put forth by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? It all revolves around President Joe Biden’s reluctance to give in or, more accurately, reduce public investing. In the end, the leader will reject it even if both houses of Congress vote” Yes.”
Treasury securities are dissipating in the interim, and the offer on a 13-week Treasury bill is approaching 5 %. At this rate, Elon Musk’s anticipation that the nation will mistake will be realized sooner rather than later. The challenge of the US default, on the other hand, is by no means different.
Researchers at Fitch Ratings predict that the US institutional leveraged loan default price will end in 2023 at 2 to 3 % despite the CDS spike, escalating economic headwinds, and recessionary danger. Therefore, never actually 50 %, so there is still nothing to worry about.
What happens if the veil comes down?
Even if the nation doesn’t repay its loans on time, it will still be considered a professional default, in which case the debts, including the interest, may be settled. The primary remaining query is when. In the worst-case approach, the nation’s credit rating might be lowered, which might raise the price of loans.
Speaking of the repercussions for the US market, prices could drop on the one hand, and the challenge of a recession would be even more clear in light of declining borrowing and spending. Everyday Americans’ retirement addresses would also be impacted.
According to Moody’s Analytics, real GDP could fall by more than 4 %, resulting in a reduction in the number of jobs lost and the potential for an employment rate of over 8 %. Additionally, at the worst of the downturn, stock prices could drop by nearly a fifth, wiping out$ 10 trillion in home income.
The S & amp, P 500, fell 17 % in 2011 as a result of the political unrest in Washington over the country’s debt limit. The recovery of past worth took about seven weeks. The results may be even worse if things do not go as planned this day.
Is there a place to hide then?
There are devices like the ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20 Year Treasury ETF, the Rydex Inverse Government Long Bond Fund, and the Powershares DB US Dollar Bearish Fund for those who think a proxy is inevitable. Finally, but most importantly, gold( XAUUSD ) might increase.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has frequently mentioned Australia’s pursuit of” a geopolitical equilibrium” during her flies over the past ten months.
When describing Australia’s Quad and AUKUS partnerships in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in the middle of 2022, Wong said that Canberra wanted a local arrangement that was” framed by the corporate equilibrium where countries are not forced to purchase but can get their own royal choices.”
On April 17, 2023, Wong made a more direct connection between this quest for equilibrium and the decline of US identity in his National Press Club statement. The United States is still the region’s unavoidable energy, but” the nature of that indispensability has changed.”
We cannot simply leave the Asia Pacific to the US because it is now a multilateral region, according to Wong. To” mainten the region’s balance ,” all the nations in the area must use diplomatic, economic, and other means.
It is understandable for spectators from Southeast Asia to believe that Australia has now found a solution to the problem it has been battling for more than three decades. This sub-region of disparate smaller states and clearly little powers has been actively utilizing the kind of business Wong is now promoting ever since the Cold War ended.
Three tactical truths have guided South Asian strategists’ post-Cold War decision-making: US power and attention are never guaranteed; China is renewed as an aboriginal Eastern power; and the center of global economic power is shifting East and is no longer concentrated in Western developed nations.
There is still strong opposition to the notion that these factors are unavoidable architectural conditions, despite recent changes in American perspectives on each of them. However, the space is getting smaller as people continue to look for business and corporate equilibrium.
American audiences require a better understanding of the persistent tactical transition in the Asia Pacific in order to close this gap. The secret is to understand that the area is departing from a protection order based on the one US hegemony wall that is centered on its hub-and-spokes alliance relationships.
This does not imply that the United States vanishes from view. However, it does imply that the United States is no longer the exclusive tower in the area.
Diversity is amplified as a result of this continued changeover. Whether it is manic or unipolar is not the only factor. Even though great powers are significant, concentrating solely on them misses a key aspect of today’s hyperconnected yet divided society.
Yesterday’s planners deal with difficult issues. Instead of focusing on the issue’s instant manifestation, they should think more broadly. They should identify key nodes and crucial relationships, find various entry points for substantial leverage, and think about how to structure the system to create the best possible resilience.
Great energy behavior and the local equilibrium may be influenced by a wider variety of states and international actors. Security needs to be comprehended more fully, taking environmental decay and epidemics as examples.
Self-help is usually required in this situation, and non-great powers like Australia and Southeast Asia have agency that needs to be effectively tapped.
Australia must make sure that all of this exercise is worthwhile and in the best interests of the country as it joins some local states in taking on more responsibility and using various tools of national power to deliver andnbsp regional security.
Canberra will need to look to others in the area to train business in ways that support and intensify its goals in this order transition as Australia makes a medium-term pivot towards significant investment in alliance partnerships and defense capabilities and technologies.
Here, Southeast Asia’s strengths include 30 years of experimenting with a variety of non-military channels, including institution – and rule-building, comprehensive security, and economic security optimization.
Southeast Asian nations have increased their significance as help states that great energy rivals must compete to win over in the process. The region is home to players who can assist others, whether it be in the form of communicating, leading international organizations, supplying essential minerals, or developing cutting-edge corporate ideas.
Australia perhaps have better opportunities to communicate with China and to help US-Chinese speech if it works with these relatives.
Australia will need to encourage a regional workers division with more partners. Canberra, however, also needs to be sufficiently informed about the various requirements of these local partners in order to maximize the chances of positive benefits.
There are still concerns when it comes to Southeast Asia. Some fundamental ideas are not always understood by the area in the same way that Australians do. For instance, sometimes as many Southeast Asians continue to hope for continued US supremacy, local principles of corporate equilibrium contain an assured leader responsibility for China.
When it comes to dealing with potential US-China dispersion, many Southeast Asian nations do not have the same room for movement as Australia. Their options are constrained by population size, development requirements, and financial trajectories.
However, this does not imply that Australia and Southeast Asia cannot agree on a shared priority for developing or assisting in the construction of necessary protections and methods to prevent the entire region from collapsing.
Australia must begin with a solid understanding of local perceptions and debates on their own terms in order to comprehend these conundrums, their effects on what various South Eastern states are willing to undertake, and avoid becoming biased by asking the right questions or viewing the world through the eyes of others.
Canberra faces the challenge of promptly integrating Southeast Asia strategic planning in light of the pressing need.
The Southeast Asia Institute’s manager and Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies at the Australian National University is Evelyn Goh.
This andnbsp, story, and was originally published by East Asia Forum and are being reprinted with a Creative Commons license.
MANILA: The Philippines Coast Guard announced on Friday, April 28, that it was involved in a fight with Chinese ships that engaged in” serious manoeuvres” in the South China Sea. This was the most uncomfortable coastal exchange between the two nations in recent memory. The incident happened while the CoastContinue Reading
LABOUR MARKET CONTINUES TO EXPAND, BUT MODERATED Advance estimates also showed that the labour market continued to expand in the first quarter of 2023, though at a more moderate pace than the previous quarter, MOM said. Total employment – excluding migrant domestic workers – grew by 34,500 during this period,Continue Reading
SAMUT PRAKAN: On Thursday, 23 unauthorized Myanmar migrant workers and a Chinese soldier who was entering the country on tourist visa were detained by police in the Bang Phli district.
The tip-off that unlawful workers were employed at the location near a bridge over the Paed river prompted the immigration police to conduct the raid.
Most people tried to flee when they saw the soldiers, but 23 of them were caught. According to Pol Col Chinnawut Tangwonglert, the director of the Samut Prakan immigration work, who oversaw the activity, all of them were Myanmar citizens without perform grants.
In order to learn more about the people, the officials questioned a man who appeared to be Thai of Taiwanese origin and was in charge of overseeing building. The man, however, behaved strangely, which led the team to learn that he was a Taiwanese subject by the name of Nibg Shoshi who had come to the country on an official tourist card.
The defendant admitted to working as a construction foreman without authorization during doubting. & nbsp,
The act was brought against him along with the 23 Myanmar citizens. They would be sent back to their various nations after being turned over to the Bang Phli police station for legal action.
The 23 many illegal migrant workers and the Chinese man in the center, who works as a construction foreman improperly, are being detained by police for legal action. Sutthiwit Chayutworakan( picture )