SINGAPORE: An Air China plane caught fire en route from Chengdu on Sunday( Sept.10 ), causing Singapore’s Changi Airport to temporarily close a runway andnbsp. Before touching down on Runway 3 at around 4.15 p.m., Flight CA403″ encounted smoke in the forward cargo hold and lavatory ,” according to aContinue Reading
10 Oct 2023 at 17:01 PUBLISHED
PHUKET: According to the Region 3 Thailand Maritime Enforcement Command Centre( Thai – MECC ), a small fishing boat capsized in the water off Koh Ael island, south of Phuket, on Sunday, and two crew members went missing.
At 1.20 p.m., the Thai – MECC Region 3 received notification of the event via crisis number 1465.
About 2.2 nautical miles off the coast of Koh Ael, the fishing vessel with four crew members capsized. The other two crew members vanished, but two of them were able to swim offshore to health.
A search and rescue vision was sent out by a guard ship, Tor 272. A television network was used to alert nearby fishing boats to the Thai-MECC and assist in the search for the missing men.
However ongoing was the research.
10 September 2023 at 16:43 PUBLISHED
According to a senior police officer, four Thai people — including three women — were detained on Sunday in Poipet, Cambodia, on suspicion of making the scam calls that last month led to the murder of the man’s family in Samut Prakan province.
Supol Wongwian, 21, Nisarat Sukasem, 22, Kanonkporn Kraisuk, 19, and Kornkanok Singthit were all detained in the neighboring region on Sunday, according to deputy federal police chief Pol Gen Surachate Hakparn.
Mr. Supol, according to Pol Gen Surachate, allegedly served as a Thai officer in charge of Thai con artists, including the three Vietnamese sexual offenders tasked with carrying out the gang’s fraud names.
They will be brought to Thailand for prosecution after being accused of participating in a multinational crime gang, computer crime, and common fraud.
Authorities took several smart phones, ATM cards, lender books, and about 240,000 baht in cash from them during the arrest.
The death of a lady and her two children in Samut Prakan’s Bang Phli district on August 28 was allegedly committed by 30 suspected users of the phone fraud crew, including the four Thai nationals. Her father was the criminal, and he also attempted to take his own life.
According to officials, the man owed several hundred thousand ringgit to guarantee a car rental for another person. Then, in an effort to assist, his wife made plans to borrow money using a banking app that was actually used by the scam gang. Finally, she suffered a 1.7 million baht fraud.
According to reports, the father killed his family as a result of the terrible damage.
Of the 30 suspected users of the fraud group, 16 have so far been detained, according to Pol Gen Surachate on Sunday. 16 proprietors of bank records used to collect money from victims, four cashiers, two people who created horse accounts, six call center con artists, and two still-at-large Chinese call center supervisors were among the suspects.
According to Pol Gen Surachate, police were looking for the defendants who were still at big. & nbsp,
Evans declined to comment on China’s long-standing foe to US-led military exercises in Asia. When asked if the US government had any plans to conduct joint naval patrols with allies like Japan and the Philippines in or close to contested waters, Evans replied that” it is important that we maintainContinue Reading
The rules-based international trading program as embodied by the WTO must be maintained.
This” remains the best surety of common development, as well as effective and resilient supply chains ,” according to Mr. Lee, but its rules must keep up with modern change, stay pertinent for the current market, and support global food and energy security.
We therefore urge the G20 to give discussions on WTO reform, in particular, a solid boost in order to return to an operational difference settlement system as soon as possible.
To support sustainable development and safeguard the common around the world, another is to reform the world economic structures. The former refers to reference domains or regions, like the high seas and outer room, that are outside of a single nation-state’s social sphere of influence.
Mr. Lee stated that Singapore” strongly” supports efforts made by India to study changes of the multilateral development banks as the number of G20 this year. These global establishments, like the World Bank, were established by various states to aid developing nations.
He continued, noting that better and more effective use of these banks’ balance sheets may be encouraged as a starting point due to the urgency and scope of the funding needs.
To enhance and increase the impact of public funds, new and creative ways will also be required to scale up and mobilize private sector growth cash.
All hands must be on board, Mr. Lee declared.
To address the development issues, the G20 must take the lead in reviving internationalism. Singapore does make every effort to play our portion, both individually and collectively, as we have in the past.
Similar arrests had previously been made, according to wo liaison officer Nyi Rang, who also stated that online scam operations are prohibited in areas controlled by the UWSA and its social wing, the United Wa State Party. A total of 1, 207 Foreign citizens who were detained by the WaContinue Reading
10 September 2023 at 14:25 PUBLISHED
Due to their alleged role in the firing at a dinner party held on Wednesday evening at the home of the kamnan( tambon main) in Nakhon Pathom, six police officers have been fired from the police force.
Pol Maj Siwakorn Saibua, a police officer at Highway Police Sub-division 2’s bridge police stop 1, was killed in that event, and Lt. Col. Wasin Pandee, the lieutenant commander, was hurt.
Four of the six officers who were fired from bridge police station 1 are Pol Lt. Prasarn Rodpol, loon. Captain Narongsak Taeng – ampai, and poli. Natthapol Nakkorn and Sansern Srisawat.
The other two officers who were fired are Pol Maj Kiatisak Somsuk, an analyst at the Samut Sakhon state police station Krathum Baen, and Lt Nimit Salidkul, a customers police officer at Nakhon Pathom’s Muang station.
The six officers are charged with destroying proof of the murder and aiding Praween Chankhlai, the kamnan, and the alleged shooter, in fleeing. In Kanchanaburi state, the suspected shooter Thananchai Manmak was afterwards killed in a firefight with police and nbsp, while Mr. Praween turned himself in to the authorities.
The discharge orders go into effect on September 9. They are all the subjects of a thorough administrative analysis.
Additionally fired and subject to an investigation for alleged role in the shooting incident is a member of the Corrections Department.
BEIJING: Last month, at least three significant Chinese cities lifted restrictions on home purchases as the Asian powerhouse slowly retracted a crackdown on the real estate industry in an effort to boost its economy. Two of the most popular cities in the northern province of Liaoning, Dalian and Shenyang, individuallyContinue Reading
Almost 30 % of Americans claim they don’t practice any religion. The so-called” nones” now make their voices heard and represent about 30 % of Democrats and 12 % of Republicans. Businesses lobby on behalf of liberal humanists, agnostics, and various nonreligious individuals.
It’s simple to believe that this demographic will have more sway as more individuals leave religious organizations or not join them in the first place. However, as a psychologist who studies politics and religion, I was curious as to whether there was any proof that this shift in church might really have an impact on politics.
There are good reasons to be dubious about the influence of affiliated Americans at the polls. Voter mobilization has long relied heavily on spiritual organizations, both on the left and the right.
Younger people tend to vote less frequently and to be spiritually unaffiliated. Additionally, exit polls from new elections indicate that fewer voters than the general population does get religiously unaffiliated.
Most importantly, it’s challenging to categorize the” unaffiliated.” Just one-third of them declare themselves to be agnostics or atheists. There is a smaller base of liberal activists, but they tend to have different ideologies from the larger, non-religious group, such as being more concerned with the separation of church and state.
Experts and political analysts run the risk of missing important information about this sizable and different constituency by classifying all unconnected people as” the nones.”
I used information from the Cooperative Election Study, or CES, for the 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 presidential elections to gain a better understanding of which segments of morally disaffiliated communities cast ballots. To verify voter turnout information, the CES compiles extensive studies and pairs up specific respondents with those surveys.
These assessments differed from enter surveys in a few significant way. For instance, these survey samples showed that total validated voter turnout appeared higher in some groups than exit polls had suggested, not just the unaffiliated.
However, I was able to identify some significant differences between smaller groups of the affiliated because each survey example contained over 100,000 respondents and precise questions about religious affiliation.
My research, which was published in the journal Sociology of Religion in June 2023, revealed that the voter turnout among the affiliated is divided: Some unafiliating groups are more likely than respondents who identify as spiritually affiliated, and some are less likely.
Particularly in more recent elections, people who identified as atheists and agnostics were more likely to cast ballots than respondents who were conscientiously affiliated. For instance, after accounting for important demographic variables of voting, such as age, schooling, and salary, I discovered that respondents who were not religiously affiliated were each about 30 % more likely to have a verified voting record in the 2020 election.
People who described their church as” nothing in particular ,” or about two-thirds of the unaffiliated, were actually less likely to participate in all four elections under those same settings. For instance, I discovered that, compared to only about half of the” nothing in particulars ,” 7 out of 10 agnostics and atheists in the 2020 election sample had verified voter turnout records.
Collectively, these groups’ voting patterns have a tendency to negate one another. The nones were equally likely to have a participation record as respondents who were religiously affiliated once I took age and education into account for another voting predictors.
The role of religion in right-wing advocacy has come to light as a result of growing Holy nationalism, which promotes fusing national identity and social power with Christian values.
However, faith and one group do not mesh well. There are many Democratic electors for whom religion is unimportant, and the social left also boasts a diverse alliance of religious organizations.
Republicans and Democrats will need to think more effectively and deliberately about how to appeal to these citizens if the percentage of people without a spiritual tie continues to rise.
According to my research, neither party can handle the unconnected as a single, cohesive group or take them for granted. Politicians and experts will instead need to focus more on what encourages vote, particularly what guidelines encourage vote among young adults.
For instance, some activist organizations refer to someone as” the secular values voter ,” or someone who is increasingly driven to cast a ballot out of concern for the separation of church and state. The secular ideals voting story is somewhat supported by the evidence I did find that the average atheist or agnostic vote is about 30 % more likely to move out than the typical religiously affiliated vote. That description does not, however, apply to all” nones.”
Given that some unconnected people also claim to have religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, it might be more beneficial to concentrate on America’s growing religious diversity rather than its declining religious affiliation.
In the past, religious communities have served as significant locations for democratic organizing. However, motivating and empowering citizens today may require searching across a wider range of area institutions to locate them.
Regardless of their political ideologies, there is great news in these results for everyone. It may not be the case, contrary to social scientific ideas from the 1990s and 2000s, which claimed that renunciation of religion was a larger pattern in declining political commitment, such as voting and volunteering.
My studies found that the affiliated respondents who reported continuing to attend religious services had the lowest likelihood of casting a ballot. Their turnout rates were lower than those of both unconnected people who previously attended and those who usually attended spiritual affiliates.
This conclusion is consistent with earlier studies on political commitment, religion, and religion. For instance, researchers Jacqui Frost and Penny Edgell discovered a comparable pattern in working among respondents who were not morally affiliated.
In a previous study, sociologist Jaime Kucinskas and I discovered that both religious and spiritual practices— including yoga and meditation — were strongly correlated with political behavior. According to these studies, there is evidence that social withdrawal is not always associated with a lack of formal religion.
If political management can implement policies that assist them in turning out and encourage them to turn out as well, new potential voters may be willing to participate as the spiritual landscape changes.
Evan Stewart teaches anthropology as an assistant professor at UMass Boston.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is republished from The Conversation. read the article in its entirety.
BANGKOK – A century ago, American humorist Robert Benchley quipped that there are “two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.” Thomas Parks does not.
In a new book, “Southeast Asia’s Multipolar Future: Averting a New Cold War” (Bloomsbury), Parks challenges those who divide the Indo-Pacific into two poles – one Chinese, the other American – and who argue, therefore, that Southeast Asia must divide the bulk of its attention between them. Instead of two poles, he sees many.
Parks also implies frustration with Southeast Asian countries themselves, which, by continually imploring China and the US not to pressure them into choosing one over the other, unwittingly contribute to the bipolar conception. If there are more than two poles, then there are more than two choices.
While conceding that China and the US are the heavyweights, Parks contends that they are trending toward “strategic parity”, such that neither is likely to establish hegemony in the region.
Far from resulting in gridlock or geopolitical inertia, however, he argues the opposite: an “opening for the second tier of actors in the region to have outsized influence” – for middle and regional powers to act as additional poles.
Moreover, among the key causes of great power parity in the region is Southeast Asia itself, whose collective voice speaks for even its smallest members and is increasingly heard in Beijing, Washington and elsewhere.
This is done via the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Home to the world’s fifth-largest economy and third-largest population, the region has proven a pole in its own right by keeping China and the US on either side of an open door.
These auxiliary poles – principally Australia, the EU, France, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the UK – vary greatly in size, strength and geopolitical magnetism vis-à-vis ASEAN and its member states. But the point is their sheer number and the options they represent for, and present to, the region. And they are here to stay.
The framework thus laid, Parks immediately sets about the foundation of his argument with a chapter on Southeast Asia’s “Unseen Agency”, whose title acknowledges the idea’s many skeptics.
Expertly linking relevant concepts such as balancing, bandwagoning, and hedging to recent examples, Parks details the ways in which regional states are playing “defense” against the sometimes heavy-handed tactics of China and the US.
He also does this by referencing history, showing that the Cold War’s near-total alignment of regional states with one side or the other was actually a short-lived departure from centuries of negotiating great power pressure. Southeast Asia was making use of these concepts before they were concepts.
Among the book’s major insights is its illustration of the region’s recent “offensive” moves, the most effective of which is the focus of a chapter on “Diversifying Partners.”
Both individually and as a regional pole/bloc, Southeast Asian countries are doubling down on the “multipolarity” they have helped create by reapportioning their foreign policies to include more middle and regional powers.
And as with any portfolio whose diversification exceeds new resources, this has mitigated risk against a day of reckoning between China and the US while enabling new opportunities for expanding relations elsewhere.
Fortunately for his assertions, which run contrary to prevailing talk of a “new Cold War”, Parks is an empiricist. Focusing on four areas – trade and FDI, foreign aid, travel and study abroad, and military cooperation and procurement – he contrasts Southeast Asia’s relations with the dominant and non-dominant states during the Cold War with the same since the war’s conclusion.
While narrow vestiges remain (Laos’s economic dependence on China, heavy Philippine weapons procurement from the US), the level of reliance on a dominant power in any of the four areas by Southeast Asian countries has diminished significantly over the past three decades. “This reliance,” he rightly notes, “made them vulnerable to foreign influence and leverage.”
At the same time, and even more to his point, Parks reveals that reliance overall has not diminished but instead has been diluted in favor of middle and regional powers. Fundamental changes – the Mekong’s “battlefields to marketplaces”, China’s economic rise, America’s “forever wars” – have of course played more than passive backdrop to this, but Southeast Asia has clearly been making deals and decisions on its own.
After being the top study-abroad destination for decades, for example, the US is no longer number one for any Southeast Asian country, while (at least before the pandemic) China led the list for only Thai and Indonesian students. Australia and the UK, meanwhile, have surged in popularity with the region’s outward-bound students.
Even as China and Russia have essentially swapped their levels of global power since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s arms sales to the region exceeded China’s four-fold between 1999-2018.
Interestingly, among the main factors enabling countries to diversify have been the “multiple competing factions and voices” within them that push for greater or lesser alignment with China or the US.
These range from camps within the communist party structures of Laos and Vietnam, to powerful ethnic Chinese minorities in Malaysia and Thailand, to partially democratic constituencies in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Parks’s prose, reflective of his long experience writing for diplomats and policymakers, is a study in measure and modulation, but he is subtly provocative in his chapters on ASEAN and “The Normative Divide.”
The former adopts a decidedly minority view among Western commentators in defending the regional body as (per its subtitle) “indispensable and misunderstood.” “Fundamentally,” Parks asserts, “whether you agree with it or not, ASEAN functions the way it was intended to function.”
That way is as “the primary vehicle for countries in Southeast Asia to shape external power engagement in the region.” Founded at the height of the Cold War in 1967, ASEAN was designed to manage disputes and conflicts among its five original members so that external powers could not in the future interfere as they were doing then.
Accordingly, once those powers and their proxy armies retreated in the 1990s, ASEAN absorbed its final four members and “it is remarkable that not a single armed conflict has occurred between ASEAN members since they joined the group,” Parks writes.
More than that, ASEAN has succeeded in establishing its own vaunted “centrality” to regional security by ensuring that its ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) – also founded in the 1990s – contains the largest (27 states) and most inclusive (North Korea) membership of any such group.
It is true that this centrality is purely procedural and that ASEAN, despite its collective heft, seldom advances its own agenda. But Parks’s point is that the power to convene is the power ASEAN itself has chosen to claim and exercise.
What ASEAN was not mandated to do – the main misunderstanding among Western observers – is to manage disputes and conflicts within its member states. Its actions to preempt external involvement only apply when conflicts involve at least two ASEAN members.
The rub lay in instances (several of which have been offered by Myanmar in recent years) where the distinction is hardly clear, and thus where ASEAN has struggled to reach and maintain its all-important consensus.
Parks acknowledges that “ASEAN’s response to the Myanmar crisis seems to be leading the organization into uncharted territory” and that changes to its mandate are almost inevitable. In the meantime, his unique chapter does a service to readers and the regional body alike.
Parks continues his stride into “The Normative Divide”, concerning the promotion of democracy and human rights in Southeast Asia by external powers, but finds himself on less steady footing.
He is correct to call for the right “balance” between promoting these “values” against more traditional national interests, and to claim that US and EU sometimes error “by emphasizing values at the expense of all other areas of cooperation.”
He also accurately notes that Southeast Asia’s governments have substantially regressed in democratic governance and respect for human rights since the end of the Cold War and have, as a result, “developed a strong preference for external partners who avoid, or delicately handle, these confrontational issues.”
But his disquieting conclusion is essentially that – ergo – the right “balance” is to simply minimize values promotion toward maximizing receptiveness to regional governments.
This implies that rights and governance inherently “weigh less” on the scale, in both their abstract importance and application, than do more traditional interests. It is hardly conceivable that Parks would sacrifice, say, global trade rules or diplomatic security the same way.
Further, in asking whether admittedly legitimate criticism of regional governments “is worth the cost in bilateral relations over the long term”, he implies that values are ancillary or additional, rather than integral, to such relations.
And while he cites Australia, India, Japan and South Korea as striking the balance varyingly well in Southeast Asia, his less-is-more logic is a slippery slope to China—which, “by not allowing values to dominate bilateral relations”, has advanced its influence and interests among regional governments more than any other country has in a quarter-century.
Promoting values less, as opposed to better, will not help Southeast Asia “avert a new cold war”; it will only usher it to the wrong side.
The book concludes with detailed chapters on four of the region’s new or, in the case of Japan, newly recognized poles. As with all of its chapters, these begin with vignettes dating back a few years to a few centuries that not only illustrate a key point but provide welcome context and color. Their content follows suit.
Japan’s development assistance to Southeast Asia was nearly twice that of the US in 1973 and nearly nine times greater by 2003, a disparity that has barely lessened since. Who knew that 13 of the 17 bridges over Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River were built by the Japanese?
In 2021, Australia – not China, the US, or Japan – became ASEAN’s first Comprehensive Strategic Partner, and the maritime border it shares with the region’s largest member, Indonesia, is the longest maritime border in the world.
As India was making Southeast Asia the main focus of its 1990s “Look East” policy, the region was busy looking north. By 2019, China and ASEAN were a decade into free trade and investment agreements, while India accounted for less than 4% of ASEAN exports and less than 1% of its FDI.
And from 2011 to 2021, the six formal partnerships established between European governments and ASEAN were more than the rest of the world combined. The UK became its first new dialogue partner in more than a quarter century.
So much of what has been written on geopolitics in Southeast Asia over the past half-dozen years is essentially the same, having become the “accepted discourse” to the exclusion of alternative views from different vantage points. There is China and the US, and there is everyone else.
Parks’s view of the region is one from the region, where he has lived and worked for 16 years. It poses a credible and necessary challenge to this new “Washington Consensus”, introducing a far more crowded and complex environment.
For this reason alone – among many others – his book should feature not only in the briefing packets of those deployed to the region, but on the desks of their many minders back home.
Benjamin Zawacki is a Senior Program Specialist at the Asia Foundation in Bangkok, a 2022-23 Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholar and the author of Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the US and a Rising China. He works alongside Parks at the Asia Foundation in Thailand.
Thomas Parks’s Southeast Asia’s Multipolar Future: Averting a New Cold War (Bloomsbury) may be purchased on Amazon here.