BANGKOK: Myanmar lawyers defending political detainees in junta-run courts are being harassed and even jailed by military authorities, Human Rights Watch said Thursday (Jun 8), warning that intimidation was forcing many to stop taking cases. Since it seized power more than two years ago and plunged the country into turmoil,Continue Reading
SYDNEY: Australia said on Thursday (Jun 8) it would introduce laws to parliament next week banning public displays and sales of Nazi hate symbols, citing a rise in far-right activities at home. The swastika, one of the most recognisable symbols of Nazi propaganda, and the insignia of Schutzstaffel (SS), theContinue Reading
The Department of Rural Roads (DRR) announced the completion of the Na Klang-Ao Jik road linking Phuket and Phangnga, which will support local tourism and cross-provincial transport.
DRR director-general Apirat Chaiwongnoi said on Wednesday the department had invested about 282.8 million baht in the 4.2km road, which is part of a city expansion plan in Phangnga’s Thai Muang district.
The concrete road has four driving lanes, each 3.5 metres wide, with a 2.5-metre wide hard shoulder on both sides. The road has a drainage system, lamp posts and traffic signs, while its footpaths are designed to be 3.5 metres wide.
The Na Klang-Ao Jik, or 1042 rural road, is a new route connecting Phangnga to Phuket, Mr Apirat said. No details were available on how much traffic it is likely to take.
It’s expected to be used by tourists who fly to Phuket to visit Phangnga’s tourist destinations, such as Na Tai Beach and Khao Pilai Beach.
He said that completing the Na Klang-Ao Jik road will benefit the local economy, cross-province transport, and tourism.
According to the Phangnga Tourism Association, more visitors travelled to Phangnga last year, up 41.65% from the year.
The total number of tourists last year was 546,475, and the tourism industry generated about 2.7 billion baht for the province.
During the first four months of this year, Chumphon welcomed 499,047 visitors, up 60.68% from the same period last year, according to the Tourism and Sports Ministry.
The tourism industry generated about 1.2 billion baht, up about 20% from the same period of last year to the southern province from Jan-April.
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It looks like chicken, it smells like chicken and, what do you know, it tastes like chicken.
You would never guess that the piece of meat in front of me did not come from a farm. It was made in a laboratory on an industrial estate just a few miles down the road.
I’m in Huber’s Butchery and Bistro in Singapore, which is the only restaurant in world to have so-called cultivated meat on the menu.
Feedback from customers has been “phenomenal”, according to the restaurant’s owner.
The meat’s creator – California-based Eat Just – says it is ethical, clean and green – with no compromise on taste. Billions of dollars are being poured into the industry, but huge question marks hang over its viability as anything beyond a novelty.
Ever since the first lab-grown burger – which cost a mere $330,000 (£263,400) to create – was unveiled in London in 2013, dozens of companies around the world have joined the race to bring affordable cultivated meat to the market.
So far, only Eat Just has managed to get its product approved for public sale after regulators in Singapore – the only country in the world to allow lab-grown meat to be sold- gave its chicken the green light in December 2020.
But things appear to have stalled since then. Cultivated chicken nuggets were briefly on the menu at a private members’ club in 2021.
That partnership was discontinued after a few months and this year Huber’s has started offering a chicken sandwich and a chicken pasta dish to the general public – albeit only once a week with limited dining slots available.
“Cultivated meat is real meat, but you don’t have to slaughter an animal,” says Josh Tetrick, chief executive of Eat Just, who spoke to the BBC from San Francisco. “This way of eating makes sense for the future,” he says.
Unlike plant-based substitutes, cultivated meat is literally meat. The process involves extracting cells from an animal, which are then fed with nutrients such as proteins, sugars and fats.
The cells are allowed to divide and grow, before being placed in a large steel bioreactor, which acts like a fermentation tank.
After four to six weeks, the material is ‘harvested’ from the bioreactor. Some vegetable protein is added, then it is moulded, cooked and 3-D printed to give it the necessary shape and texture.
The resulting strips of deep fried chicken on my plate of orecchiette pasta certainly tasted like the real deal, if a bit processed. Perhaps the sort of chicken you would eat in a fast-food restaurant.
“It’s meat – it’s perfect!” says Caterina, an Italian student who came here especially to try the cultivated chicken. Normally, for sustainability reasons, she would not eat meat but Caterina says she would eat this.
Her only quibble? Serving the chicken with pasta, which typically does not happen in Italy.
Another diner from Singapore says he was surprised by how much it resembled real meat.
“It’s legit”, he says. “I wouldn’t know where it came from. My only concern would be the cost.”
The chicken pasta dish I ordered was S$18.50 ($13.70; £11), but that is vastly discounted relative to the current cost of producing the meat.
Eat Just will not say exactly how much it spends on making its cultivated chicken, but at the moment the company’s production capacity only yields 2kg (4.4lb) or 3kg per week in Singapore.
When you compare that to the 4,000kg – 5,000kg of conventional chicken sold weekly – at Huber’s alone – it gives you a sense of the scale of the task ahead. Put simply, they will need to increase production enormously to avoid making a loss on each piece of chicken.
Eat Just says it has already achieved a 90% reduction in costs since 2018 and the company offered me a tour of its new multi-million dollar production facility in Singapore, which it hopes will open next year.
The pair of shiny steel 1,320 gallon (6,000 litres) bioreactors certainly represent a sign of intent, but in reality they are a tiny fraction of the millions of tonnes of chicken that would need to be produced to match the price of slaughtered chicken.
The industry is urging for patience, but many scientists have already seen enough.
“The narrative presented by these companies is very strong”, says Ricardo San Martin, co-director of the Alt: Meat Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
“But that narrative must be contrasted with the science”, he says. “Run the numbers, look at every scientific paper written by people who have no skin in the game, and you’ll see the answer is clear.”
“Can you do this, at scale, at a reasonable cost? No. Can you talk about saving the world with this? Again, no. These companies have to be honest – it’s wishful thinking”, he says.
Not only are there doubts about scaling up production, there is also uncertainty over the industry’s green credentials, which have been questioned by scientists.
In theory, reducing the world’s reliance on land and livestock for meat production should reduce carbon emissions, but at the moment the advanced technology needed to create cultivated meat is so energy intensive that it cancels out any benefits.
One study by the University of California, Davis even estimated that the process produces between 4 and 25 times as much carbon dioxide as regular beef. However, East Just has called the study “flawed”.
When asked by the BBC whether the whole project might end in failure, Josh Tetrick from Eat Just replied: “For sure”.
But he remains undeterred: “Making meat in this way is both necessary and highly uncertain,” he says.
“It’s not straightforward. It’s complicated. It’s not guaranteed and it might not work out. But the other option for us is not to do anything. So we decided to take a bet and go for it.”
Plenty of investors have decided to make that same bet. As of this year, an estimated $2.8bn has been spent on developing cultivated meat.
However, if cultivated meat is to become anything more than a niche alternative for the well-off in the developed world, then relying on investments from private businesses may not be enough.
Governments, Mr Tetrick says, are going to need to put “significant public money” into cultivated meat for it to rival conventionally slaughtered meat.
“This is like the transition to renewable energy… It’s a lifetime project – maybe a multiple lifetimes project,” he says.
At the moment though no country outside Singapore has authorised the sale of cultivated meat, let alone committed to serious investment.
According to Ricardo San Martin from UC Berkeley, both private and public funding for cultivated meat companies will dry up if they do not “look in the mirror” soon and present realistic forecasts to investors.
“Unless there is a clear path to success at some point in the future, investors and governments will not want to spend money on something that is not scientifically proven”.
Lily Naing Kyaw/FacebookMyanmar singer Lily Naing Kyaw died in a Yangon hospital a week after being shot in the head – allegedly by gunmen opposed to the military she championed.
Her death has not only shocked military supporters but also celebrities working with the pro-military media.
The 58-year-old was close to top junta leaders who seized power in 2021, plunging the country into war – she was also accused of being their informant.
Two men have been arrested and accused of her killing.
They are said to belong to an urban guerrilla group opposed to the military. Within hours of their arrest, two relatives of one of the men had been killed in apparent retribution.
Ms Kyaw’s killing is the latest in a series of assassinations of high-profile government supporters.
Four days before she was attacked, a well-known nationalist and pro-military supporter, Tint Lwin, was fatally shot in the head while at a tea shop in Yangon, the country’s main city. He had been in hiding after surviving a shooting last summer.
Ms Kyaw was targeted early in the evening of 30 May while parked outside her house in Yangon’s Yankin Township.
First reports said she had been killed, after an image of her lying face down in her car was shared on social media. She was taken to hospital in a critical condition and remained in a coma until she died early on 6 June. Her family confirmed her death with the BBC.
A government statement described it as the “inhumane shooting of an innocent woman”. Seventeen pro-junta organisations issued statements condemning the killing. Ma Ba Tha, a hard-line nationalist Buddhist organisation, demanded better security.
Two men said to be members of the Special Task Force, an armed resistance group based in Yangon, were arrested and accused of the shooting. One of the men, Kaung Zar Ni Hein, was identified from CCTV footage. The other has been named as Kyaw Thura. The suspects are in custody awaiting trial and the military claim they have confessed.
The military have also alleged that prominent student leader D Nyein Lynn was behind the shooting.
On the night of the men’s arrests, the mother and cousin of Kaung Zar Ni Hein, were fatally shot at their home in Yangon. His younger brother and younger sister managed to escape – the security forces are “protecting them from gunmen”, according to a pro-military channel.
There was no independent confirmation of the report – or who attacked the family. No group has claimed it.
Born into a military family, Ms Kyaw rubbed shoulders with military top brass and was often pictured at official events. One of her songs had become the unofficial theme song of Myanmar’s water festival, which celebrates the New Year.
Ms Kyaw is said to have been targeted because she was a military informant. She is said to have filmed protesters demonstrating by banging pots and pans in her neighbourhood and handing the footage to the army, leading to their arrests. She had also reported on young people involved with revolutionary forces.
A few months after the February 2021 coup which ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected National Democratic Party (NLD), Ms Kyaw was chosen to speak to CNN and the Southeast Asia Globe during their visit to Myanmar. She told reporters that she had been accused of being a spy and that posters condemning her as a traitor had appeared on lampposts near her home. She also said her home had been vandalised.
“I support the military and accept the coup. But most people in my neighbourhood support the NLD and say they want to kill me,” the singer told reporters. “These people want to destroy the nation.”
Some public figures shunned her because she would tell the pro-military Telegram channel which celebrities were joining anti-coup protests so they could be arrested, according to close sources of the victims.
A famous songwriter, Aung Naing San, who is a pro-democracy supporter, had been embroiled in a long-standing social media row with Ms Kyaw. He was arrested last week after liking the photo of her lying in her car. “Death is sad,” he posted on Facebook on 1 June, “but because there is personal hurt and hatred I clicked satisfied.” The former friends fell out in 2009 and he had criticised Ms Kyaw for supporting the coup.
At least six others have also been arrested after reacting to, commenting on or sharing posts about Ms Kyaw’s shooting on social media. Most were charged with section 505(a), a law which criminalises fake news and incitement against the military.
The killing has spread fear among other pro-government Myanmar celebrities, some of whom have announced they will no longer voice their support for the military because they feel they have no protection, and gunmen could arrive at their door any time. They are warning each other to use social media carefully, and to keep a low profile, according to close sources.
One entertainer caught up in Myanmar’s political minefield is Paing Takhon, a model and actor who was sentenced to three years in 2021 for joining the anti-coup protests. He was released early after agreeing to collaborate with the military, but is now being boycotted after performing for them during the water festival in April.
Social media users posted angry comments under the trailer for his forthcoming film, called Rent Boy. Some accused him of betrayal, others posted “shame on you” and “Paing Takhon is not Myanmar people’s hero any more and he is collaborating with the brutal military junta now”. The actor responded to his 2.8 million followers saying that Myanmar was not progressing because people were fighting each other, but his post was taken down shortly after.
Last April, a rapper named Yone Lay (meaning Little Bunny) was attacked by a man with a knife while he was at a restaurant in Yangon, but he escaped uninjured. On his social media account he said that loving the armed forces was not the same as hating non-military organisations. “I don’t like extremism. I really want everyone to be peaceful and united,” he posted. Like Ms Kyaw, he has been accused of being a military informant.
Meanwhile, there has been a crackdown on celebrities who criticise the government.
Last month rapper Byu Har was arrested for “disrupting the peace” and “spreading propaganda” after he mocked the junta for constant power outages. His father, the famous composer Naing Myanmar, wrote the song Kabar Ma Kyay Buu, meaning “We won’t be satisfied until the end of the world”, which was the anthem of Myanmar’s 1988 pro-democracy movement and is now sung at protests against the 2021 coup.
Thailand is among 13 countries newly added to Canada’s electronic travel authorisation (eTA) programme by its Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Sean Fraser, the country announced on Wednesday.
Travellers who have either held a Canadian visa in the last 10 years or who currently hold a valid United States non-immigrant visa can now apply for an eTA instead of a visa when travelling to Canada by air, according to the website canada.ca.
Effective from Tuesday, eligible travellers from Thailand and the following countries can now benefit from the programme: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Costa Rica, Morocco, Panama, Philippines, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay.
“By making travel to Canada more accessible, we are enhancing opportunities for collaboration, trade and investment, thus invigorating our economy,” said Kevin Lamoureux, Canada’s MP for Winnipeg North.
The usual images of Tokyo oscillate between two extremes: Gilded metropolis of the future and repository of the aristocratic past. The Q Guide evokes a different, real, thoroughly proletarian and much more intriguing city, most faithfully depicted in works of art and literature that I love.
I thought of Donald Richie’s Tokyo: A View Of The City, a short book published in 1999 that illuminates Tokyo’s downtown culture, when I waited in line outside Dote no Iseya, a basic but brilliant tempura restaurant in what was once a lively red-light district. Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s magnificent graphic novel, Abandon The Old In Tokyo, a collection of stories from 1970, focused on the city’s postwar, working-class culture, came to life when I ducked into Uosan Sakaba, an izakaya located on the far eastern side of Tokyo. I trailed two salarymen, obviously a little tipsy, into the steamy space. The counterman said to them, with no greeting or preamble, “Have you been drinking?”
“We had a few,” the men replied.
“Get out,” the counterman said, authoritatively, and that was it. Uosan may be cheap and loud, but they too have their rules. You can get drunk there, but you don’t enter if you’re already inebriated.
Fugitive ex-PM still faces 3 legal cases
The Shinawatra family wants fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra to postpone his return from exile to Thailand, according to a source.
Shortly before the May 14 general election, Thaksin, who fled the country to avoid facing jail time, tweeted that he wanted to return home before July 26, his 74th birthday, to care for his grandchildren.
His planned return was discussed on Wednesday at a family get-together attended by Khunying Potjaman Na Pombejra, Thaksin’s ex-wife, Thaksin’s daughters, Pintongta and her husband, and Paetongtarn.
The get-together at a Bangkok hotel took place after Ms Paetongtarn, one of the Pheu Thai Party’s prime ministerial candidates, told the press at Pheu Thai Party headquarters that her father wants to return home next month and is ready to face justice.
According to the source, Thaksin cannot wait to return but the family is not sure about the timing and wants him to postpone his plan until the formation of the coalition government.
The source said the family also thinks it is too soon for Ms Paetongtarn to try and serve as prime minister and that it would be better for her to wait five years. At 37, the clan feels she is too young to handle the political situation and there are other suitable candidates such as Srettha Thavisin and Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat, the source said.
“She is young and doesn’t have much experience. She entered politics because she wants to strengthen Pheu Thai. It’s better for her to take it step by step. She also told her father she has yet to gain more experience, and he gets it,” said the source.
Early on Wednesday, Ms Paetongtarn told the media that Thaksin plans to return to Thailand in July but he is likely to look at several factors before deciding on an exact date.
She said Thaksin has made no coordination through her, but he is believed to be liaising with certain government agencies.
Ms Paetongtarn said Thaksin would face justice regardless of what government is in power.
“The last time we talked, [his plan] was still July. His return is quite important. So, circumstances and timing will be taken into consideration,” she said.
Thaksin was overthrown by a military coup on Sept 19, 2006, while he was overseas. He has since lived in self-imposed exile, except for a brief visit to Thailand in 2008.
He has spent 17 years saying he will come back. There are 18 records of him talking about his return.
The first time he was known to talk about coming home was on March 30, 2009 when he addressed red-shirt protesters in front of Government House via a video conference. “As soon as a first shot is fired at people, I’ll lead you to Bangkok,” he said.
Three years later he made a phone-in to greet red-shirt supporters at their gathering in Surin and told them: “If I go home, I’ll have to come back cool. And I’ll let you know later how to come back cool.”
The rest of Thaksin’s homecoming nods were recorded from 2021 to this May.
On May 1, he tweeted about the birth of his newest grandchild and said that all seven were born after he left the country.
On May 9, he tweeted that he wanted to return home before July 26. “I am determined to return home by July before my (74th) birthday to care for my grandchildren.”
During his absence, the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Holders of Political Positions sentenced him to 12 years imprisonment in four cases.
These range from abuse of power related to the ownership of state-owned land, malfeasance concerning the two- and three-digit lottery, abusing his position by authorising bank loans to buy equipment from a telecoms firm owned by his family, and using nominees to hold shares in that company, Shin Corp.
SINGAPORE: Singapore’s High Commissioner to Malaysia Vanu Gopala Menon on Thursday (Jun 8) said he was appalled by “gratuitously offensive comments” made by comedian Jocelyn Chia during a stand-up performance in New York. In a video clip of Chia performing at the Comedy Cellar club, she can be seen making jokes about Singapore’s relationshipContinue Reading
The Highway Police Division (HPD) will set up a committee to look into a recent attempt by a senior official at the Excise Department to lobby the HPD to avoid taking legal action against a tanker carrying illegal oil.
Pol Maj Gen Jaroonkiat Pankaew, commander of the Anti-Corruption Division (ACD), also acting as HPD commander, said the HPD police last Saturday stopped and seized an oil tanker for inspection on Phetkasem Road in Prachuap Khiri Khan and found the oil it transported was illegal.
Following the seizure, the unnamed senior Excise Department official called the HPD team and asked for a favour to let the tanker driver go and release the tanker, which the team refused to do, said Pol Maj Gen Jaroonkiat.
The Excise Department official then tried contacting Pol Maj Gen Jaroonkiat’s team asking for help to agree to a negotiation, he said.
Pol Maj Gen Jaroonkiat said as soon as he learnt about the caller’s intention, he immediately refused to meet that person.
“Now is time for everyone at the HPD to join hands in shaking off our bad reputation and build a new one to regain public trust,” he said.
He was referring to an ongoing investigation into the “sticker bribery” scandal of highway lorries disclosed by Move Forward Party (MFP) MP-elect Wiroj Lakkhanaadisorn, who cited information supplied by Land Transport Federation of Thailand chairman Apichart Prairungruang.
