Rare footage of âferociousâ platypus fight in wild
Two male platypuses have been caught on camera fighting for territory in Tasmania, Australia. Esme Atkinson, who filmed the video, said the animals were “ferocious” and showed no signs of stopping after 20 minutes. One expert told the BBC the male platypuses, which have venomous spurs, can become territorial ahead of the breeding season.
Faster clearance at Woodlands Train Checkpoint with new immigration kiosks: ICA
SINGAPORE: The installation of 10 new immigration kiosks at Woodlands Train Checkpoint since March has improved clearance speed and capacity, said the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) on Wednesday (Jun 14). Immigration clearance through these kiosks, the first of its kind at Singapore’s checkpoints, is similar to that at automated lanes. EligibleContinue Reading
Questioning the Quadâs rhetoric
In the wake of the rancorous China-US standoff at the Shangri-La Dialogue, the Quad looms ever larger in importance.
The Quad – short for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – is a loose but rapidly evolving security arrangement of Australia, India, Japan and the US. As it evolves and expands its participants in Quad-Plus “initiatives,” it is a good time to parse its intent and direction. The Quad leaders’ statement of May 20 from their fifth meeting provides a starting point.
In the leaders’ words, the core intent of the Quad is to maintain a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” and uphold “the rules-based international order.”
This is code for the international system primarily built and dominated by the US and the West and that preferentially benefits them. The leaders think it is increasingly under threat from a rising China and this must be deterred. They hope to do this by coordinating their strategy to constrain, contain and, if necessary, confront China.
The Quad’s agenda includes traditional security issues like “upholding peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain” and “adherence to international law, particularly that reflected in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,” or UNCLOS.
The Quad has already held joint military exercises and its Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness could well provide a basis for cooperation on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance targeting China’s military. This is but the tip of an iceberg of ongoing and planned traditional security cooperation.
However, it has deftly merged the United States’ real raison d’être with an agenda that includes cooperation on non-traditional security issues like climate change, disaster risk, pandemics, infrastructure, and cyber and maritime safety.
The non-traditional part of the security agenda is a sop to wary India and Japan and the sensitivities of Southeast Asian countries.
Anti-China agenda
Indeed, the Quad’s evolution toward a hardcore security arrangement would have moved much faster but for India’s non-alignment policy and markedly different worldview – as evidenced by its refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and Japan’s constitutional constraint against deploying offensive weapons.
Australia also doesn’t want it to move too quickly toward a defense alliance because of the sensitivities of China and Southeast Asia.
While these factors may slow the pace of its evolution into a full-blown anti-China defense arrangement, Japan and India seem to be changing their political tune in response to an increasingly aggressive China and moving toward the US goal.
The US intent of the Quad for the time being is for it to be a US-driven “quiet and implicit deterrent” against an increasingly aggressive China. Certainly China and many other countries in the region see it this way.
But the Quad’s spin doctors hide its real intent. The recent Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement repeats what has become the standard language for its intent: “We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient.” A key word is “inclusive” as advocated by India and Southeast Asia. But in US eyes it doesn’t seem to include China.
Indeed, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Shangri-La Dialogue that the United Staates is “doubling down” on regional alliances and partnerships “at every stage of defense planning.”
“Our shared goals are clear: to deter aggression and to deepen the rules and norms that promote prosperity and prevent conflict,” he said. “So we’re stepping up planning and coordination, and training with our friends from the East China Sea to the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.”
The Quad Statement says: “We seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated – one where all countries are free from coercion….” This is aimed at China. But the US coerces countries militarily and economically around the world – including in the Indo-Pacific.
Examples include its co-called “freedom of navigation operations” challenging others’ maritime claims with warships and its sanctions imposed on such countries as China and even some of its leaders, such as Defense Minister Li Shangfu, to try to force a change in policies and actions. Amazingly, it then complains that he won’t meet with his US counterpart.
Even the leaders’ self-serving claim to be responsible for the security of the Indo-Pacific region is questionable. Australia is the only Quad member that is a genuine geographic Indo-Pacific country bordering both oceans.
The US does border the Pacific Ocean and has many possessions there left over from the colonial era and World War II. But what is the basis of the US claim to be an “Indo” country? If it is its military base on Diego Garcia that is currently controlled by the UK, that is quite a stretch.
Many African countries border the Indian Ocean. That doesn’t make them “Pacific” countries. India is not a “Pacific” country and Japan is not an “Indo“ state, unless one counts its dependence on its sea lanes for its oil and gas imports.
The US has created this fuzzy Indo-Pacific concept and grouping by cobbling together countries at the extreme edges of the region in its strategy to surround China. This verbal geographic sleight of hand seems to be based on conceptual imperialism.
Indeed, the key for the US is that it has security interests and military bases in the area and deploys its military there. By this definition, the US is a global country.
The Quad leaders reaffirmed their “consistent and unwavering support for ASEAN centrality and unity.” This assertion is now included in all Quad statements to try to spin reality. But rather than supporting ASEAN centrality, the Quad – if effective – will become central to regional security management, particularly in the South China Sea.
Indeed, the US and its allies wanted to use the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or some of its members as a bulwark and buffer against China. But they would not cooperate to the extent that the Quad leaders sought. So the US and its allies went around and over ASEAN to form the Quad and its ancillary AUKUS, an Australia-US-UK defense pact. As a result, ASEAN centrality in regional security affairs has been weakened.
The Quad leaders emphasize the importance of adherence to international law and UNCLOS. But the US has not ratified that treaty, and some of its practices and claims, as well as those of Australia, India and Japan, are contrary to its provisions. Moreover all of them – just like China – have defied the rulings of international panels.
The point is that one should not rely solely on the Quad’s pompous rhetoric but instead gauge its intent by its actions. For perceptive analysts and policymakers, reality trumps spin.
An edited version of this article appeared in the South China Morning Post.
Japan Self Defence Force member arrested after shooting, one dead: NHK
TOKYO: A member of the Japan Self-Defence Force (SDF) was arrested on Wednesday (Jun 14) on suspicion of attempted murder after a shooting incident that resulted in at least one fatality, local media reported.
An 18-year-old SDF member injured three other personnel with automatic weapon fire, killing one, public broadcaster NHK reported, citing the defence ministry. Another report by NTV said two of the victims were without vital signs.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said the incident happened at about 9am at an SDF shooting range in Hino City in the central Japanese prefecture of Gifu. An SDF spokesperson said eight shots were fired.
The shooter was a teenage SDF member, while the injured included a man in his 50s and two in their 20s, NHK said.
The victims included a man in his 50s and two in their 20s, and there were no reports of civilian casualties, NHK said
Shootings are extremely rare in Japan, where gun ownership is tightly regulated and anyone seeking to own a gun must go through a rigorous vetting process.
Japan Self-Defence Force member arrested after shooting, one dead: Report
TOKYO: A member of the Japan Self-Defence Force (SDF) was arrested on Wednesday (Jun 14) on suspicion of attempted murder after a shooting incident that resulted in at least one fatality, local media reported. An 18-year-old SDF member injured three other personnel with automatic weapon fire, killing one, public broadcasterContinue Reading
Tourist kills himself at Phuket shooting range
PHUKET: A Belgian tourist shot himself dead at a shooting range in Muang district on Tuesday afternoon.
The shooting was reported to police about 2.40pm, said Pol Col Ekarat Plaidung, superintendent of Chalong police station. It occurred at the Sai Yuan shooting range at Moo 7 village in tambon Rawai.
Police sent to the scene were accompanied by doctors from Vachira Phuket Hospital and charity foundation rescuers.
They were directed to the body of a Belgian tourist, identified as Christian Richard Cerfontaine, 52, lying dead on the ground with a bullet wound in the forehead.
The police found on him a notice from Phuket immigration office that he had overstayed more than 90 days in the country.
Witnesses said the man arrived at the shooting range on a motorcycle, rented a gun and then shot himself.
The man’s body was sent to Vachira Phuket Hospital for autopsy. The Belgian embassy was informed.
The police investigation was continuing.
Do we still need the post office?
Many years ago, when I lived in the United States, the mail was a constant source of excitement. I would look forward to opening the mailbox and sifting through the new wonders with giddy excitement. The serendipity of not knowing what each day would bring was a small but cherished part of my day.
I haven’t experienced those feelings in nearly 20 years, partly because the utility of the postal service is different outside of the US and partly because of the rise of all things digital and paperless.
In South Africa, where I now live, the postal service is in a state of near collapse. The SA Post Office was put in provisional liquidation in February. The decline at the post office has been slow and steady for the past two decades. Now executives are applying to the court system to be placed in business rescue to avoid additional lawsuits from creditors and escape liquidation.
I have to use the postal service here sparingly. Even though I have canceled my beloved print subscriptions to magazines and journals, I still get issues delivered from years ago. I recently opened my cobwebbed post box to find a copy of the London Review of Books dated April 2022.
Post offices around the world do a lot more than deliver mail. Traditionally they have offered essential services to communities like access to benefits, bill payment, and banking services. Universal (and free) access to mail and parcels is just one service. In developed and developing countries, access to these services is vital for underprivileged urban and rural communities that lack other options.
Pundits and analysts such as Business Day columnist Khaya Sithole have lamented the inability of the SA Post Office to use its large footprint in the country and pivot the business model.
Sithole said new business ventures, “such as providing social grants and reducing the digital divide between citizens by bringing technological resources closer to communities, it languished in mission drift where the main activity became paying salaries to its employees at the end of each month.”
Fading role
The demise of South Africa’s postal service is an extreme example of a more significant trend. As more essential services like bill payments move to smartphones and the need for physical mail dissolves, the post office’s role as a service hub is fading.
The Indian post office is more than 167 years old but has struggled in recent years to stay relevant in the digital age. Similar to the infrastructure challenges facing the US Postal Service, India Post hasn’t been able to leverage its existing resources to continue offering the services residents demand.
In the Middle East, where the first postal service may have originated in ancient Egypt and where the Persian Empire developed a sophisticated delivery network that formed the basis of many modern systems, the story is somewhat different.
Several nations have already moved on from a model where the post office served an essential role.
The United Arab Emirates, for example, has never offered universal access to mail services. Access is provided for a price, and regular mail has never taken off in the country. Utility bills and other officialdom have generally found their way to one’s office but now everything is handled through apps and over e-mail.
Interestingly, Emirates Post never became a significant actor in either bill or remittance payments. Without a footprint in the remittance market, the post office was never going to have a large role in society. The UAE is a global focal point for remittances because of the many foreign workers.
Curiously, the lack of a robust postal service and the country’s unique system of road addressing (or lack of a system of road addressing) were vital ingredients needed to create one of the most valuable companies ever built in the UAE.
Aramex, the first Arab company listed on the Nasdaq, started as an express delivery service in Dubai and has grown into a massive multinational logistics empire. The genius behind the Aramex model is how the company uses drivers that have highly localized knowledge. Without clear street names, these drivers must rely on landmarks and local expertise to ensure packages are delivered to the right person and on time.
Digital reality
As an idea and service, the post office still has an essential societal role. To realize this role, the post office must radically pivot away from paper products and embrace our digital reality. This is a painful reality for those with fond memories of receiving mail every day, but we can’t stop how pervasive our devices have become.
For the post office truly to embrace its mandate in the digital age, it must move to complete digital options. Imagine if the post office in your country functioned much the same as the app store on your phone – no physical branches, accessible on all your devices with a click of a button.
There is room for innovative ideas concerning the digital post office, but we might have to wait a while to see them take effect. As one of the largest and oldest state-owned enterprises in many countries, changes taking root in the post office tend to be glacial at best. Yet smaller countries with less traditional postal operations can make changes with a lot more ease than larger countries.
With its failing post office, South Africa is another area where change could occur. The direction of travel is clear; it’s just a matter of finding the political will to build the post office of the future.
This article was provided by Syndication Bureau, which holds copyright.
Zouk Group to open nightlife entertainment concepts in Tokyo and Los Angeles
He added that the time is right to enter the Tokyo market also seeing as “Singaporeans love Tokyo and Japan. When Japan opened for travel, I think it was bigger news than when the US opened.” The group is also looking to expand its reach in F&B with more collaborations in Japan.
As for opening in Los Angeles, that will take place in March or April next year, Li said. In partnership with lifestyle hospitality company sbe, Zouk LA will be located in what is currently sbe’s Nightingale club on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood. The 6,500 sq ft space will be redesigned by Christian Schulz and team of boutique design agency Studio Collective.
The Tokyo and Los Angeles projects are “extremely exciting” because they are partnerships with third-party operators, a first for the Zouk brand and testament of its draw, Li said. And, while they have had offers to open elsewhere, their strategy is to focus on “gateway cities”, he said, adding that going forward, Miami and Ibiza could be good targets.
“Globalisation started when we branched out to Las Vegas – it propelled the Zouk brand onto the global stage because only a few nightlife entertainment brands expand globally, and they are usually concentrated in Europe, the US or Asia.” This, he said, opened the door to Japan. And, “To have clubs in places such as Singapore, Malaysia, Las Vegas, and soon, Tokyo and Los Angeles, puts us into only three to five brands that have managed to do that.”
South Korea’s jobless rate in May falls to record low
SEOUL: South Korea’s jobless rate fell in May to a record low, official data showed on Wednesday (Jun 14), indicating a still robust labour market despite signs of slowing economic growth. The country’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate fell to 2.5 per cent in May from 2.6 per cent in April, theContinue Reading
Overcrowded Indian trains a relic of colonialism
A devastating rail crash that left almost 300 people dead has refocused international attention on the importance of railways in the lives of Indians.
Indeed, to many Western observers, images of men and women crammed into overcrowded cars serve as a metaphor for modern India.
Take, for example, a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel on India’s population surpassing China’s. Published just weeks before the accident in Odisha province on June 2, the now much-criticized cartoon depicted a shabby Indian train crammed with passengers rushing past a streamlined Chinese train with only two people in it.
Where does this enduring image in the West of Indian railways – and of India – come from?
As a scholar of Indian history and author of the 2015 book Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India, I believe the answers lie in the gigantic infrastructure projects of the 19th century – forged at the intersection of colonial dictates and capitalist demands.
A carrier of freight, not people
Railways remain the backbone of passenger traffic in India, transporting some 23 million people daily. In the pre-pandemic 2018-19 financial year, 7.7 billion passenger journeys in India. In comparison, even after a dramatic post-pandemic increase, airline passenger traffic was 123.2 million in 2022.
Yet, when first planned in the 1840s, India’s railways were intended to transport primarily freight and livestock, not people.
Indians were thought unlikely to become railway passengers by directors of the English East India Co, a merchant monopoly that gradually annexed and administered large parts of India under UK crown control.
Many people at the time disagreed that Indians were immobile people, pointing out that the country had a long history of global trade across vast oceanic networks.
However, early colonial railway policy was driven by pervasive Orientalist imaginings of a people rendered immobile by poverty, living in isolated villages and constrained by religious restrictions prohibiting travel.
The trope interlocked with colonial thinking that railways would foster greater industrialization which in turn would further a capitalist economy. It also aligned with the practical needs of a colonial trading monopoly that needed raw materials for English industries, such as cotton, to be moved swiftly and efficiently from India’s interiors to port towns, from where they could be shipped.
Relegated to cheap seats
To induce the “natives,” as the British often referred to their colonial subjects, to use railways, the colonial government pitched low fares, especially in third-class cars – the lowest and cheapest category of rail travel.
The decision to introduce lower fares seems at odds with the profit-driven aims of a capitalist venture, with money raised by private companies incorporated in the United Kingdom.
However, British capitalists and shareholders in these private ventures did not have to fear for their profits, which were underwritten by the Indian taxpayer. The colonial government of India guaranteed these companies a 5% annual return on their investment whether or not the venture turned a profit.
Despite the doubters, the new Indian railways attracted an increasing number of passengers.
The half-million passengers recorded in 1854 when tracks became operational increased to 26 million in 1875. By 1900, annual passenger figures stood at 175 million and then almost trebled to 520 million by 1919-20. By the time of the partition of India in 1947 it had risen to more than 1 billion passenger journeys annually. Indeed, images of overcrowded trains came to epitomize the upheaval of partition, with the rail system used to carry swaths of uprooted peoples across the soon-to-be Pakistan-India border.
Third-class passengers, overwhelmingly Indians, comprised almost 90% of this traffic.
These escalating figures did not, however, generate a lowering of fares. Nor did they result in any substantial improvements in the conditions of overcrowded, unsanitary third-class travel.
Instead, railway companies sought “the greatest economy of space and load,” as one rail manager put it. Inadequate rolling stock, much of it imported, exacerbated matters.
A tool for ‘self-composure’
The generally British railway managers seemed disinclined to remedy systematic overcrowding, which included transporting passengers in wagons meant for livestock. Rather, they insisted that such overcrowding was caused by the peculiar habits and inclinations of Indian passengers: their alleged abhorrence of empty carriages and their inclination to follow one another “like sheep” into crowded carriages.
These attributes were soon rendered into a more public narrative, especially among Western mindsets. Journalist H. Sutherland Stark, writing for the industry publication Indian State Railways Magazine in 1929, stated that although he was “unversed” in railway administration and traffic control, he knew railway facilities were not the problem. Rather, Indian passengers lacked the mental preparedness, “self-possession” and “method” necessary to travel like “sane human beings.”
Stark suggested passenger education as a solution to the perceived problem, making railway travel a tool for “self-composure and mass orderliness.” He was not the only one to suggest a congruence between rational railway travel and reasonable public behavior. In the 1910s, though condemning railway management for perpetuating the indignities that third-class passengers faced, the nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi also suggested educating railway passengers as a means to create a civic body of citizens.
A continuing metaphor
More than a century later, this depiction endures, though, ironically, it now serves as a foil to understanding contemporary India. In a piece published in The New York Times on March 12, 2005, the author lauded the then-new Delhi metro, emphasizing that it had “none of the chaotic squalor of hawkers and beggars that characterizes mainline railroads in India, nor do desperate travelers hang from the sides of the trains.”
As the debate rages on whether safety has taken a back seat to “glossy modernization projects” in India – early analyses suggest signaling failure might have caused June 2, 2023, accident – railways continue to represent India’s history.
In the heyday of empire, they were deemed the technology through which Britain would drag India into capitalist modernity. In 1947, they became a leitmotif for the trauma of the partition that accompanied the independence of India and Pakistan. As the coverage of the Odisha accident reminds us, it continues to be a metaphor in the West for evaluating contemporary India.
Ritika Prasad is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.