Showing 51 - 60 of 114
Army chief feels a draft
News, Editorial, Published on 06/11/2018
» As a new batch of conscripts reported to the army late last week, army commander Apirat Kongsompong used the occasion to defend conscription into the Royal Thai Armed Forces. In the process, Gen Apirat stated two different points in one pithy sentence -- one basically true and the other off the track. He also unfortunately took the occasion to champion current military discipline. He would have been better advised to speak about reform of the Thai military, starting with its methods of discipline.
Time to solve plastic mess
News, Editorial, Published on 27/10/2018
» As a part of the world which dumps 150,000 tonnes of plastic into its waters every year, the European Union (EU) has decided to take a tougher stance against this polluting material. The European parliament on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to ban a number of single-use plastics.
UN tramples its own ideals
News, Editorial, Published on 16/10/2018
» The UN General Assembly has once again openly mocked some of the major principles it purports to champion. It has elected several of the world's worst human rights violators as full members of its Human Rights Commission. In the process, it employed a questionable procedure in which there was no competition. Member countries of the UNGA were presented with 18 candidate-nations for 18 pending vacancies on the UNHRC. In the event, as usual in such UN processes, none of the candidates failed to gain a majority vote, so the 48-member UNHRC will at least have all its seats filled when it meets in Geneva next year.
Bank on right track with transparency
News, Editorial, Published on 15/07/2018
» It is not often to see the Bank of Thailand (BoT) announce its intervention in the Thai currency even though such practice is a normal duty of a central bank.
Debating the death penalty
News, Editorial, Published on 20/06/2018
» The Corrections Department has opened the raw wound of capital punishment once again.
Death penalty ineffective
News, Editorial, Published on 21/03/2018
» US President Donald Trump is exploring options including the use of capital punishment to battle a new and deadly epidemic of drug abuse. So many Americans have died while abusing the world's most powerful opioids that the outbreak has reduced average US life expectancy by two years. The trafficking of drugs like oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl and the like has resisted standard "war on drugs" enforcement, and the US government is floundering and grasping at promised solutions.
Fretting over fishy business
News, Editorial, Published on 09/03/2018
» The government's decision to import fresh fish from a radioactive-contaminated area in Japan's Fukushima prefecture has raised alarm among consumer groups. Such concerns bring no surprise.
Tackling plastic waste
News, Editorial, Published on 29/01/2018
» A study of Thai and neighbouring underseas life, published last week, proves beyond doubt that people are killing coral. Specifically, the plastic items that wind up in the area of Thai reefs is literally the death of coral. Ocean currents, sand and rocks bash and cut bags, bottles and trash to tiny bits. The coral, living animals, eat the plastic, choke and die.
Asean media under attack
News, Editorial, Published on 22/01/2018
» A free press is the key test of whether a nation has true freedom of speech. Across the region, every country is failing the test. In communist Vietnam and all the way to the resurgent army controllers in Myanmar, governments are arresting, imprisoning and strongly intimidating the media.
Over-fishing killing sea
News, Editorial, Published on 27/12/2017
» It is no longer a secret that the South China Sea is threatened -- not politically or militarily, but ecologically. More than half of the world's fishing trawlers operate in this sea. That threatens the collapse of the most productive source of seafood in our region, and the world. Scientists agree that the environmental disaster of over-fishing will destroy this fishing ground in the foreseeable future. No government or body of experts disputes this.