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Development rush could doom Yangon's architectural treasures
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 07/10/2012
» For local investors they are unwieldy behemoths occupying prime real estate. For the nostalgic they remain noble vestiges of an era almost forgotten, when the city, then called Rangoon, was the most cosmopolitan in the region. For tourists they are one of Asia's most concentrated collections of colonial buildings and grand sights in themselves, unartificially preserved in time. For nationalists they can be an unwanted reminder of less independent times, when the subjugated people were answerable to the caprices of colonial authorities.
A mercenary's tale
Spectrum, Ezra Kyrill Erker, Published on 06/05/2012
» Peter Slade was once in prison for five years on charges of murder, conspiracy to commit another murder and attempting to overthrow a foreign government _ partly a victim, he says, of a corrupt Australian judicial system. He fought in the Vietnam War, was a security contractor in 1973 Rhodesia, a debt collector at home in Melbourne and as far afield as Nigeria, and arrived in reconstruction-era Cambodia and Iraq without connections but a desire to start anew, in stints that would last some seven years each. He witnessed first-hand the Bangkok coup that killed journalists Neil Davis and Bill Latch in 1985 and was on the beach in Patong the morning the tsunami struck Phuket in 2004.