• THAILAND

  SMOP is a flop

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 08/10/2017

  » Last Sunday night, an anti-drug squad caught two men carrying 400kg of crystal methamphetamine from Myanmar, ya ice worth 400 million baht on the street. On Monday and on Tuesday, police in Udon Thani and Mukdahan busted two cross-Mekong shipments of compressed marijuana from Laos, now Japan's major weed supplier. Combined, they weighed a tonne.

• OPINION

  The kids are all right

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 28/10/2018

  » <i>Prathet Ku Mee</i> is no slapped-together concert song. It wasn't made, so much as crafted. The accusatory lyrics are set against the shameful, hovering background of the 1976 dictators' massacre at Thammasat University. The rap song's finale brings the background image of the hanged, beaten student to the front of the picture, before fading out to the hopeful message, "All people unite".

• NEWS

  Losers

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 14/01/2018

  » Voldemort's sister

• OPINION

  Art of the graft

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 03/06/2018

  » Coup leader Gen (Ret) Prayut Chan-o-cha first mentioned his programme concerning corruption in late May, 2014, not long after seizing power. It was so long ago that there wasn't even a National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO). It was still called the National Peace and Order Maintaining Council (NPOMC).

• THAILAND

  You've been gouged

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 05/02/2017

  » How can we fleece you? Let me count the ways. That probably wasn't an unusual week, just a more transparent one.

• OPINION

  You think this is a game?

  Oped, Alan Dawson, Published on 14/10/2018

  » The general prime minister went to Japan and all we got is another lousy T-shirt that says "The Election Is Next Year".

• OPINION

  A walk in the Park

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 24/06/2018

  » So the latest unchangeable, confirmed, guaranteed date of the 2015 Thailand general election isn't "definitely in February" after all, but some time in the next 371 days. To put it another way, voting will be, in the words of the country's official political cartographer, "early in 2019", or by Sunday, June 30.

• WORLD

  The man who kills people

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 19/02/2017

  » Sending two women assassins he probably vetted personally after his half-brother seems a weird act for the leader of a country. For Kim Jong-un and for his father and for his father's father, it was Monday.

• THAILAND

  End of an era?

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 25/12/2016

  » Planning for the third Cobra Gold war games since the 2014 coup d'etat is pretty much complete, and it is going to show better than any other public event the diminishing passion of the long US-Thailand affair.

• OPINION

  The Big Issue: Whine stewards

  News, Alan Dawson, Published on 23/10/2016

  » A few hundred people, perhaps even a few thousand (say 0.005% of all Thai people), decided last week to become the experts in mourning. For lack of a better phrase, they appointed themselves as Mourning Police (MPs).

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