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Bangkokpost.com
As the current government’s term will soon end, it’s bewildering to see how the Royal Thai Navy (RTN) is apparently speeding up its decision-making process on whether it will continue with a highly questionable submarine procurement from China.
For more than four decades of political instabilities, Myanmar has been a hotbed of internal and regional displacement, with millions of civilians forced to flee their homes.
One of the most iconic images of our time shows a polar bear marooned and adrift on an ice floe. Few other images capture the reality of climate change so viscerally. And now, ironically, Davos Man finds himself in a similar metaphorical position. His natural habitat, the hyper-globalised world of the past half-century, is shrinking, and he has gone from skiing in the Swiss Alps to skating on thin ice.
One of the most iconic images of our time shows a polar bear marooned and adrift on an ice floe. Few other images capture the reality of climate change so viscerally. And now, ironically, Davos Man finds himself in a similar metaphorical position. His natural habitat, the hyper-globalised world of the past half-century, is shrinking, and he has gone from skiing in the Swiss Alps to skating on thin ice.
For more than four decades of political instabilities, Myanmar has been a hotbed of internal and regional displacement, with millions of civilians forced to flee their homes.
As the current government’s term will soon end, it’s bewildering to see how the Royal Thai Navy (RTN) is apparently speeding up its decision-making process on whether it will continue with a highly questionable submarine procurement from China.
Global news headlines this month will be focused on the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which falls on Feb 24. This external aggression, where a bigger state unilaterally takes territory from a smaller neighbour by force, can be juxtaposed to an internal subjugation in Myanmar, where a military coup took place two years ago this week. Whether the aggression is externally between states, or internally within a state, the oppressors behave the same way and pursue similar objectives of conquest and dominance. Reversing an internal subjugation is as morally compelling as turning back an external aggression. What Myanmar's civilian-led resistance coalition needs is a fraction of the aid the Ukrainians have been receiving.
With two long-awaited organic laws governing the election of MPs and political parties coming into effect, politicians are geared up for the next general election that is set to take place on May 7 -- if parliament runs its course.
The "energy transition" from hydrocarbons to renewables and electrification is at the forefront of policy debates nowadays. But the last 18 months have shown this undertaking to be more challenging and complex than one would think just from studying the graphs that appear in many scenarios. Even in the United States and Europe, which have adopted massive initiatives to move things along, the development, deployment, and scaling up of the new technologies on which the transition ultimately depends will be determined only over time.
This year is a time to remember and reiterate two key instruments which have shaped responses to human rights implementation since the end of World War II in 1945. It was the task of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), based on a Resolution of the UN General Assembly adopted in 1948, to identify and list a number of key rights of a global nature.
In the bureaucratic system, transferring a state official is hardly unusual. But this seems not to be the case for government critic Dr Supat Hasuwannakit, director of Chana Hospital in Songkhla province.
It seems like a profound contradiction; trying to convince Afghanistan's Taliban authorities to accept foreign humanitarian help for their own starving population. Thus as beleaguered Afghan civilians endure a brutal winter, the sanctimonious Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul has largely restricted international aid agencies because they employ women.
Farming is one of the world's oldest and most far-reaching endeavours. Meeting the growing food demands of the global population amid accelerating climate change presents an unprecedented high-wire act that requires human ingenuity, good governance, and technology.
