Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...aptly illustrates Executive Producer Andrew Lack's desire to look at much reported stories from a different, even idiosyncratic, angle. Instead of running a segment about Viet Nam veterans in the U.S., for example, Lack plans to focus on the some 1,000 former soldiers who now live in Bangkok. "My mandate is to be new," says Lack. "I want people to watch this and say, 'Jesus Christ, I didn't know that...
...cannot be trusted and that locals should not cooperate with the authorities. Now, Thailand is faced with the possibility that the insurgents are expanding their terror campaign into new parts of the country. "These militants are very provocative and getting more indiscriminate," says Sunai Phasuk, a political scientist at Bangkok's Thammasat University. "Their idea appears to be to try and trap Thaksin and the military into a cycle of violence...
...Prime Minister ruled out the idea of retaliating with force against the insurgents. At the same time he ordered a dramatic increase in security at the nation's airports, embassies, and major commercial and tourist centers. Last week, hundreds of checkpoints and surveillance cameras were set up across Bangkok, including on Khao San Road, a tourist strip popular with backpackers. "We must remain vigilant," says one senior military intelligence official. "[The militants now] have the ability to strike anywhere...
...Smith Dharmmasaroj, a Thai official in charge of setting up his country's early-warning system, didn't have to wait for the alert from Hawaii. Ten minutes after the quake struck, he received a phone call from a friend in Bangkok who had felt its tremors. A few minutes later, Dharmmasaroj had confirmed the quake's size and location with seismologists, and then he began working the phones. The result: 40 minutes after the quake, Thai TV and radio networks were broadcasting warnings. In coastal areas, police and soldiers went out on the streets with loudspeakers. But Dharmmasaroj still...
...longtime Bangkok resident myself, I find the author too charitable at times. Is the city's Chatpetch Tower really a "post-modernist pastiche" of the ubiquitous Greco-Roman style? Or is it just rubbish, like so much urban Thai architecture? Sometimes, too, the urge to be exhaustive is just plain exhausting, although future social historians will thank Cornwel-Smith for recording how you toughen up a Siamese fighting fish before a bout. (Rather meanly, you "just stir the water.") Encyclopedic in scope, Very Thai is an unapologetic celebration of both the exotic and the everyday, and an affectionate reminder...