Word: bangkok
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With reporting by Lin Yang / Beijing and Robert Horne / Bangkok...
...Bangkok military seminar in February concluded that the conflict in southern Thailand, now entering its sixth year, "will get worse before it gets any better." In the same week, insurgents gunned down a village chief, blew up two people and shot two soldiers, mutilating and burning the corpses. Some 3,300 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since 2004. Exactly how much worse does it need...
...Ranged against this ruthless foe are the bumbling and sometimes brutal Thai security forces. McCargo is scathing about them. The army subcontracts much of the fighting to ill-disciplined paramilitaries, he writes, keeping its best-trained troops close to Bangkok to stymie or stage coups d'état. The police, McCargo says, are "vicious and incompetent." His unsparing criticism is supported by groups like Human Rights Watch, which, in a 2007 report, attributed 21 "disappearances" to the security forces, including that of campaigning Muslim lawyer Somchai Neelaphaichit...
...party is not complete without drinks." This perhaps explains the ban's lukewarm reception from British-educated Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's government. The Tourism Minister claimed it would drive away foreign visitors and further damage a vital industry already reeling from global recession and the shutdown of Bangkok's two airports by antigovernment protesters last year...
...Thailand has an increasingly vocal antialcohol movement. Last November Thai Beverage PLC, the country's largest producer of alcoholic drinks, indefinitely postponed its stock listing after Buddhist monks led a blockade of the Stock Exchange of Thailand building in Bangkok. Thais in favor of prohibition also cheered the passing of an alcohol-control act that took effect in February last year. It raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 20, banned alcohol-related advertising, and - at a time when Britain was liberalizing its licensing laws to allow for round-the-clock drinking - restricted the sale of alcohol to only...