Word: thailand
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Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire telecom tycoon who served as Thailand's Prime Minister before being ousted in a military coup, may be a billionaire no longer. On Friday, Thailand's Supreme Court ruled that the government could seize $1.5 billion of the fugitive politician's $2.3 billion in frozen assets after concluding he had enriched himself at the expense of the state through abuse of power and conflicts of interest when he led the country from 2001-2006. The court ruled that the remaining $800 million will stay frozen pending calculation of interest and the settling of other cases...
...Bangladesh, like India, Thailand and Pakistan, is not one of 147 nations to sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, the global treaty that defines who is eligible for refugee status and what rights they are guaranteed. As a result, Dhaka has not registered a single refugee since 1991, and, as one of the most impoverished nations in the world, does not have the financial resources to cope with such a huge number of people. "We are a poor country and we have our own issues to deal with," says one local from Cox's Bazaar district, where the greatest concentration...
...Anybody who loves this nation has got to look at that and say, ‘Oh God—it’s not Thailand, it’s not Russia, it’s the United States!’” Franks said, pointing to child pornography and violence and degradation of women featured in what he called “hardcore pornography.” “This is bad. It’s criminal. It’s evil...
...freeing of 82-year-old Tin Oo, vice chairman of the National League for Democracy, from seven years of prison and then house arrest "does not in any way signal a shift in attitude on the part of the government," said Benjamin Zawacki, a Thailand-based researcher with Amnesty International. "Like all prisoners of conscience in Myanmar [Burma], he never should have been arrested in the first place...
...comes the turn of Thailand's Uruphong Raksasad. Applying the principles of reality TV to his homemade production, Uruphong engaged two scuffling farming families to work a plot of land he rented for them in his native Chiang Rai province, and filmed them. The end result - the ironically entitled Agrarian Utopia - is a poignant essay on lives of mounting debt and bug-catching subsistence, evoking eternal cycles of suffering that will seem stunningly fresh to urban audiences in Thailand and the region. See what we learned from a decade at the movies...