Word: thailand
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...After Thailand's currency collapsed in 1997, the government directed its tourism officials to market the country as a hot destination for plastic surgery, hoping to boost revenues. Thailand quickly became the go-to country for comparatively inexpensive sex-change operations, where patients faced fees as low as $5,000, as well as looser requirements for pre-surgery psychological counseling. Thailand is now a destination spot for all types of plastic surgery as well as a host of routine medical procedures. Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok is probably Thailand's best-known mecca for medical tourists, boasting patients from "over...
Hollywood, the land of ultimate battles and last stands, doesn't have a monopoly on dramatic endings. On Nov. 24, thousands of anti-government protesters swarmed Thailand's parliament in what they called - drumroll please - the "final showdown...
...four-year strife between separatists and army troops in Thailand's south has cost some 3,000 lives, yet is probably the world's least covered Islamic insurgency. The fatal 2006 beating of an idealistic Thai schoolteacher has, however, led to Citizen Juling, a documentary that more than makes up for lost exposure - with nearly four hours of raw video footage probing both that crime and society's knee-jerk response. "I left everything in so viewers could come to their own conclusions," says writer turned filmmaker Ing K, who collaborated with photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom and opposition politician Kraisak Choonhavan...
...viewpoint is foremost, it is Kraisak's. After the 1991 military coup against his Prime Minister father, General Chatichai Choonhavan, Kraisak was indicted on assassination plots against rival generals and fled. Locals in the border region helped his escape, smuggling him to Malaysia. (He returned safely to Thailand two years later and denies the charges, which were never pressed.) In Citizen Juling, he returns the favor. "I had to pay back these people for their help by showing there was at least one Thai who cared about the unwarranted massacres and disappearances," he says...
...true now in the waters off the Horn of Africa. This year alone, pirates based in Somalia, where any semblance of a functioning state broke down years ago, are thought to have attacked more than 90 ships. In a recent 48-hour period, they apprehended vessels from Greece, Thailand and Hong Kong, and on Nov. 15 took the biggest prize of all, the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, laden with an estimated $100 million in crude...