Deputy director Kirati picked to take over as next AOT chief
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2023
Airports of Thailand (AOT) Plc deputy director Kirati Kitmanawat has been selected as the new director, a source said on Wednesday.
Kirati, an AOT deputy director in charge of engineering and construction, will replace Nitinai as AOT chief when he completes his term on April 24.
The source said a subcommittee in charge of salary negotiation will negotiate with Kirati on his salary and perks before his contract is sent to the State Enterprise Policy Office for approval.
The employment contract would be signed by next month, the source added.
According to the source, Kirati was picked because he had the highest score among four candidates with 95 points, while the next best candidate had 91 points.
Kirati got his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University. He later got his Masters and doctorate degrees in engineering from Tokyo University.
Thai court orders Malaysian allegedly behind scams to be deported to China
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2023
A Thai court has issued an order for a wanted Malaysian businessman to be extradited to China to face charges in connection with fraud, Bernama news agency reported on Wednesday.
The court through a virtual hearing on Wednesday said Tedy Teow Wooi Huat, Penang-born founder of the Mobility Beyond Imagination Group (MBI), can appeal against the verdict within 30 days.
Both China and Malaysia have requested his repatriation, after being allegedly linked to a slew of scams.
Teow, wearing a brown prison uniform and a surgical face mask, appeared on camera from the Bangkok Remand Prison, accompanied by prison officers, Bernama reported.
He was calm throughout the hearing and after the judge read the verdict asked, “Can I appeal?”, the news agency said.
Malaysian media has reported that Beijing police wanted Teow for questioning after 400 investors in China filed a suit in a bid to recover investments worth some RM100 million ( 765 million baht, S$31 million).
In 2019, some 100 Chinese nationals allegedly cheated by the MBI’s group online pyramid scheme staged a protest outside the Chinese embassy in Kuala Lumpur.
Last year, Malaysian police smashed a syndicate involved in a Macau scam said to be linked to Teow and his two sons, the media reported.
The group was believed to have set up shell companies to launder ill-gotten gains before using the money to buy high-end properties in Malaysia and Thailand, and invest in cryptocurrencies totalling more than RM336 million ( 2.57 billion baht ), The Star reported.
Teow was arrested in a police raid at MBI’s office in Dannok, Sadao near the Thai-Perlis border on July 22 last year.
Is time up for feasts for ghosts of Korea’s patriarchal past?
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2023
The Korean tradition of ancestral rites has been passed down through generations for thousands of years. But it may be only a matter of time before the ritual disappears for good.
The lighting of incense, circling of rice wine and bowing before a table of assorted food items offered to one’s dead ancestors are called “charye” on major holidays like Seollal (New Year’s Day) and Chuseok, and “jesa” on their death anniversaries.
The tradition itself means well. By performing jesa to honour their forefathers, Koreans believed the souls of those who brought them to the world protected them. It’s also an occasion that brings together extended family members to share memories of deceased parents or grandparents.
But the way jesa is prepared manifests some archaic traits in the strictly divided duties and hierarchy between men and women.
As if to symbolize the vestige of traditional gender roles still lodged somewhere in Koreans’ minds, men play the external, ceremonial roles in jesa, while women do most of the actual work.
As the host of the jesa ceremony called “jeju,” the male head of the family begins the ritual by kneeling before the altar to light a stick of incense, which invites the ancestors to the table.
His helper, usually the next man in lines like the jeju’s younger brother or son, pours the wine into a cup for the jeju to circle it over the incense three times. Then the jeju kneels and bows twice. A few other men do the same.
Ceremonial details vary across families, but in some households, women, despite having toiled away from dawn to prepare food for the charye table, are not allowed to bow at all.
Ki Seo-kyung in her mid-40s remembers the shock she felt as a child when her paternal grandmother told her to move over so her grandsons could bow during charye.
“I grew up with my maternal grandparents who treated sons and daughters equally. … It was the first time I was told to step aside because I was a girl,” Ki said.
Many women who grew up without facing palpable gender discrimination, at least at home, say the first Seollal, Chuseok or jesa at their in-laws’ was a jarring experience.
It can be their first encounter with strange or unpleasant relatives, the amount of kitchen work the women of her husband’s family do while the men rest in the living room, or difficulty understanding why the senior women are not willing to change anything. Even if the in-laws don’t perform ancestral rites because they are protestants, they still gather and feast on Seollal and Chuseok.
Korean women have been making strides in professional spheres over the past decades, but women still feel pressured, often by themselves, to keep excelling at their domestic jobs as mothers, wives and daughters-in-law at the same time.
It is partly because they grew up being influenced by their parent’s generation who had more clearly divided gender roles, in which the women took care of the kids as well as her and her husband’s families so that the men could focus on their careers.
The asymmetric strain on women has its roots in agrarian and Confucian Korea of the past where a son-in-law was treated like “a guest forever” — as the old Korean saying goes — while the role of a daughter-in-law was to carry on the family line or work like a servant, as some older women bitterly recall.
Young couples nowadays often share domestic responsibilities, but on Seollal and Chuseok, they’re shoved into a time machine headed back to the 1960s.
At these ironically festive occasions of large family gatherings, the new brides feel obliged to follow the unspoken but visible rules of the clans they married into — the wider the gap with her family by birth in terms of gender equality, the greater the displeasure.
“Even if they say ‘you don’t have to do anything,’ you can’t just sit idly when your husband’s aunt in her 60s is washing tons of dishes,” said Cha Ah-young in her 30s.
As for the numerous septuagenarian women who have stuck by the tradition of jesa for decades, some of them actually believe in spirits, or that honouring the ancestors is the reason their family are doing well.
“My mother-in-law told me, as if she’s doing me a great favour, that when it’s my turn to host jesa, we should do it without inviting the aunts and uncles,” said Oh Young-mi in her 40s.
“It’s like she wants me to promise to give her jesa when she passes away. From her point of view, it’s been really scaled down from decades ago when there was a jesa almost every month because they did it for everyone up to great great grandfathers.”
Oh and most of her peers say they don’t want their children to perform jesa for them.
In a poll of 847 adults conducted by job search website Incruit last year, 94.3 % said the charye table menu should be simplified, a view that Sungkyunkwan, an authority on jesa, has also shared.
A proposal for the eldest women of households that can’t let go of “proper” jesa: Please be fair in distributing the work, and ask your sons and other able-bodied men to help.
Japan Coast Guard patrol vessel runs aground in Niigata
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2023
A Japan Coast Guard vessel ran aground in shallow waters off the coast of Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, on Wednesday morning, according to the Niigata coast guard office.
No injuries were reported among the 43 crew members aboard the Echigo patrol ship and there was no danger of it sinking. However, water flooded part of the vessel and oil leaked into the sea.
The Niigata coast guard office said at around 6:35 a.m. the vessel struck a hidden reef about 1.1 kilometres northwest of Shiiyahana Lighthouse, whose light was off at the time.
According to the office, the wind speed was about 10 meters per second, so the vessel might have drifted onto the reef.
“Such a situation is unthinkable under normal circumstances. It may have been caused by human error,” a coast guard official said.
The Japan Coast Guard released a statement saying, “It is extremely regrettable that such an accident has occurred.”
On Jan. 10, a Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer struck a rock in waters off the island of Suo-Oshima in Yamaguchi Prefecture and was unable to navigate following the accident.
Ancient Maya cities, ‘super highways’ revealed in latest survey
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2023
A new high-tech study has revealed nearly 1,000 ancient Maya settlements, including 417 previously unknown cities linked by what may be the world’s first highway network and hidden for millennia by the dense jungles of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico.
It is the latest discovery of roughly 3,000-year-old Maya centres and related infrastructure, according to a statement on Monday (January 16) from a team from Guatemala’s FARES anthropological research foundation overseeing the so-called LiDAR studies.
The findings were first published last month in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
All of the newly-identified structures were built centuries before the largest Maya city-states emerged, ushering in major human achievements in math and writing.
LiDAR technology uses planes to shoot pulses of light into the dense forests, allowing researchers to peel away vegetation and map ancient structures below.
Among the details revealed in the latest analysis are the ancient world’s first-ever extensive system of stone “highways or super-highways,” according to the researchers.
Around 110 miles (177 km) of spacious roadways have been revealed so far, with some measuring around 130 feet (40 meters) wide and elevated off the ground by as much as 16 feet (5 meters).
As part of the Cuenca Karstica Mirador-Calakmul study, which extends from northern Guatemala’s Peten jungle to southern Mexico’s Campeche state, researchers have also identified pyramids, ball game courts plus significant water engineering, including reservoirs, dams and irrigation canals.
This discovery shows that the cultural complexity within the Calakmul region is larger than what experts thought it was, an archaeologist, working at the site Josue Garcia said.
The latest finds date to the so-called middle to late pre-classic Maya era, from around 1,000-350 BC, with many of the settlements believed to be controlled by the metropolis known today as El Mirador. That was more than five centuries before the civilization’s classical peak when dozens of major urban centres thrived across present-day Mexico and Central America.
New Zealand PM Ardern says she will step down next month
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2023
New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced her resignation on Thursday, saying she will stand down as leader by early February.
Ardern said she still believed New Zealand Labour would win the upcoming election, due this year.
“I know what this job takes and I know I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,” Ardern told media.
As the country’s youngest leader in more than a century, the charismatic 42-year-old’s response to the mass shooting by a white supremacist in Christchurch, a fatal volcanic eruption and her success with the Covid-19 pandemic has won her international praise and admiration.
Ardern’s brand of liberal, inclusive and compassionate leadership has seen some even label her “the anti-Trump”.
Having previously worked under former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and as an advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Ardern rose to become Labour Leader in 2017.
Her communication skills and ability to connect with the public – dubbed “Jacinda-mania” – helped upstage the 2017 election, which had previously been seen as a shoe-in for the ruling centre-right National Party. In October 2017, Ardern, then 37 years old, became New Zealand’s third female prime minister through a coalition deal after an inconclusive election.
In January 2018, Ardern and her partner Clarke Gayford – a television fishing show presenter – made the announcement that she was pregnant with her first child. The couple said they found out the news six days before she secured power.
Ardern gave birth in June 2018 to Neve Te Aroha, becoming only the second leader in history after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto to give birth while in office.
On her return from a six-week maternity leave, Ardern spoke at the United Nations and at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland, highlighting issues such as gender equality and climate change.
But it was her leadership in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings in March of 2019 that turned a global spotlight onto Ardern, where she helped New Zealand grieve following the country’s worst peacetime mass shooting that shook the nation to its core.
She prompted the government to quickly enact and tighten gun laws, as well as urged changes to the role social media plays in the propagation of violent and extremist media.
Ardern and Gayford became engaged in mid-2019.
Ardern’s Prime Ministership was tested once more when 21 people died when the White Island volcano erupted when their tour party were visiting the location.
With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Ardern moved quickly to close New Zealand’s borders to all foreigners to slow the spread of Covid-19. She implemented a one-month compulsory lockdown for the country, telling New Zealanders to behave as if they had the coronavirus and cut all physical contact outside of their households.
A video of Ardern staying cool and continuing a live TV interview during an earthquake that rattled Wellington, encapsulated for many her poise.
After progressively lifting social restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Ardern led the country to 102 straight days without domestic transmission.
However, praise for her prolonged lockdown of the country began to diminish by 2022 and led to a 3-week protest outside the parliament house.
Jim Thompson collabs with artist Pichaya O for their Chinese New Year Collection
The Jim Thompson X Pichaya Osothcharoenpol collection is inspired by traditional Chinese cultural elements, as 2023 is the year of the Rabbit in Chinese astrology, the new collection features the rabbit, which is regarded as a symbol of peace, patience, and prudence, together with flowers and trees that symbolize good fortune.
Alternative rockers find unlikely fans with smash hit ‘Bad Boy’
Thai alternative rock duo Paper Planes found an unlikely audience with “Bad Boy”, their first major hit with an unexpected audience.
Grade 1 students and even their parents have embraced the catchy tune about a playboy gangster suffering the blues of unrequited love.
The song went viral after its video was released on October 17 last year. As of Wednesday, it had more than 54 million views, 430,000 likes, and 11,000 comments on YouTube.
Even though the song is about the kind of guy parents often warn their children about, young children across the country know the lyrics by heart.
Parents are posting about their Grade 1 sons singing the song constantly, and many praise Paper Planes for avoiding inappropriate language.
The duo’s Children’s Day performance on Saturday saw all 6,000 seats at Bangkok’s Safari World snapped up in 15 minutes by young children and their parents. The performance was held near the dolphin exhibition area, where more than another 1,000 fans waited outside the performance area to hear the duo perform the song live. So many children sang along they nearly drowned out vocalist Tunwa “Hye” Ketsuwan.
He, and guitarist Nakarin “Zen” Khunpakdee, comprise the duo that has suddenly become beloved. Tunwa and Nakarin advised children to enjoy life and do what they love without comparing themselves to others. They also asked parents to take good care of their children so that they will become high-quality citizens.
“We may be dubbed leaders of the children’s gang, but we believe that we are their big brothers,” Paper Planes said. “We have done both good and bad things, but we believe that we and parents can work together to encourage children to do the right thing.”
Tunwa and Nakarin also thanked the parents of their young fans for their support and for refraining from judging them by their appearance. Paper Planes debuted in 2017 under Thai record label Genie Records, a subsidiary of GMM Grammy. The band released its first music video “Kon Sia Ther Pai” (“Before Losing You”) on March 6, 2017.
Another Paper Planes’ video, “Pretend”, has accumulated 103.36 million views on YouTube since its release on March 8 last year. The video has also drawn more than 590,000 likes and 20,000 comments.
Tunwa also produces songs for Thai artists like Retrospect, Lomosonic, Sweet Mullet, Wonderframe, Mirrr, Annalynn, Gavin.D, ActArt, SBFIVE, and PiXXiE.
According to the source, Kirati was picked because he had the highest score among four candidates with 95 points, while the next best candidate had 91 points.
SootinClaimon.Com 