In a Facebook post on Monday, she reiterated that the government does not have to make any decision about the late Lee Kuan Yew’s house now, as his daughter, Dr Lee Wei Ling, is still staying there as per his wishes.

“Letting the house stand for now does not go against those wishes … The matter may well not need to be decided for another 20 to 30 years. It can be decided by a future government,” she said.

She added: “The real question therefore is why Lee Hsien Yang is asking for an immediate commitment on demolition now? What is the urgency?”

Indranee also listed four options for 38, Oxley Road — demolition, preservation, conservation, and compulsory acquisition — in her third post on the feud between the Lee siblings over whether to demolish the house.

Her first post centred on issues surrounding the dispute including the demolition clause in the late Lee Kuan Yew’s will , while the second post focused on that final will.

On Monday, she noted that demolishing the house would pave the way for the owner to appeal for rezoning or to increase the plot ratio.

38, Oxley Road is currently a freehold site zoned for a two-storey landed property, with a land area of 1,120.5 sq m.

Indranee said the land value will increase significantly if rezoning or increased plot ratio is granted, and one can expect interest from many developers.

“For example, if a 20-storey luxury condominium can be built on the site, with one condo unit per floor, all with the address of 38 Oxley Road, it could be marketed as a unique trophy address,” she noted.

She said the house could be conserved, which means it cannot be developed but works can be done to the building if they comply with conservation guidelines.

A third option is for the house to be designated a national monument, which means it cannot be redeveloped and will be subject to stringent preservation guidelines.

Since the house is used as a residence, it will be subject to compulsory acquisition — the fourth option — within one year of the preservation order.

Compulsory acquisition will be done under the Land Acquisition Act, and Hsien Yang, who owns the house, will be compensated at market value.

Indranee said the government has several further options, like demolishing the house and building a tasteful memorial or symbolic marker in a park setting.

She cited Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean, who chairs a ministerial committee to consider options for the house, and previously said he would not personally support options at the extreme ends of the range — preserving the house for visitors against Lee Kuan Yew and his wife’s wishes or demolishing the house and putting it on the market for private new residences.

Said Indranee: “One can understand DPM Teo’s feelings. A luxury condo with that address would confer bragging rights on a select few to say: ‘I’m living where Lee Kuan Yew lived’. The history and heritage of the site would be forever lost to ordinary Singaporeans, including future generations. That is probably not the way Singaporeans will want to remember 38 Oxley Road.”

She pointed that out that while Hsien Yang has said he has not thought about what lies beyond demolition, “it would appear he has not ruled out redevelopment.”

Hsien Yang travelled to Hong Kong on Sunday, and told Hong Kong media he was visiting friends. He declined to say when he was returning to Singapore.

In her post, Indranee also reiterated that PM Lee has no financial interest in the house, having sold it to his brother.

For the government, the question is whether there is an intermediate option that will respect the late Lee Kuan Yew’s wishes and still preserve the heritage and history of 38, Oxley Road for Singapore and Singaporeans, she said.

One option raised by DPM Teo was to demolish the house but keep the basement dining room, where many historical meetings took place, with a heritage centre attached.

This, Indranee said, would “substantially fulfil Lee’s wish” as his and his wife’s privacy would be respected.

“At the same time, the history and heritage would not be lost and the crucible where the hopes and dreams of a nation were forged can be kept to inspire many more generations to come,” she said.

House Bill No. 5224 also seeks to impose stiff penalties of P50,000 to P100,000 on “any person who, or entity which violates any provision” of the proposed law—much heftier than the P5,000 to P20,000 fine

provided for by the current Flag and Heraldic Code of the Philippines.

Under the proposed measure, singing along when the anthem is played at public gatherings “shall be mandatory and must be done with fervor.” It may be noted the current flag code, enacted in 1998, did not use the word “mandatory” when it directed public attendees to sing along during gatherings.

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As a sign of respect, all persons must stand at attention facing the Philippine flag, if displayed, or the band or conductor; civilians salute the flag with their right palm over the left chest.

But, the House bill also seeks to provide leeway for people whose religious beliefs prohibit them from singing. The current flag code did not contain any provision, while the House measure states these people “must, nonetheless, show full respect… by standing at attention.”

The House bill also seeks to standardize the proper rendition of Lupang Hinirang in accordance with the musical arrangement and composition of Julian Felipe: in 2/4 beat when played, and within the range of 100 to 120 metronome, in 4/4 beat when sang.

The National Historical Commission of the Philippines will also be mandated to disseminate an official musical score sheet to reflect the correct way of singing the anthem.

The proposed flag code will also oblige the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education, and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority to “ensure that the national anthem… shall be committed to memory by all students” of public and private schools.

The House bill also strikes out the current flag code’s prohibition on the display of the Philippine flag in front of “buildings and offices occupied by aliens.”

Under the proposed law, failure to observe the rules on the proper rendition of the anthem and display of national symbols will also lead to administrative discipline for the employees of all government offices and privately-owned entities displaying the flag.

The House announced the development in a Monday statement. With the approval of the law on third and final reading via a unanimous vote of 212-0, the measure now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Sar Kheng said illegal weapon trafficking is unacceptable in Cambodia.

Cambodia has condemned all illegal weapons trafficking and pledged to take action.

This reaction was raised after Thai authorities made a concern recently on the illegal weapon trafficking in its kingdom.

According to Thai media, Thai authorities had earlier found 29 rifles, four machine guns, a number of grenades and bullets loaded in a pick-up and arrested two Thai and Cambodian men at Trat province of the country.

Sar Kheng called competent authorities to carefully work with their counterparts in Thailand as well as other concerned countries in order to identify the roots source of the arms traffic.

The “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism” intends to share engineering, research and knowledge to help “continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists,” the companies said.

Each of the technology giants has been working individually to prevent its platforms or services from being used to promote or spread extremist views.

“The spread of terrorism and violent extremism is a pressing global problem and a critical challenge for us all,” said a joint statement posted on Twitter’s policy blog.

“We believe that by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of our individual efforts, we can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online.”

The new forum built on discussions in Europe and conclusions of recent G7 and European Council, according to the companies.

The forum planned to work with smaller tech firms as well as civil groups, academics and governmental bodies.

“The scope of our work will evolve over time as we will need to be responsive to the ever-evolving terrorist and extremist tactics,” the founding companies said.

US social media titan Facebook last week launched a campaign in Britain to counter the spread of online extremism after warnings from Prime Minister Theresa May that followed four attacks in three months.

Facebook said it would seek to educate charities and other organizations on how to fight hate speech, in the wake of the terror attacks in Britain as well as in Belgium and France.

The Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI) will act as a forum for charities and other nonprofit organizations to share their experiences of extremism and develop “best practices” to tackle the issue, both on and offline.

There are already OCCI schemes in France and Germany.

Earlier this year, Group of Seven (G7) leaders had urged companies like Facebook and Google to do more to curb extremist content online.

Facebook this month launched a series of counterterrorism measures in the wake of attacks in Manchester and London.

FANS OF the American comedy hit series on the Korean War, M*A*S*H (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital), might remember watching dozens of episodes without seeing a single North Korean soldier. But in real life, the whole situation is far from funny. Virtually all rhetoric coming out of the White House these days is matched by Pyongyang’s missile tests, with photos of the military top brass standing side-by-side congratulating leader Kim Jong-un.

It’s not an understatement that North Korea’s nuclearisation and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) activities are increasingly destabilising North Asia to the point of no return.

And within a year or two, according to experts in Seoul and Tokyo, a North Korean ICBM with a nuclear warhead could be capable of reaching the United States, perhaps New York City.

President Donald Trump appears to concede defeat after his earlier statements vowing to break the ice with Pyongyang and ridiculing as a failure years of former president Barack Obama’s “containment” strategy of Kim’s regime. Trump is now swallowing his own ego as tensions with North Korea reach new heights.

North Korea’s advancing missile and nuclear programmes are the “most urgent and dangerous” threat to United States security, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said this month.

On the operational front, Admiral Harry Harris, US Navy commander of the US Pacific Command, during his testimony before the House armed services committee on April 26, said North Korea remained the US’s most immediate threat in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.

A number of missile and nuclear weapon tests over recent years is moving North Korea to its stated goal of becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. “As a military commander, I must assume that Kim Jong-un’s claims are true – his aspirations certainly are,” Admiral Harris said. “The US Pacific Command must be prepared to fight tonight, so I take him at his word. That means we must consider every possible step to defend the US homeland and our allies.”

Nuclear ambitions

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions could be traced back to the early 1960s, when then leader Kim Il-sung asked his ally, the Soviet Union, to help develop nuclear technology.

The outside world realised that the country’s dream is coming true when it conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006. This test yielded an explosion of less than one kiloton. Compare this to the latest test, which had a yield of 11-12 kilotons – almost equivalent to the 15-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the World War II, said Narushige Michishita of the Tokyo-based National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS).

“Over the past ten years, North Korea has made progress in developing a nuclear capability comparable to level of the US in 1945,” he said.

In 2013, North Korea declared it had conducted a test of a smaller and lighter A-bomb, and last year claimed it could even develop a hydrogen bomb. An assessment by the US Defence Intelligence Agency leaked to the public recently that North Korea has nuclear weapons capable of being mounted on missiles, but its ICBM capability is nevertheless still low, according to Michishita.

A nuclear weapon is indeed being developed and experts estimate that Pyongyang is currently in the same league as India and Pakistan with possession of anywhere between 13 and 30 nuclear warheads. Kim Jong-un is now focusing on the development of a ballistic missile.

Missile development began since his grandfather Il-sung’s time in the 1960s. The nation’s founder had told his military academy to develop missiles that could reach US military bases in Japan and nearby. The regime originally copied and developed short-range Scud-type missiles in the 1980s, but major success was seen only in 1993, a year before his death, when the country managed to test medium-range missiles.

Kim Jong-un took the project even more seriously and has made greater progress, arguably more than both his grandfather and father. His country test-launched more ballistic missiles last year than in the previous few years combined. This included the first launch of the Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) and the claimed development of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). Both experienced noteworthy – and often spectacular – failures, but they have also achieved some successes.

But the series of test flights in May was not consistent with an ICBM, the US Pacific Command said in a statement.

Other sources have stated the test demonstrated a new type of ballistic missile that would be hard to detect and shoot down. The missile reached an altitude of 2,000 kilometres, but its short trajectory meant it could fly faster and strike a target more precisely, according to a Japanese military expert.

The missile is believed to be the Hwasong12, which has a maximum range of 4,000km. Theoretically the missile could reach the US military base on Guam, although the test missile travelled only 800km before falling into the sea 400km outside of Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

ICBM capability

It appears North Korea will be able to have an ICBM soon. The latest launch indicated that Pyongyang has rockets powerful enough to carry a nuclear warhead into space before it re-enters earth’s atmosphere and heads to a target, and the country will very soon test a real ICBM, perhaps by late this year, according to security expert Uk Yang, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum.

In addition to its nuclear capacity, North Korea fields the fourth largest conventional military in the world. “Despite a number of noteworthy shortfalls in training and equipment, we must take seriously the substantial inventory of long-range rockets, artillery, close-range ballistic missiles, and expansive chemical weaponry aimed across the Demilitarised Zone at South Korea and US forces stationed there,” declared Admiral Harris.

North Korea’s existing missiles are already a significant threat to the 90,000 American troops stationed in the Pacific and US treaty allies Japan and South Korea.

Pyongyang’s Nodong missile could reach Tokyo in just 10 minutes, said Michishita at GRIPS.

Immediate threat to Japan

North Korea’s militarisation is regarded as an immediate threat to Japan. Successive Japanese governments over the past years have taken measures to respond to the missile threat, according to officials at the Foreign and Self-Defence ministries in Tokyo.

The governments have spent at least $10 billion (Bt337.7 billion) to acquire missile defence systems from the US. In service now are sea-based SM 3 and ground-based PAC 3 systems. One is designed to shoot down incoming missiles outside earth’s atmosphere while the other can destroy missile that have entered the atmosphere.

In the next three to four years, Japan plans to procure more advanced system known as SM 3 block 2A, which has better speed, more accuracy and longer range, said Michishita.

Another measure is the civil defence system comprising two warning systems. One is Em-Net, which is a text-based emergency network warning, while the other is J-Alert, which is an automated siren-cum-voice message.

The third measure is consultative with the US on “extended nuclear deterrence” or a nuclear umbrella. “Since Japan does not possess nuclear weapons, we have asked the US to retaliate with nuclear weapons against anyone who uses nuclear weapon against us, he said.

There are debates among citizens and strategic planners in Japan these days to have “strike capability”. There are differences on the issue, since Japan currently has just a defensive policy.

While some experts said it makes sense for Japan to have such a policy, the situation has changed after North Korea has developed nuclear weapons, said Michishita.

“It is a good idea to have a defensive missile capability along with a strike capability, thus forcing North Korea to find it more difficult to launch missiles against Japan,” he said.

Unlike Japan, South Korea is in a dilemma and difficult position.

“While North Korea as a country is our enemy since it poses a nuclear threat to us, the Koreans are our brothers, sharing the same ethnic blood, and North Korea in the future would be our partner if reunification becomes a reality,” said Lee Nae Young, chief of the National Assembly Research Service.

THAAD hits ties

However, the deployment of the US-made Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile system to defend against the North Korean threat has adversely affected relations between South Korea and China. While Seoul intends to use the system as a shield to protect itself, Beijing considers it a security threat, fearing the US might use the system to spy on China’s nuclear deterrence systems. China has retaliated economically against South Korea by not issuing visas for their citizens and later banned Chinese tourists from going to South Korea.

Experts at a Seoul-based private think tank said while such retaliation did not seriously hurt South Korea, the measure undermined Beijing’s strategy in the region.

China’s reaction could force South Korea further into the arms of the US and Japan, while “our [South Korea’s] military could get even closer to the US, and the missile system could have far more integration with the US”, said Hahm Chaibong, president of the private think-tank Asan Institute for Policy Studies. “But that’s really what China does not want to see,” he said.

“What economic damage has China done to us? Minimum, so some cosmetic companies are suffering, our K-pop stars might not be able to go to China. At the micro level it is a big deal, but our foreign trade volume is huge,” he said.

South Korea is a big supply chain for China. For example, the iPhone manufactured in China has components imported from around the world, with some of the most important ones coming from South Korea, either from LG or Sumsung, he said.

“China will hurt too”

“If they want to place sanctions on us, it would also hurt their own economy. So China is very careful not to touch the major component of economic ties and wouldn’t want us to complain to the World Trade Organisation, Hahm said.

In early June, however , newly elected President Moon Jae-in decided to delay the additional deployment of THAAD a month after taking office. While two THAAD launchers will not be withdrawn, the deployment of four additional ones are being delayed until an assessment is first completed on their impact.

Strategically, the US, Japan and South Korea share the same position in dealing with the situation in the Korean peninsula. While the countries have enforced deterrence policies, they also want to push maximum sanctions against North Korea but look forward to engaging with the country. The problem is how to enforce the measures properly to obtain good results.

While US President Donald Trump expects China to exercise its influence over Pyongyang, Eric Harwit, an expert on China affairs at Hawaii University, said leaders in Beijing might not want to harshly push North Korea.

North Korean top leader Kim Jong-un inspects ballistic missiles before launching last month./KCNA

While China has many ways to put pressure on North Korea, since 95 per cent of its oil and gas supply comes from China, Beijing does not want to use that approach, he said.

“The bottom line is that no matter what China does, North Korea will not give up its nuclear programme and the pressure could destabilise the region as well as the regime in Pyongyang,” Harwit said. “A missile also could be used against China. So I’m not so optimistic that China wants to do this.”

An unstable regime in Pyongyang would also pose threat to China, he said. If the regime collapses, China would face a massive influx of refugees from North Korea, he said.

Blockades and sanctions will not defuse North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, agreed Lee Sanghyop, director of the Centre for Korean Studies at Hawaii University. Sanctions would affect ordinary people, rather than the nuclear programme, he pointed out. “North Korea will not give up its nuclear ambitions even if many people there were to die,” he said.

Experts in Tokyo and Seoul agree that Pyongyang is developing its nuclear capability as a bargaining chip in international politics, rather than using it to wage war. “A nuclear weapon capability would be powerful when you are not using it. Leaders in Pyongyang know this and use that logic,” said Uk Yang.

Pyongyang’s leaders believe carrying out nuclear tests is the best survival strategy, so persuasion is not enough to make North Korea give up its nuclear programme, said Lee Nae Young of NARS. “Therefore sanctions are an option as other diplomatic means in the past have failed, while a hard-line policy too has not produced any good results,” he said.

“Simple sanctions won’t help”

Simple sanctions won’t yield good results by stopping or delaying North Korea’s nuclear programme either, argued Japan’s Michishita. “We have to learn from past experiences. People say we should not buy the same horse for the third time,” he said.

During Kim Jong-il’s reign, the international community put pressure and engaged with North Korea but failed to stop the project. On the contrary, Pyongyang has made a lot of progress with its nuclear programme. Under the first deal in 1994, when North Korea floated the nuclear option, the US, Japan and South Korea paid $2.5 billion to the regime in Pyongyang to convince it to give up [but they did not], he said.

In the second deal in 2007, five countries in the six-party talks paid $400 million to North Korea for the same purpose. Under the agreement, once the North shuts down its nuclear reactors, the US and its allies will provide that country with 500,000 metric tonnes of heavy fuel oil every year, he said.

Unlike his father, Kim Jong-un has developed a nuclear capability to use as a leverage in dealing with the outside world, not because of a sole economic deal, said Hahm of Asan Institute. Jong-un does not want to go down that road to sustain his regime. He wants to hold onto nuclear weapons to win world recognition that his country is a nuclear state. The North wants to proceed as a nuclear power, perhaps in the same manner as the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, he said.

There are plenty of ways to impose sanctions against North Korea, he said. “But the kind of sanctions in the past are ridiculous compared to the threat. If you compare Iran and North Korea, Iran is part of the world economic system and it is easy to sanction, but even then UN sanctions have never mounted to anything in the past,” he said.

It was not UN sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table, it was unilateral sanctions by individual countries such as the US and those of the European Union, he said.

“For example, if all British insurance companies refuse to provide insurance to any ship carrying Iranian cargo, that is a severe sanction. There is nothing like this concerning sanctions against North Korea,” he said.

There are also effective options for the US. That is secondary sanctions via its strong financial networks against any companies, notably Chinese, which do business with North Korea, Hahm suggested.

High-profile student campaigner Joshua Wong and a dozen demonstrators attached the black cloth to the giant golden bauhinia flower on Hong Kong’s harbourfront in an early morning protest as security tried to stop them climbing on the famous tourist attraction.

The sculpture of the bauhinia, which became the emblem of Hong Kong after the handover, was a present to the city from China in 1997 and stands outside the convention centre where Xi will attend anniversary events during a three-day visit starting Thursday.

Police were called to take the flag down while the protesters chanted “democratic self-determination for Hong Kong’s future” and “one country, two systems has been a lie for 20 years”, referring to Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status.

A guard shouted at them: “You are insulting our country! You are Chinese!”

The “one country, two systems” deal made when Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 allows the city rights unseen on the mainland, including freedom of speech.

But there are increasing concerns Beijing is trampling the agreement by interfering in a range of areas, from politics to education and media.

Campaigners like Wong are calling for democratic reforms, promised in the handover deal, to change a system where the city leader is still chosen by a pro-China committee and the legislature is weighted towards Beijing.

Wong led mass Umbrella Movement rallies calling for fully free leadership elections in 2014, but they failed to win concessions.

Since then calls for self-determination or even full independence from China have emerged for the first time.

Wong’s party Demosisto wants a public referendum on Hong Kong’s future in 2047, the year the handover agreement guaranteeing the city’s way of life and liberties expires.

“The protest action aims to express our anger and disappointment against the administration for the major political blunders since 1997,” Demosisto said in a statement.

It accused China of failing to honour promises made in the handover agreement, “depriving Hong Kong people of civil and political rights to free elections and democracy”.

Xi’s visit will be his first since becoming president in 2013 and will culminate with the inauguration of Hong Kong’s new leader, Carrie Lam, on Saturday.

Protesters say they are preparing to gather during the handover celebrations and Xi’s visit will be shrouded in a huge security operation.//AFP

The 61-year-old, who was previously jailed for his involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests, was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in prison for subversion — a punishment that earned international condemnation.

To Beijing’s fury, he was awarded the Nobel prize a year later — and was represented by an empty chair at the ceremony in Oslo.

Last month the prominent activist was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and released from prison on medical parole, his lawyer Mo Shaoping said Monday.

He is being treated in a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang.

Liu was arrested in late 2008 after co-authoring Charter 08, a widely circulated petition that called for political reform in the Communist-ruled nation.

The bold manifesto, which was signed by more than 10,000 people after it went online, calls for the protection of basic human rights and the reform of China’s one-party system.

Beijing opposes the peace prize “because they fear that it will draw more attention to Liu Xiaobo and to China’s situation (on democracy and human rights),” his wife Liu Xia told AFP after he was honoured by the Nobel committee.

“If they didn’t fear this, then they would not have sentenced him to 11 years for writing an essay.”

Liu Xia herself was placed under house arrest at the time of the Nobel award and could not be reached for comment on Monday.

She suffered a heart attack in 2014, when she was diagnosed with depression after years of detention, a rights group said at the time.

– Words seen ‘as crimes’ –

==========================

Charter 08 specifically demands the abolition of subversion as an criminal offence.

“We should make freedom of speech, freedom of the press and academic freedom universal, thereby guaranteeing that citizens can be informed and can exercise their right of political supervision,” it says.

“We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.”

Liu is also known for his efforts to help negotiate the safe exit from Tiananmen Square of thousands of student demonstrators on the night of June 3-4, 1989 when the military bloodily suppressed six weeks of protests in the heart of Beijing.

He was arrested immediately after the crackdown and released without charge in early 1991.

Liu was rearrested and served three years in a labour camp from 1996-1999 for seeking the release of those jailed in the Tiananmen protests and for opposing the official verdict that their actions amounted to a counter-revolutionary rebellion.

Liu, who holds a doctorate in Chinese literature, was once a professor at Beijing Normal University, but was banned from teaching at state institutions over his involvement in the 1989 demonstrations.

As a leading member of the Independent China Pen Centre, a grouping of Chinese writers, Liu remained in close contact with key intellectuals and had been largely free to attend meetings and writer group activities despite constant police surveillance.

Although he has been banned from publishing in China, many of his writings advocating greater democracy and respect for human rights have appeared in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese publications.

Some of these served as evidence in his most recent trial.

– Award under arrest –

======================

Liu still commands great respect among Chinese intellectuals, a fact that some say was central to the Communist Party’s decision to bring charges against him.

Western governments, rights groups, scholars, and a coalition of Nobel prize winners have repeatedly called for his release.

Liu is the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel peace prize and one of only three people to have won it while detained by their own government.

The Nobel announcement sparked renewed calls for his release, led by fellow peace laureates and then by then-US President Barack Obama. Washington has also called on Beijing to end its house arrest of Liu Xia.

Liu has been honoured by Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and other rights groups. His essay “The Noble Paradise of Power, the Hell for the Meek” won the Hong Kong Human Rights News Prize in 2004.

The burnings, to mark the UN’s world anti-drugs day, follow another year of record seizures of narcotics from the remote borderlands of Myanmar, Laos, southern China and northern Thailand.

Myanmar in particular remains one of the world’s great drug-producing nations, a dark legacy of decades of civil war in its frontier regions where troops and ethnic rebel forces have vied for control of the lucrative trade.

Armed gangs churn out vast quantities of opium, heroin and cannabis and millions of caffeine-laced methamphetamine pills known as “yaba” which are then smuggled out across Southeast Asia.

An estimated $385 million was burnt in three official ceremonies around Myanmar on Monday, according to a senior police officer in the capital Naypyidaw.

At the biggest bonfire in Yangon, huge clouds of smoke filled the sky as authorities set fire to stacks of opium, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine tablets worth almost $230 million.

“We burnt a record amount of drugs today… because police have seized more in recent years,” drug enforcement officer Myo Kyi told AFP.

On an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thai authorities incinerated some $589 million worth of drugs including 7,800 kilogrammes of yaba pills and 1,185 kilogrammes of the more potent crystal methamphetamine.

And in Cambodia, officials burned 130 kilogrammes of drugs estimated to be worth some $4 million.

The huge seizures are often touted as proof these countries are making inroads into the vast regional drug trade.

But law enforcement agents say they are just the tip of the iceberg as producers ramp up production to meet growing demand across Southeast Asia and increasingly in Bangladesh and India.

And unlike their Latin American counterparts, cartel leaders in the Golden Triangle are rarely ever arrested or killed.

– Rising production –

The senior officer in Naypyidaw said almost all of the drugs burned at Myanmar’s official ceremonies originated in the eastern state of Shan in areas controlled by ethnic armed groups.

The kingpins are the United Wa State Army, a 25,000-strong militia known as Asia’s most heavily-armed drug dealers who boast their own autonomous territories on the border with China and have close links with Beijing.

Despite their reputation, the Wa deny producing drugs and even staged their own burning session on Monday in the village of Ponpakyin.

Myanmar has also been struggling to stem a growing tide of drug addiction inside its borders.

Experts say yaba use has exploded as ethnic armed gangs switched from exporting all the pills abroad to increasingly targeting domestic users.

Buddhist monks and military officers were among 13,500 people prosecuted for drugs crimes in 2016, up 50 per cent from the previous year, according to data seen by AFP.

“Drug production has increased every year since 2006,” Yangon police chief Win Naing told crowds gathered for Monday’s ceremony on the outskirts of the city.

In a bid to combat the growing scourge, Myanmar’s new civilian government is seeking to overhaul stringent anti-drug laws brought in under the former military government.

Current legislation means anyone found with even small amounts of drugs can be jailed for years.

Thailand meanwhile has the world’s sixth-largest prison population and the tenth highest incarceration rate in the world, largely thanks to its strict anti-drug laws.//AFP

Some years ago, Chatri Sityodtong was sitting in a New York sushi restaurant. The hedge fund manager had just enjoyed, in his words, “a record, bang-out year” that earned him tens of millions of dollars.

But he was unhappy when he had more reason than most to be cheered by riches. When he was young, his father was a property broker turned bankrupt, reduced to selling fruit on the street, with the family surviving on one meal a day.

The life of a Wall Street trader should have been especially sweet, but questions haunted him.

“What is the point of all this? I got to the top of the mountain, but money was not something I cared about,” says the 45-year-old.

The thing he cares about is martial arts – honing his skill as a fighter and being around other fighters.

My vision is to make ONE Asia’s first multi-billion-dollar sports media property. Every other region has them – in America there is the NFL, NBA, Nascar. In Europe, it’s the same thing – there is the English Premier League, Formula One, Bundesliga. All worth billions each. But there is absolutely nothing like that on a pan-Asian basis.

His moment of clarity was distilled into a business plan. He observed that Asians spend billions of dollars on sports content from outside the region, but produce nothing Europeans or Americans want to buy.

He thought there was one sport, born and perfected in this part of the world, epitomised by global stars such as Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, that might be a candidate for a global breakout.

Thus ONE Championship was born, founded in 2011 by Chatri , with help from the Economic Development Board. Chatri , the chairman and chief executive of ONE, picked Singapore because of its location and communications infrastructure.

ONE is now Asia’s largest sports media property in electronic reach and match attendance. Its first match at the Singapore Indoor Stadium, held in September that year, drew 6,800 fans. These days, a match there will draw up to three times that number.

The private company has 350 fighters in its stable, with offices in most major Asian cities, including China. Last year, it organised 16 fights, held everywhere from Manila to Jakarta, from Changsha in China to Yangon in Myanmar. ONE reaches 118 countries through free-to-air, cable and paid video streams. In a recent match, one in four people in the Philippines tuned in.

In the West, the Las Vegas-based mixed martial arts media company Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) dominates and has a vast international television following. UFC also holds matches in Asia. ONE is the leader in this region, in stadium attendance and potential television audience reach.

Chatri has plans to take ONE public in three years, a milestone that will better allow it to “unleash superheroes who will inspire millions”.

He speaks with evangelical zeal about the power of martial arts to change lives and, at his other business, the Evolve MMA chain of gyms, everyone from a four-year- old to a 75-year-old retired doctor gets the chance to feel it, he says.

Not surprisingly, he is also a motivational speaker, a talent he displayed at a TEDx talk titled How To Achieve Your Greatness In Life.

Perhaps he did pick up a “change the world” mentality from his time in Silicon Valley, he says. With friends, he set up a software company, NextDoor Networks, that they later sold. But his passion runs deeper than just in manner of presentation, he says.

“If I look at my life, I owe a debt of gratitude to martial arts for pulling me out of poverty, for giving me a chance to do something with my life. Maybe destiny or fate made me go through poverty so I could understand humanity.

“One day in ONE Championship gives me more happiness than 10 years on Wall Street ever did,” he says.

The son of a Thai father, Thaworn, and a Japanese mother, Michiyo, who met in Japan, where his father, an architect, went to university, Chatri spent the first 18 years of his life in Bangkok.

“I was an average student, the kid who got suspended for fighting in high school. I got detention. I was a naughty kid,” he says.

His father quit his job as an architect to start a real estate company during the Asian Tiger years of the 1980s. The family fortunes improved from “meagre” to “well-to- do”, he says. They moved to a better apartment.

As a teen, he fell in love with muay thai, training with the revered Yodtong Senanan in Pattaya’s Sityodtong Camp. He competed for a while, but ruled out a career as a professional after realising his talents lay elsewhere.

In accordance with tradition, masters of muay thai camps can bestow their camp’s name on promising fighters. Yodtong gave the boy, whose birth surname is Trisiripisal, the name Sityodtong.

ONE WITH A WARRIOR SPIRIT

After the Asian financial crisis hit, Chatri’s family was forced to downgrade to a “concrete-floor shack”. Soon after that, his father walked out on the family.

“After we went bankrupt, we became pariahs. Friends, relatives – everyone – disappeared from our lives, just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers.

At the same time, the graduate in economics from Tufts University was offered a place at Harvard Business School.

Taking it up would be a big risk – what if he flunked? Not only would he return in shame, but he would also be stuck with student debt. His mother urged him to go there. The best hope for the family getting back on its feet lay in the United States, she told him.

He got his MBA in 1999, living on borrowed money and part-time jobs giving tuition, delivering Chinese food and teaching muay thai.

He sent money to his mother, but to better take care of her, he moved her into his dorm room at Harvard.

He spent the next decade in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

The Harvard student, who ate his main daily meal at a US$4 buffet, soon earned enough to buy his mother an apartment in New York, where she now lives.

His younger brother Charlie, a hedge fund manager, also lives in the city.

He is married, but prefers to keep his wife’s identity private.

He has more than made up for his family’s financial losses, but his father’s irresponsibility would not be made good so soon, he says.

In 2015, Chatri went in search of the man who left a wife and two boys.

“I wanted to forgive him and to release myself from anger. I wanted him to know that he could have his peace. I wanted to ask him, ‘Why?’ Why did he abandon us, throw us away like garbage in our toughest time?”

He found the 73-year-old, poor and living alone in a small studio apartment. He found out that his father walked out because of the shame he felt over his failure to put food on the table.

Father and son have seen each other a few more times since then. The younger man sends money and is glad to have reconnected, but there is no turning back the clock, he says.

Normally articulate, Chatri searches for words to describe his feelings.

“You can’t repair 20-plus years of damage overnight… I feel we made peace with each other. But too much time has passed,” he says.

Media entrepreneur Kamol Sukosol Clapp, 48, first met Chatri in high school.

Speaking to The Straits Times on the telephone from Bangkok, he said that since the time he was a teen, muay thai had been his friend’s “biggest passion ever”.

The love of martial arts has been a constant in Chatri’s life, he says, as well as a sense that his life had to rise above the mundane.

Kamol, known as Sukie in Thailand, has been a concert promoter, musician and television host. He is now president of the Thai arm of ONE Championship.

He remembers the two of them walking along a beach in 1999, just after his friend’s time at Harvard.

“He told me, ‘I am going to make it’. I remember the look of determination on his face,” he says.

These days, Chatri is still trying to make it – he is trying to make ONE Championship a regional household name, with the brand power of Formula One, ESPN or the English Premier League.

More than that, he wants it to be a force for good, spreading a message of health, sportsmanship and what he calls “warrior spirit” – the strength of mind that he says saved his life when things were at their bleakest.

The couple of hours he spends daily in the gym are still the highlight of his day. It is where he picks up techniques in Brazilian jiu-jitsu from trainers. And, no, they do not take it easy on him because he is the boss. To prove his point, he shows a picture of a gash on his forehead, sustained during one session. He looks at it proudly.

“All of society’s pressures, categorisations of you disappear. On the mat, it doesn’t matter if you are a CEO, janitor or engineer. You are just you. It equalises the world. That’s what I love.”

A thought-provoking performance at the ongoing Expo 2017 Astana shows a drowning man clinging to a barrel of diesel oil, an action that almost kills him.

Given that Future Energy is the theme of the international exposition, the message is clear. Fossil fuel is taking its toll on humans.

Climate change has already threatened the world, affecting patterns of temperature, precipitation and more. It aggravates global warming, which is driving various species such as polar bears into extinction. If climate change goes extreme, food security will falter.

Staged inside the South Korean exhibition zone at the three-month-long Expo, the drowning man is saved by a female performer representing clean power, who also shows him how his city can be totally powered by eco-friendly energy sources.

It’s a simple show yet one that is drawing visitors eager to learn from its powerful message. Cleverly combining performance art with the giant electric screen in the background, members of the audience can’t help but ask themselves if they too have become so attached to fossil fuel that they no longer realise the associated dangers.

South Korea is just one of the more than 100 nations participating in the Expo 2017 Astana to address energy challenges of the 21st Century. The event kicked off on June 10 and will run until September 10.

Exhibitors are presenting their views of future energy in various ways. Inside the China Pavilion, for example, nuclear power is highlighted, the superpower making the point that nuclear energy is low-cost.

Russia too has placed an emphasis on nuclear technology, which provides hope for villagers in its Arctic zones.

Japan, however, begs to disagree. Although Japan continues to operate several nuclear power plants, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 – which was triggered by tsunami – has nudged the country into pursuing alternative-energy sources.

The Japan Pavilion showcases the country’s current leaning towards solar energy and wind energy.

Japan, moreover, presents how to save energy in everyday life by living in green dwelling units. For example, solar panels and fuel cells can be installed to make electricity at home. Japanese appliances, moreover, are promoted as having impressive energy efficiency.

Here too the message is clear. Humans do not have to give up their creature comforts even as they go green.

Singapore, a small island state, advocates a similar idea. Its pavilion promotes the best practices in sustainable development, urban planning and future energy. Embracing a “Small City, Big Ideas” concept, this exhibition zone underlines that humans can save energy by supporting energy-efficient facilities and devices.

A leader in alternative power sources, Germany has proudly announced its plans to embrace renewable energy at this international exposition. Small water turbines are installed in the Germany Pavilion to show how they generate electricity in an environmentally friendly way.

The German zone also has electric cars and even electric bicycles, with the industrialised and well-developed exhibitor presenting a wealth of ideas and innovations on the subject of generating, storing and distributing energy along with practical examples presented in an entertaining and accessible way.

Thailand is there too, promoting biofuel, an obvious energy source given our agricultural abundance.

Kazakhstan as host takes pride of place at the Expo, showcasing a comprehensive range of alternative energy options in an exhibition zone spanning more than 15,000 square metres across eight floors of a sphere-like building. The seventh floor is dedicated to a museum of future energy, the sixth to solar energy, the fifth to wind energy, the fourth to biomass energy, the third to kinetic energy, and the second to water energy.

It is a fascinating place to spend the day and the attraction is further enhanced by some cleverly imagined gimmicks. On the wind energy floor, for example, the gusts are so strong in one corner that walking becomes a challenge and your clothes feel like they will be ripped off your back. The presentation is a strong reminder of the power of the wind and why we should be harnessing something that comes for free.

In the kinetic energy zone, visitors are invited to pedal stationary bicycles to generate energy.

Indeed, the entire Expo is fun and educational at the same time.

And despite being a major oil exporter, Kazakhstan pulls out of the stops to demonstrate that it is serious about future energy too.

In Astana, well outside of |the exhibition zone, even the |direction signs are powered by solar energy.

BOOK A TRIP NOW

– Expo 2017 Astana is being hosted by Kazakhstan through September 10.

– Air Astana offers two direct flights a week from Bangkok.

– For more information visit http://www.expo2017astana.com.