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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/asia-pacific/40020476

Deeper ties with Thailand high on agenda as China celebrates 73rd anniversary as a republic

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

THE NATION

China has pledged closer ties with Thailand and deeper cooperation in the Asia Pacific region, as the country celebrates the 73rd anniversary of its founding as a republic. 

China’s Ambassador to Thailand Han Zhiqiang stressed on the key messages of bilateral cooperation between China and Thailand as well as China’s contribution to the keep peace and order related to geo-political tensions, while vowing to help boost cooperation within the Asia Pacific region during the upcoming Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Summit in November, to be hosted in Bangkok.

While China will officially mark the 73rd anniversary on October 1, an array of important guests attended “Celebrating the 73rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The People’s Republic Of China” event on Monday at Shangri-La Bangkok Hotel. 
Ambassador Han said his country would continue to grow steadily despite the lingering Covid-19 pandemic and geo-political tensions. He also voiced confidence that November’s Apec Summit in Thailand would help boost cooperation within the Asia Pacific region and lead to win-win outcomes for all members.

The event at Shangri-La Bangkok Hotel featured a video presentation on the long-standing relationship between Thailand and China, highlighting their collaboration to fight Covid-19, as well as economic, military, agricultural and cultural ties.
The ambassador said this year’s anniversary also marked China’s victory over Covid-19 and its impacts, with normalcy almost restored.
“Despite the lingering Covid-19 pandemic and lack of full world peace, China will continue to grow steadily. We have created a society where everyone lives and eats well, have dealt with poverty on a historic scale, and achieved modernisation in all aspects,” Han said.

He added that despite a population of 1.4 billion people, China had managed to maintain one of the world’s lowest Covid infection and death rates. Meanwhile, its economic expansion exceeded the 2.3 per cent target in 2020 and soared to 8.1 per cent in 2021, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, he said.
The ambassador also told guests that Thailand’s hosting of the Apec Summit this year was a good opportunity to promote Asia-Pacific economic cooperation. China is willing to work with all international partners to establish relationships based on mutual respect, fairness and shared victory for the future of humankind, he said.

Thai business tycoons and politicians joined the pre-anniversary event. Among the guests were House Speaker Chuan Leekpai and senior chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group Dhanin Chearavanont, as well as politicians from the government coalition and opposition parties.
House Speaker Chuan Leekpai led the room in congratulating China ahead of its 73rd anniversary. Apologising for his limited Chinese language skills, Chuan said in Thai that the Covid-19 outbreak had brought proof of the “strong and beautiful” relationship between the two countries. He said China’s donation of vaccines to Thailand was the act of a “true friend in need” and was greatly appreciated by all Thais.
Speaking after the event, Chuan told reporters that he believed the international community was looking to Chinese President Xi Jinping for help in solving the crises facing the world, including the Russia-Ukraine war.

THE NATION

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/russia-central-asia/40020466

5,000 Russian citizens arrived in Mongolia since September 15

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

According to the General Department of Border Protection, 5001 citizens of Russia have arrived in Mongolia through the Khiagt-Altanbulag border since September 15.

In particular:

– 179 Russian citizens on September 15
– 220 on September 16
– 260 on September 17
– 179 on September 18
– 169 on September 19
– 153 on September 20
– 229 on September 21
– 830 on September 22
– 867 on September 23
– 931 on September 24
– 984 on September 25

On September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization in Russia. Since then, the number of citizens leaving the country has increased sharply, and many of them go to neighbouring countries such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia where visa-free travel is available.

Gogo Mongolia

Asia News Network

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/asia-pacific/40020465

Japan holds state funeral for slain former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s funeral started at 2 p.m. After the national anthem was played and a moment of silence was held, images of Abe from throughout his life were displayed on a large screen inside the hall.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, House of Representatives Speaker Hiroyuki Hosoda, House of Councillors President Hidehisa Otsuji and Supreme Court Chief Justice Saburo Tokura gave memorial addresses, and former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made an address on behalf of Abe’s friends.

About 4,300 people attended the funeral, including about 700 people from 218 nations and territories.

Self-Defence Forces personnel formed an honour guard when the hearse carrying Abe’s ashes left his home in Tomigaya in Shibuya Ward. The hearse drove past the Defense Ministry before arriving at the Budokan.

The opening of the flower-laying stands was brought forward by 30 minutes from the originally scheduled 10 a.m. due to the large number of people arriving at the area. The stands stayed open until 4 p.m.

Members of the public paid their respects and bid a final farewell to Shinzo Abe in the hours before his state funeral at the Nippon Budokan hall in Tokyo on Tuesday.

From about 9:30 a.m., many people came to lay flowers at stands that opened at Kudanzaka Koen park, which is near the hall. Entry was restricted to funeral officials and people offering flowers, and traffic restrictions were in place on nearby roads. Many police officers were on duty guarding the area.

Abe was shot dead in Nara on July 8 while giving a campaign speech for an upper house election. Abe is the second postwar prime minister to be given a state funeral, 55 years after the same honour was given to Shigeru Yoshida.

The Japan News

Asia News Network

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/asia-pacific/40020464

Ex-Tokyo Games exec Takahashi arrested again over fresh bribery allegations

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

A former executive board member of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic organizing committee was arrested again on Tuesday over fresh bribery allegations linked to an advertising agency.

The special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office believes Daiko Advertising Inc. paid about ¥14 million to a company run by an acquaintance of the former Games executive Haruyuki Takahashi, who in turn is alleged to have helped the company secure a deal linked to the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

The major advertising agency Dentsu Inc. was responsible for seeking sponsors for Tokyo 2020 and Dentsu recommissioned part of the solicitation operations to Daiko. According to sources, Takahashi allegedly asked Dentsu to select the company to fulfil the role at the request of Daiko.

After Daiko was selected, the company is alleged to have paid a total of about ¥14 million from January 2019 to January 2020 to Commons2 Inc., a consulting firm run by Kazumasa Fukami, 73, an acquaintance of Takahashi.

Takahashi was arrested on suspicion of receiving bribes of ¥51 million from business clothing retailer Aoki Holdings Inc. Takahashi was also arrested on suspicion of conspiring with Fukami to receive bribes totalling about ¥76 million from the major publisher Kadokawa Corp.

The Japan News

Asia News Network

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/russia-central-asia/40020452

Putin grants Russian citizenship to US whistleblower Snowden

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA, where he worked.

U.S. authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.

There was no immediate reaction from Snowden, whose name appeared without Kremlin comment in a Putin decree conferring citizenship on a list of 72 foreign-born individuals.

The news prompted some Russians to jokingly ask whether Snowden would be called up for military service, five days after Putin announced Russia’s first public mobilisation since World War Two to shore up its faltering invasion of Ukraine.

“Will Snowden be drafted?” Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state media outlet RT and a vocal Putin supporter, wrote with dark humour on her Telegram channel.

Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told RIA news agency that his client could not be called up because he had not previously served in the Russian army.

He said that Snowden’s wife Lindsay Mills, who gave birth to a son in 2020, would also apply for citizenship.

Russia granted Snowden permanent residency rights in 2020, paving the way for him to obtain Russian citizenship.

That year a U.S. appeals court found the program Snowden had exposed was unlawful and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

Putin, a former Russian spy chief, said in 2017 that Snowden, who keeps a low profile while living in Russia, was wrong to leak U.S. secrets but was not a traitor.

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/asia-pacific/40020451

Japanese prepare to bid farewell to slain Abe with controversial state funeral

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

People in Tokyo queued early on Tuesday morning to offer flowers and pay their last respects to assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, as Japan prepares to hold a rare state funeral for the slain politician.

Long lines of people, both young and old, streamed steadily outside Nippon Budokan in the capital city, bowing and praying in front of Abe’s portrait at an altar. A man was also seen holding up a Taiwan flag to the large portrait draped with black ribbon hung over a bank of green, white and yellow flowers.

Later on Tuesday, Japan will honour Abe, a polarizing figure who dominated modern-day politics as its longest-serving leader, with a rare state funeral that has become nearly as divisive as he was.

Abe’s killing at a July 8 campaign rally set off a flood of revelations about ties between lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) he once ran and the Unification Church, which critics call a cult, sparking a backlash against current premier Fumio Kishida.

Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/asia-pacific/40020450

Do Kwon, the man behind cryptocurrency wipe-out in South Korea, insists he is not hiding

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

THE NATION

Do Kwon, the co-founder of Terraform Labs who is wanted in South Korea for charges over the US$60 billion wipe-out of cryptocurrencies and considered missing, said he is not hiding.

The Seoul prosecutors’ office said on Monday that it had called on Interpol to issue a Red Notice against Do Kwon early last week. The office has accused Kwon and five others of crimes, including breaches of capital-market laws related to the wipe-out of currencies he created.

In a tweet on Monday, Kwon said members of Crypto Twitter had likely seen him walking on the street or around shopping malls over the “past couple of weeks”. However, he did not mention the city or country he is in.

Kwon told his more than a million followers that he had not seen his name on Interpol’s list of individuals to “locate and provincially arrest pending extradition, surrender or similar legal action”. Though he admitted that not all names are made public.

“I’m making zero effort to hide,” Kwon wrote.

Kwon is rumoured to have shifted to Singapore after the collapse of Terraform Lab, its TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and sister token Luna. Both coins imploded in May, sparking huge losses in crypto markets.

However, a September 17 report from Reuters suggested he may no longer be in Singapore. South Koreans are generally not allowed dual citizenship, though it is unclear if Kwon holds more than one country’s passport.

South Korean financial authorities began investigating Kwon, Terra and other company employees in July by raiding offices of crypto exchanges like Gopax, Coinone, Upbit, Bithumb, and Korbit. The investigation reportedly led to a South Korean court later issuing an arrest warrant for Kwon and five others connected to Terra and requesting a Red Notice from Interpol.

South Korea has no extradition agreement with Singapore and Interpol can only request local law-enforcement authorities to detain Kwon if he is located.

THE NATION

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/us-canada/40020448

Nasa’s DART spacecraft hits target asteroid in test of planetary defense system

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

Nasa’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in a test of the world’s first planetary defence system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth.

Humanity’s first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations centre outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched.

The live stream showed images taken by DART’s camera as the cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth.

The mission was devised to determine whether a spacecraft is capable of changing the trajectory of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force, nudging it off course just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.

Whether the experiment succeeded beyond accomplishing its intended impact will not be known until further ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials hailed the immediate outcome of Monday’s test, saying the spacecraft achieved its purpose.

DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA’s flight directors, with control handed over to an autonomous onboard navigation system in the final hours of the journey.

Monday evening’s bullseye impact was monitored in near real-time from the mission operations centre at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Cheers erupted from the control room as second-by-second images of the target asteroid, captured by DART’s onboard camera, grew larger and ultimately filled the TV screen of NASA’s live webcast just before the signal was lost, confirming the spacecraft had crashed into Dimorphos.

DART’s celestial target was an oblong asteroid “moonlet” about 560 feet (170 meters) in diameter that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.

Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test could not create a new hazard by mistake.

Dimorphos and Didymos are both tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species including the dinosaurs.

Smaller asteroids are far more common and present a greater theoretical concern in the near term, making the Didymos pair suitable test subjects for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defence experts. A Dimorphos-sized asteroid, while not capable of posing a planet-wide threat, could level a major city with a direct hit.

Also, the two asteroids’ relative proximity to Earth and dual configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of DART, short for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Reuters

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https://www.nationthailand.com/world/us-canada/40020444

Foreign Affairs Minister Don delivers statement at UNGA77 in New York

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

THE NATION

On Saturday (September 24), Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Don Pradmudwinai delivered statement at the General Debate of the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA77) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Don stressed the urgent need to strengthen multilateral cooperation to address current global crises, both from nature and man-made such as food and energy crisis, pandemic, conflict, and climate change. He urged the international community to reaffirm the commitment to multilateral system and called for collective efforts to drive forward collaborations during this crucial time in support of the Secretary-General’s initiatives outline in the Our Common Agenda report.

Don further highlighted Thailand’s support for Black Sea Grain Initiative initiated by the United Nations and stressed the importance of this initiative to help keep global supply chains open. Apart from food insecurity, it is vital to strengthen healthcare system through Universal Health Coverages or UHC while reforming the global health architecture in order to address the current shortcomings of health systems.

On climate change, Don demonstrated Thailand’s readiness to submit Nationally Determined Contributions: NDCs and long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies (LT-LEDS) at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27). He also emphasised the need for the international community to restore confidence in the multilateral system and working closely on the issues of mutual interest, which also includes providing humanitarian assistance to countries in need and the promotion human rights. To this end, Thailand presents its candidacy for the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) membership for the term 2025-2027.

The Foreign Affairs Minister pointed out that Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could be achieved only through international cooperation and Thailand considers the Bio-Circular-Green Economy Model (BCG) as a mean to drive forward a more balanced development. He stressed that regional cooperation such as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) can complement the multilateral system. This year, Thailand plays host to APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting under the main theme of “Open. Connect. Balance.” 

On this occasion, Don proposed that key stakeholders of the Ukraine crisis to assemble at three venues in Southeast Asia – ASEAN Summit in Phnom Penh, G20 Summit in Bali and APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Bangkok – to use the opportunities to talks towards exit to the crisis with possible participation of the UN. He also encouraged the international communities to respond to global crises with a mindful and positive outlook in order to overcome challenges and to achieve global peace to all mankind.

THE NATION