Photos of two foreigners jogging down Pattaya’s main road in nothing more than tight speedos have sparked a furore on social media, with many asking if it is even legal.
The images that have gone viral since Sunday show two Caucasian men aged between 50 to 60 jogging down Pattaya’s Jomtien Beach Road in only blue speedos and trainers in broad daylight.
One netizen pointed out that if a Thai person went jogging in nothing more than underwear, they would be charged with public indecency. Many others also slammed the local officials for being too lenient with foreigners and letting them break laws.
Article 388 of the Penal Code says that anybody doing any shameful act in public by indecently exposing oneself or committing any other act of obscenity will be liable to a maximum fine of 5,000 baht.
Jomtien Beach in Chonburi province overlooks the Gulf of Thailand and is about 165km southeast of Bangkok and some 3km south of Pattaya City. The white sandy beach is known for its beauty and the neighbourhood is chock-a-block with high-rise condominiums, beachside hotels and restaurants.
The left shoulder of the Chalong Rat Expressway from KM22+500 to KM22+600A (outbound) will be closed for maintenance between 10am to 3pm every day until October 23.
The Expressway Authority of Thailand (EXAT) announced on Sunday that the closure is to fix the expressway’s concrete barrier and install a traffic sign gantry at the Sukhapiban 5-4 toll booth.
EXAT said it has deployed warning signs and traffic sirens to notify motorists of the construction work ahead and has urged all expressway users to strictly obey traffic signs for safety.
The work has been contracted to Best Work (Thailand) Co Ltd. The 28.2-kilometre Chalong Rat Expressway runs from Ramindra Road to Chaloem Maha Nakhon Expressway and has 14 toll booths.
The Public Health Ministry reported on Monday (August 15) that over the past 24 hours, 1,663 Covid-19 patients have been admitted to hospitals.
The death toll has risen by 30, while 2,335 patients have recovered and discharged from hospitals.
The number of cumulative cases in the country since January 1, 2022, stands at 2,398,653 with 10,160 deaths.
The country’s total caseload from Covid-19 stands at 4,622,088 – 4,569,974 of whom have recovered, 20,256 are still in hospitals and 31,858 have died.
Separately, another 1,819 people were given their first Covid-19 shot in the last 24 hours, 2,379 their second shot and 17,670 a booster, bringing the total number of Covid-19 vaccine doses administered nationwide to 142,201,901.
According to Worldometer, confirmed cases globally had risen to 595.34 million on Monday, 568.73 million of whom have recovered, 20.16 million are active cases (45,590 in severe condition) and 6.45 million have died.
Thailand ranks 28th in the global list of most cases, which is topped by the US with 94.68 million, followed by India with 44.26 million, France with 34.22 million, Brazil with 34.17 million and Germany with 31.53 million.
The Centre for Alcohol Studies (CAS) on Sunday warned against extending opening times for pubs and bars to 4am in tourism provinces, citing statistics from other countries.
Tourism Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn announced earlier that he will ask the Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration to allow tourist zones to extend the drinking deadline from 2am to 4am. Phiphat argued that 4am closing would suit foreign tourists, who start drinking late. He also noted that if pub hours were not extended, tourists would simply buy alcohol to drink elsewhere. He wants extensions to be approved for Bangkok, Pattaya, Krabi, Phuket, Hua Hin, Samui and Chiang Mai starting from October.
Opposing the move, CAS deputy manager Surasak Chaiyasong said time zones for alcohol sales are approved by the World Health Organisation as a way of reducing problems related to drinking.
Surasak, an assistant professor of pharmacy at Mahasarkham University, said banning alcohol sales late at night and on certain public holidays helped to prevent problems such as physical assault, drink-driving, road accidents and other drink-related crimes.
Citing statistics from other countries, he said restricting late-night alcohol sales in Russia reduced people’s frequency of drinking while similar limits on buying alcohol in Switzerland and Germany had reduced the number of people admitted to hospital for drink-related issues. Meanwhile restrictions on alcohol sales in Lithuania had cut the number of road accidents and injuries.
In contrast, allowing late-night drinking had triggered a rise in physical assaults, injuries, drink-driving and other destructive behaviour, he said.
Surasak cited statistics from Australia showing that extending bar hours had led to increased drinking and road accidents. Longer sale hours in Iceland also led to a rise in emergency-ward patients, injuries, quarrels, physical assaults and drink-driving.
He added that Norway saw a 16 per cent rise in physical assaults after extending alcohol sales by just one hour.
“From the academic data and experiences of several countries, it is clear that restricting the days and hours in which alcohol can be sold is an effective measure for preventing and reducing problems related to drinking,” Surasak said.
“We disagree with the extension of bar hours to 4am,” he added.
In August 2002, the online portal site Daum created a category called “Webtoon” on its platform. Following Daum, South Korea’s largest online portal and search engine Naver launched a similar platform in 2005.
Twenty years after its conception, South Korean webtoons have emerged as a strong multiuse source that creates enormous economic value not only in the country but also globally. Domestically, it has become an industry worth 1.053 trillion won ($810 million) in 2020 in terms of sales, up 64.6 per cent from 2019 and exceeding the 1 trillion won mark for the first time.
Globally, the webtoon market size is projected to reach $26.2 billion by 2028, up from $3.6 billion in 2021, according to market research firm Proficient Market Insights in May.
“Webtoons have become a very important source that can create many other content products in line with ‘one-source, multi-use content consumption methods,” Sung Dong-Kyoo, a media communications professor at Chung-Ang University, told The Korea Herald on Thursday.
A trend of webtoons being adapted into globally popular TV dramas is palpable, with a long list of Korean dramas that gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. They include “Itaewon Class” (2020), “Sweet Home” (2020), “D.P.” (2020), “Hellbound” (2021), “Yumi‘s Cells” (2021) and “Work Later, Drink Now” (2021).
“Webtoon IPs [intellectual properties] are the easiest source for creating other content because they are just like a storyboard. It’s easy to turn them into video content,” Han Chang-wan, a professor at Sejong University, said on Wednesday. “Now the way we consume content has changed entirely.”
First movers
Broadening the spectrum away from the local market, Korean webtoon companies have begun thriving noticeably worldwide.
Eight domestic webtoon platforms have entered the overseas market and 5,500 translated Korean webtoon works as of 2020, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency.
Naver Webtoon, which expanded out of Korea in 2014, now takes the No 1 position among webtoon platforms in 100 countries including the US, Canada, Japan and France. It offers content in 10 languages around the world, and its monthly active users reach 82 million – 75 per cent of whom are foreign users.
More importantly, Korean webtoon companies have developed unique ecosystems in the countries they have made forays into. For instance, “Lore Olympus” on Naver Webtoon’s English platform has recently been given the best webcomic award from the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, marking the first such achievement for a webtoon on a Korean platform.
“It is very meaningful that webtoons and web novels made by global creators spread throughout the world on platforms made in Korea, and it is encouraging to witness Korean companies becoming first movers rather than fast followers,” Sung added.
Hurdles ahead
While webtoons are enjoying an era of growth, there are many hurdles to overcome, experts said.
Considered an offshoot of the comic book industry, webtoon platforms are still struggling to be recognised as a distinct industry on their own.
“Webtoons play a role in the broader literary world and make up a de facto industry just based on sheer size, but institutionalisation and promotion policies are facing an uphill battle,” Seo Bum-kang, the head of the Korea Webtoon Industry Association, said on Thursday.
Seo added that the government and the National Assembly should give webtoons independent industry status and foster small and medium platforms and content companies to establish an ecosystem to promote the creation of a greater variety of webtoons.
According to professor Han, Korean webtoons, which suddenly find themselves in the spotlight, are going through a transition period amid a wave of globalisation that neither writers nor readers are ready for.
“The variety of webtoon genres have shrunk somehow, as readers only see what they want and writers only create what readers like. Now, most of the topics are about school life, school gangs, fantasy romance or romantic comedy,” Han noted. “These genres might not appeal to a global audience, and because of that we need more diversity of genres.”
The structure of Pakistan’s economy has drastically changed since its inception in 1947 with industry and then services sectors dominating the economy, says a finance ministry report released on Saturday.
The report gives a glimpse of the country’s 75-year economic journey, with all major economic indicators seeing massive changes over the period.
At the time of independence in 1947, Pakistan inherited only 34 industrial units out of the 921 in undivided India.
The nominal GDP rose from $3 billion in 1950 to $383 billion in 2022, while GDP growth was recorded at 5.97 per cent in 2022 compared to 1.8 per cent in 1950. Per capita income jumped from $86 in 1950 to $1,798 in 2022.
Tax revenues rose from 31 million rupees to 6,126.1 billion rupees from 1950-2022, while agriculture accounted for 59.9 per cent of the total GDP in 1949-50.
In the agriculture sector, the production of wheat increased from 3.35 million tonnes in 1958 to 29.4 million tonnes in 2022, rice from 0.69 million tonnes to 9.32 million tonnes, maize from 0.36 million tonnes to 10.64 million tonnes, sugarcane from 5.53 million tonnes to 88.65 million tonnes, cotton from 1.16 million bales to 8.33 million bales and water availability from 63.9 million acre-feet to 131 million acre-feet.
On the external side, remittances sent by Pakistanis working abroad jumped from $0.14 billion in the fiscal year 1973 to $31.2 billion in fiscal 2022, exports from $162 million in fiscal 1950 to $31.8 billion in fiscal 2022, and imports from $276 million in fiscal 1950 to $80.2 billion in fiscal 2022.
Finance Minister Miftah Ismail said the dearth of resources to meet local needs after independence was not a secret as India refused to give due share of its wealth to Pakistan soon after its birth.
The severely disrupted country’s economic system along with the settlement of refugees were major challenges faced by the newly born country, he said but added that Pakistan’s economy quickly revitalised with the hard work and determination of its people.
He said a country with a population of 30 million in 1947 could not feed its population and had to import most of its food requirements, adding that local agriculture production has risen significantly today.
Ismail said Pakistan constructed both large and small dams like Tarbela and Mangla, which increased the water storage and availability to 131 million acre-feet in 2022 from 63.9 million acre-feet in 1965-66, adding that it helped in achieving sustainable agriculture sector growth.
He said Pakistan emerged as one of the leading exporters of textiles, pharmaceutical goods and food-related items and economic policies of the successive governments have promoted industry, agriculture and services sectors.
The perseverance of its people made Pakistan the world’s 24th largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity and 44th in terms of nominal GDP, the finance minister said.
Federal Secretary Ministry of Finance Hamed Yaqoob Sheikh said the 75-year journey of Pakistan was a story of economic, political, social and regional events that have shaped the country that we live in today.
He said several boom-bust cycles, political crises and geo-strategic challenges have guided the country’s policies and programmes.
He said Pakistan was ranked among the 50 leading economies of the world with a GDP amounting to $383 billion, adding that it also established its vibrant banking system that supported economic development over the years.
Despite having to deal with her own disability, Zhao Yuan has succeeded in carving out a career in e-commerce and has helped more than 2,000 other disabled people sell agricultural products.
The 50-year-old was born in the Jianghua Yao autonomous county in Hunan province.
Before being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 24, Zhao was a dance teacher. Arthritis is a condition that causes permanent damage to the joints, especially the fingers, wrists, feet and ankles.
Eventually confined to a wheelchair, she had to leave her teaching post and began to make a living in business.
She opened a hotel in her mountain hometown and used some of her earnings to help pay for the school and college fees of 13 poor students.
“There are people who have helped me, and I want to repay them by doing good things for others,” Zhao said.
In 2017, she set up an offline sales platform called Sanhao Xiansheng – or “good and fresh” – which mainly sold goods produced by Zhao’s disabled friends.
Due to the pandemic, however, Sanhao Xiansheng stopped making money, so Zhao turned to online sales instead.
She became a livestream host on social media platforms, promoting goods like brown sugar, sweet potato flour and honey that her friends made, by telling stories about them.
“This is handmade brown sugar. Although the woman who makes it only has one leg, she grows over 333 hectares of sugar cane, and her business provides work for about 100 local residents,” Zhao explained during one livestream session on June 26, which she shot at a villager’s home in Longhui county.
That day, after introducing the products and telling stories for six hours, Zhao checked on the sales and concluded that two of the products – sweet potato powder and honey – were selling well. “Next time, I will spend more time introducing them,” she said.
Zhao said that she always checks the quality of the products herself before promoting them. “Before selling anything, I inspect the products. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to ensure they’re fit to sell,” she said.
Although travelling is inconvenient, Zhao has been all over Hunan checking produce and teaching the producers how they can sell online.
In 2020, she sold 50,000 kilograms of oranges and other agricultural produce, with sales topping 2 million yuan ($298,600).
Zhao said that everything she sells comes from 55 agricultural centres around the province run by the disabled, which employ more than 2,000 people. She has also hired 57 hosts, all of whom are disabled.
With her career flourishing, Zhao has set up the Hunan Sanhao Xiansheng Agricultural Science and Technology Development Co, of which she is now chair.
“We are planning to train another 1,000 hosts,” she said, adding that she hopes they will also be able to experience their personal and social value through work, just the way she did.
The University of Tokyo is scheduled to open a Metaverse School of Engineering in September. In the metaverse virtual reality space on the internet, members of the public, such as junior and senior high school students and working adults, will be able to attend lectures and events.
The metaverse school aims to foster human resources in digital technology fields and increase the number of female junior and senior high school students who aspire to work in engineering and information technology fields.
The university said it is aiming to attract over 100,000 participants.
In the metaverse, users can participate regardless of location. By utilizing this feature, the university plans to build a system in which as many people as possible can learn engineering and information technology through lectures and events.
On Sept. 23, the metaverse school will hold an opening ceremony in a virtual replica of the university’s Yasuda Auditorium. Guests and university teaching staff will attend the ceremony using their avatars, digital depictions of themselves.
For junior and senior high school students, the metaverse school will offer free lectures in which they can learn about digital technologies and entrepreneurship. Laboratory tours and exchange events will also be held.
In addition, the metaverse school will proactively provide information about the careers of women who studied in the real-world Faculty of Engineering in order to encourage female student interest in the fields.
For employees of companies that support the metaverse project, the metaverse school is scheduled to offer lectures by experts regarding artificial intelligence and next-generation telecommunications technologies.
Prof. Takao Someya, an expert on semiconductor engineering who serves as the dean of the metaverse school, said, “I want to foster human resources who can resolve various social tasks with digital technologies and increase their numbers to an unimaginable level.”
To ensure the safety of all road users, the police will continue their blitz against illegal racers nationwide, says Inspector-General of Police Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani.
Stressing that operations against illegal racers are not seasonal, the nation’s top cop said they were conducted by the Traffic Investigation and Enforcement Department (JSPT) on a weekly basis, especially during weekends.
“Such enforcement operations are led by the respective state and district JSPT chiefs with the goal of nabbing the wrongdoers and ensuring the safety of all road users,” he told The Star yesterday.
The operations were conducted after the JSPT identified the hotspots for such races, he said.
“Information on the races are obtained through intelligence gathering and from the public as well,” he added.
One of the main challenges faced by the police was the higher risk posed by the illegal racers, Acryl Sani said.
“They are becoming more brazen not only when carrying out their stunts, but also when they are trying to escape the authorities.
“In turn, they are endangering not only themselves but the enforcement personnel and other road users as well.
“Despite the danger, the police are committed to safeguarding the safety of the public,” he said.
Recently, the Transport Ministry proposed amendments to Section 42 of the Road Transport Act 1987, which would lead to stiffer penalties for illegal racers.
Action would also be taken against spectators and parents who allow their children under the age of 18 to join illegal racing activities.
On the proposed amendments, Acryl Sani said the Royal Malaysia Police fully supported laws that would be used to effectively curb illegal racing.
“We welcome efforts to amend and improve existing laws aimed at curbing illegal racing,” he said.
“We hope that the amendments proposed by the Transport Ministry will have a positive impact during implementation. We need a holistic legislative approach to seriously curb illegal racing,” Acryl Sani added.
Illegal racing, which mainly involved underaged riders, not only impacted the racers but also their parents and other road users, he said.
Under the proposed amendments, the racers could face a minimum fine of RM5,000 and jail time too.
The current minimum fine is RM300.
Transport Ministry secretary-general Datuk Isham Ishak said that under the proposed amendments, workshop operators who provided motorcycle modification services for illegal racing purposes would also be punished.
He said the amendments would likely be tabled in the first Dewan Rakyat meeting next year.
The airport of the Australian capital, Canberra, was evacuated and a man was arrested after five gunshots were heard in the main terminal building, police said on Sunday.
One person has been taken into custody and a firearm was recovered, the police said. There have been no reported injuries, it added.
Police said CCTV footage has been reviewed and at this time the person in custody is believed to be the only person responsible for the incident. The airport was evacuated as a precaution and the public were not allowed to go into the terminal, police said.
The incident has led to delays and cancellations of flights, local media reports said.
