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TANDBERG First to Demonstrate Immersive Three-Screen Telepresence Interoperability with Cisco TelePresence

2010-02-07T02:41:00.001-08:00

TANDBERG Total Telepresence solution delivers additional immersive third-party telepresence interoperability capabilities for expanded company-to-company collaboration.

TANDBERG (OSLO: TAA.OL) announced it has successfully demonstrated telepresence interoperability between TANDBERG Telepresence and the Cisco CTS 3000. This demonstration, the first of its kind, was enabled by integrating Cisco's new Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) into the award-winning TANDBERG Telepresence Server. With this integration, TANDBERG now adds Cisco TelePresence solutions to the list of third-party telepresence solutions it can seamlessly interoperate with while maintaining the three-screen, high-definition telepresence experience.

"As we build a global video community, it is imperative that organizations are not locked in by technology," said Fredrik Halvorsen, TANDBERG CEO. "Our Total Telepresence solution is interoperable with a broad range of third-party solutions, including those from Polycom and Microsoft. We are very happy to now deliver even greater value to our customers by bringing participants on TANDBERG Telepresence and Cisco TelePresence together with an immersive, three-screen experience. Today's demonstration reflects TANDBERG's continued commitment to open standards, providing scalable solutions and protecting our customers' video investments for the future."

According to Frost & Sullivan, although many companies initially think of telepresence as a substitute for the corporate jet, the technology holds even more value when it can seamlessly link to other video conferencing solutions - within and outside of an organization - to ensure all necessary participants can attend any meeting. TANDBERG customers have seen the exponential value of interoperability between third-party telepresence and video conferencing for company-to-company collaboration while maintaining the best experience possible. TANDBERG is consistently the first to deliver the most advanced interoperability solutions to the market, demonstrated by:

* TANDBERG first to demonstrate a multi-screen, high-definition telepresence call with Cisco TelePresence CTS 3000 (see video).

* TANDBERG first to deliver a telepresence solution that can interoperate with third-party telepresence systems while maintaining the immersive telepresence experience.

* TANDBERG first to enable high definition video between Microsoft Office Communicator and immersive multi-screen telepresence.

* TANDBERG first to deliver a complete portfolio of HD telepresence and video conferencing solutions that can interoperate with any other standards compliant systems both within an organization and company-to-company.

Interoperability with Cisco CTS 3000 and other Cisco systems will be available through a software upgrade to the TANDBERG Telepresence Server later this year. For more information about the TANDBERG Total Telepresence solution, visit http://www.tandberg.com or call or contact moreinfo@TANDBERG.com .
About TANDBERG

TANDBERG is the leading global provider of telepresence, high-definition video conferencing and mobile video products and services with dual headquarters in New York and Norway. TANDBERG designs, develops and markets systems and software for video, voice and data. The company provides sales, support and value-added services in more than 90 countries worldwide. TANDBERG is publicly traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker TAA.OL. Please visit http://www.tandberg.com for more information.

TANDBERG is a trademark or registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names here in may be trademarks of their respective owners.

One Global Corporate Default This Week Brings The 2010 Tally To Eight Defaults, Article Says

2010-01-29T23:19:00.001-08:00

One global corporate issuer defaulted this week, bringing the 2010 year-to-date tally to eight defaults, said an article published today by Standard & Poor's, titled "Global Corporate Default Update (Jan. 15 - 21, 2010) (Premium)."

This week's default, Air Jamaica Ltd., is based in the emerging markets, bringing the year-to-date default tallies by region to five defaults in the U.S., two in the emerging markets, and one in the other developed region (Australia, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand).

"This week's default resulted from a distressed exchange," said Diane Vazza, head of Standard & Poor's Global Fixed Income Research Group. "So far this year, three issuers defaulted because of distressed exchanges and another three defaulted as a result of missed interest or principal payments. The remaining two defaulted issuers were confidential."

Of the global corporate defaulters in 2010, 17% of issues with available recovery ratings had recovery ratings of '6' (indicating our expectation for negligible recovery of 0%-10%), none of the issues had recovery ratings of '5' (modest recovery prospects of 10%-30%), 33% had recovery ratings of '4' (average recovery prospects of 30%-50%), and 33% had recovery ratings of '3' (meaningful recovery prospects of 50%-70%). And for the remaining two rating categories, none of the issues had recovery ratings of '2' (substantial recovery prospects of 70%-90%) and 17% of issues had recovery ratings of '1' (very high recovery prospects of 90%-100%).

The marked improvement in financial conditions has altered our expectations for corporate default rates within the one-year forecast horizon. The sharp decline in funding costs, the reopening of the bond markets (even for low-rated issuance), and the abatement of volatility are factors that will lower refinancing costs, even for low-rated issuers. As a result, our 12-month-forward baseline projection for the U.S. corporate speculative-grade default rate is now 6.9%. Our pessimistic and optimistic scenarios result in default rates of 9.9% and 5.5%, respectively. As of September 2009, the U.S. 12-month-trailing corporate speculative-grade default rate was 10.8%. Previously, we had stated our expectations for a swathe of defaults to occur in the first half of 2010. But now, we expect that many of the defaults might be postponed to later quarters beyond the 12-month forecast horizon. Our forecasts are based on quantitative and qualitative factors that we consider, including, but not limited to, Standard & Poor's proprietary default model for the U.S. corporate speculative-grade bond market.

This article is part of our premium Global Fixed Income Research content, which is available to premium subscribers to RatingsDirect on the Global Credit Portal at www.globalcreditportal.com and to RatingsDirect at www.ratingsdirect.com. Ratings information can also be found on Standard & Poor's public Web site by using the Ratings search box located in the left column at www.standardandpoors.com. Members of the media may request a copy of this report by contacting the media representative provided.

Disney Interactive Media Group (China) and 3D Gaming (Hangzhou) Release the First 'Disney 3D Ping Pong' Game Station in China

2010-01-24T06:32:00.001-08:00

Disney Interactive Media Group (China) and 3D Gaming (Hangzhou) Ltd. have released their first product on January 20, 2010, to the arcade game market in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The product is said to be the first Disney "pop-out" 3D game station for which no glasses or other aid are

needed to experience the 3D effect. Disney Interactive Media Group (China) and 3D Group started their cooperation in China, leveraging 3D technology developed by 3D Group, to develop a 3D game station called "Disney 3D Ping Pong," and 3D Group is licensed to manufacture and sell in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau,

and Taiwan. Disney used the Chinese national ball game, ping-pong, as the theme, creating the first Disney 3D ping-pong game in China. Sport is the core of this game, allowing players to entertain themselves and exercise at the same time. It is a pioneer in healthy arcade game stations, and an innovation in China's arcade game history.

Song Ming, the Game Development Manager from Disney Interactive Media Group (China), revealed that "Disney 3D Ping Pong" combines the most popular Disney cartoon characters and the most adorable sport in China -- ping-pong. It's an integration of entertainment and sport, which is the newest and most healthy

game for young players in China. The game production team will focus on developing more games leveraging the latest techniques to bring great entertainment experiences to players.

Al Pien, the president of 3D Group, stated that 3D Group has spent five years with its technology partner in Germany in developing and providing the first 3D display and game develop kits in the world. It owns the world patent on the 3D display's intellectual property rights. 3D Gaming (Hangzhou) is the latest company of 3D Group, and is focusing on the cooperation with Disney Interactive Group (China). Meanwhile, Guangzhou Bao Hui Electronics Co., Ltd., licensed by 3D Group, becomes a national distributor of the "Disney 3D Ping

Pong" game station. Al Pien also stated that it has been a year negotiating and communicating with Disney, that it is an honor to be chosen and supported by Disney, and to become a partner of Disney in the game station market in China.
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About Disney Interactive Media Group

Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG) is the division of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) responsible for the creation and delivery of Disney branded interactive entertainment and informational content across multiple platforms including online, mobile and video game consoles around the globe.

DIMG oversees several lines of business. Disney Interactive Studios, which has five internal game development studios around the world, self publishes and distributes a broad portfolio of multi-platform video games, mobile games and interactive entertainment worldwide. Disney Online produces http://www.Disney.com , the No. 1 kids entertainment and family community Web site, for multiple platforms including PCs and mobile phones, as well as the Disney Family Network of Web sites for moms. Additionally, Disney Online

develops and publishes an industry leading suite of online virtual worlds for kids and families. Disney Interactive Studios and Disney Online work together to leverage the platform-specific expertise of the collective group to create a line of interconnected, multiplatform interactive entertainment experiences.

Disney Mobile Japan includes the Disney Mobile phone service as well as the region's highly successful mobile content business. DIMG also develops new online technologies and distribution platforms and operates the online technical backbone and infrastructure that power the Web presence of The Walt Disney Company. DIMG is headquartered in North Hollywood, Calif., with content available directly or through third parties in many major markets worldwide, including the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
About 3D Gaming (Hangzhou) Ltd.

3D Gaming (Hangzhou) was established in Xiacheng District, Hangzhou. With its base in Hangzhou, it will focus on the development of Disney 3D games and the production and sale of related products.

3D Gaming will apply self-owned 3D parallax technology in developing and providing new, exciting, and pop-out cartoons and games. Its business includes producing and integrating 3D display, game station, 3D technology and hardware services, and cartoon product development.

3D Gaming will continue to use leading 3D technology to develop healthy 3D games for players and let them experience a brand new kind of entertainment.

Media Asia Distribution

2010-01-24T04:31:00.001-08:00

With its headquarters based in Hong Kong, Media Asia is one of Asia’s largest and most successful Chinese-language film studios.

Since its establishment in 1994, Media Asia has produced or co-financed over 60 Chinese-language films, including critically acclaimed blockbusters like The Warlords (2007), The Assembly (2007), Confession of Pain (2006), The Banquet (2006), Exiled (2006), Initial D (2005), Wait ‘Til You’re Older (2005), and the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-2003), the latter spawning the Hollywood remake The Departed which won 4 major awards at the Academy Awards in 2007, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Media Asia’s films have won over 140 awards out of some 350 nominations from major international film festivals (e.g. Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Tokyo, and Pusan) and award ceremonies (e.g. Golden Horse Awards and Hong Kong Film Awards).
MR. RICKY TSE

In addition to its own productions, Media Asia also handles a library of over 150 feature films. It has entered into output agreements with leading television stations in Asia, including Star TV (Hong Kong / Taiwan), CCTV 6 (China) and Celestial movies (Singapore / Malaysia / Indonesia / Brunei). It has also formed a joint-venture with China Film Group (China) for film distribution in China.

Media Asia aims to produce quality Chinese-language films with commercial viability. Together with its film library portfolio, the Group aims to bolster its position in the product and distribution of Chinese-language films in Asia and around the globe.

SHERATON HUA HIN RESORT & SPA 2ND PLACE WINNER OF “BEST SPA RESORT” AWARD BY CEI ASIA MAGAZINE

2010-01-24T03:55:00.001-08:00

Sheraton Hua Hin Resort & Spa is delighted to announce that it has been awarded the 2nd place winner “Best Spa Resort” by CEI Asia Magazine. This honorable award is based entirely on the valuation of the readers of CEI Asia Magazine, Asia’s leading MICE magazine, reaches 12 percent ranking of the poll.

Now in its 3rd year of operations, the Sheraton Hua Hin Resort & Spa continues to be the favorite vacation retreat for business meeting groups and tourists. A new sense of welcome and comfort await at this stylish resort, where well-trained associates provide service with a smile and go out of their way to make guests feel at home.
sheraton HUA HIN
RESORT & SPA
1573 Petchkasem Road
Cha-Am, Petchburi 76120
Thailand
t — +66 32 708 000
f — +66 32 708 088
sheraton.com/huahin

The 820-square meter convention service area consists of a ballroom, 2 additional meeting rooms and is able to do 6 breakout rooms if required. The 520-square meter Grand Ballroom has advanced audio-visual technology, equipped with wired and wireless internet access and comfortably accommodates up to 500 guests. Conference facilities are immediately accessible via the driveway. Spacious private lawn area by the pool is also the venue for open-air function, elegant cocktail or sensational events.

With its distinct signature features, such as the 56 Lagoon Access Rooms that are located directly by the 560-meter circumference, lagoon style swimming pool, the “StarClub” area for kids and the “Aspadeva Spa”, the resort offers unique spaces and great attractions for its guests. The award-winning restaurant “InAzia” offers signature dishes from around Southeast Asia, while four other restaurants and bars let the guests savor a wide array of culinary delights.

Newly developed, Sheraton Hua Hin Resort & Spa has recently introduced the Sheraton initiative “Link@SheratonSM experienced with Microsoft®.” This unique virtual and physical lobby lounge space enables guests to work, relax and remain connected with the people that matter most to them during their travels.

‘Roses of the North’ Charity Exhibition

2009-12-16T18:27:00.001-08:00

Flowers can make everyone feel happy…. H.E.Privy Councillor Palakorn Suwanrath and Thanpuying Dhasaniya Suwanrath recently presided over at ‘Roses of the North’ charity oil painting exhibition inspired by Bhubing Palace organized by L’Occitane and Baan Saen Doi Resort in Chiang Mai. The art of mercy rose oil painting exhibition was held at Peninsula Plaza and part of sales went to support schools and hospitals where are needed in Chiang Mai. Many kind hearted celebrities attended the event including Khunying Dhipavadee Meksawan, Mr.Harald Link, Arunee Bhirombhakdi, Atchara Tejapaibul, M.L.Sirichalerm Svasti, M.L.Thongmakut and Jarujit Thongyai, Yuwadee and Nidsinee Chirathivat, Dararatana and Toey Mahadumrongkul, Chadapah Snidvongs, Captain Deuntemduang Na Chiengmai, Pimpawan Limpichart, Joy Sopitpongstorn, Panitnuj Bunnag, Piranuj T.Suwan, Sodsoi Chomthavat, Mayura Savetsila, Wanchana Sawasdee and more.

The exhibition showcased of over 70 oil painting of roses flowers by artist and art lecturer Narin Phothisombat. Narin Phothisombat is a talented artist with an art degree from Chiang Mai Technology Rajchamonkol. His painting was inspired by roses from Phra Tamnak Bhubing Rajanives (Bhubing Palace). His painting reflected his pride and passions towards the beauty of nature for roses including Queen Sirikit, Eliza, Rouge Meilland, Queen Elizabeth and Royal Air Force.

In addition there was the charity auction on 2 oil painting pieces. The first one was the painting of Queen Elizabeth which won by Harald Link, CEO of B.Grimm for 120,000 Baht and the other piece on Queen Sirikit won by Arunee Bhirombhakdi for 75,000 Baht.

Accumetrics Closes 2009 with Positive Outlook

2009-12-15T18:53:00.000-08:00

New distribution agreements, favorable clinical data, and significant capital financing position the company for continued growth in 2010 Accumetrics, Inc., developer and marketer of the VerifyNow(R) System, the first rapid and easy-to-use diagnostic system for measuring an individual's response to multiple antiplatelet agents, announced that 2009 included a doubling in the number of international and U.S. distribution agreements, as well as positive medical community support, and significant capital financing

that will take the company into 2011.

In 2009, the company continued its commitment to creating a powerful, worldwide distribution network aimed at gaining adoption of its products at end-user levels. Spanning Europe, Latin America and Asia, Accumetrics currently has partnerships with 20 leading international distributors who provide the company with local representation in over 30 countries. Latest additions to the international distribution network include Keller Medical in Germany, ZAO "Schag" in Russia and VSA Alta Complejidad S.A. in Argentina. Accumetrics continued to strengthen its U.S. presence by partnering with 10 cardiovascular specialty distributors to enhance support to the company's growing base of clinicians in the domestic hospital market. Accumetrics has

also partnered with National Distribution & Contracting, Inc. (NDC), the largest organization of independent medical supply distributors in North America, to expand its distribution network in the physician office lab
marketplace.

Increasing evidence of the clinical value of platelet reactivity testing was demonstrated in several presentations of new clinical studies including the POPular study, presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in November, and a meta-analysis presented at a symposium during the 2009 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT ) Conference. These data also build upon the anticipation of the results of the GRAVITAS trial, which has now completed 80% enrollment.

"2009 has proven to be an outstanding year of growth for Accumetrics," said Timothy I. Still, CEO and President of Accumetrics. "We look at 2010 as a breakthrough year for the company, and are pleased to be in a position to capitalize on the growing clinical acceptance of platelet reactivity testing."

Accumetrics concluded 2009 with $17.1 million in new capital financing, which will fully support the company into 2011. Proceeds will fund a number of key 2010 milestones including expanded claims for existing products, new product development and continued expansion of commercialization efforts. About Accumetrics (www.accumetrics.com)

Accumetrics is committed to advancing medical understanding of platelet function and enhancing quality of care for patients receiving antiplatelet therapies by providing industry-leading and widely accessible diagnostic tests for rapid platelet function assessment.

Accumetrics' VerifyNow System is the first rapid and easy to use platform for measuring an individual's response to multiple antiplatelet agents. Addressing every major antiplatelet drug, including FDA-cleared products for aspirin, P2Y12 inhibitors (e.g. prasugrel (Effient(TM)) and clopidogrel (Plavix(R))), and the GP IIb/IIIa inhibitors (e.g. ReoPro(R) and Integrilin(R)), the VerifyNow System provides a valuable tool to help
physicians make more informed treatment decisions.

The Accumetrics logo and VerifyNow are registered trademarks of Accumetrics, Inc. ReoPro is a registered trademark of Centocor, Inc. Integrilin is a registered trademark of Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Plavix is a registered trademark of sanofi-aventis. Effient is a trademark of Eli Lilly and Company.

Social Media for Travel Marketing

2009-11-19T06:53:00.001-08:00

Social Media for Travel Marketing - - the latest seminar program by SPOTMARK is schedule on 11 November 2009 at The Westin Grand Sukhumvit, Bangkok. The seminar, organized in response to the popularity of social media marketing, will be a perfect educational session for travel marketers to learn how to master social media marketing and how to integrate it into the marketing mix.

In response to the popularity of social media marketing especially among travel marketers who want to capture the expanding social media user population, SPOTMARK is organizing a seminar on ‘Social Media for Travel Marketing. The seminar is scheduled on 11 November 2009 at the Westin Grande Sukhumvit, Bangkok, Thailand.

In addition to utterly presentations on social media marketing, the seminar will also touch on other digital marketing tools and trends for the travel industry. “Social media like any other marketing tools shouldn’t be use alone. It should be integrated into the whole marketing mix if you really want to make it works,” said Mr. Sirapat Kettarn, Managing Director of SPOTMARK, the professional business-to-business conference, exhibition & event marketing organizer adding that, “however, since there have been a lot of seminar and workshop on digital marketing in the past, the main focus for this seminar will be in social media, how it works and to make it works by itself and together with other tools. That is where other digital marketing will come into the picture. We will bring in a lot of real-life case studies to demonstrate what works well and what doesn’t.”

The growing popularity of social media marketing is not only because of the expanding population of social media users but its proven success as well. Social media has become the tools for various purposes - - branding, improving customer loyalty, lead generation, direct marketing and e-commerce. Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer’s senior analyst once said the beauty of social networks is that they are a place where nearly any marketing goal can be achieved, with nearly any marketing tactic.

For the travel industry, social media is the future. The latest finding from Eye for Travel claims that 79% of travel industry executives view social media as a long-term part of the online marketing mix.

Why social media is so important for travel marketing? Some of the simple answers might because travel are collectors, critics, creators & spectators; seeing is believing - - pictures do speak louder than words; travelers want “insider information”; recommendations from fellow travelers are trusted and travelers want to share their experience.

The seminar will benefit anyone working in hotels & resorts, travel agencies, online travel, airlines, cruise from large hotel chains to independent hotels as well as international travel companies and online travel agencies that want to better understand of the fast moving travel technology and how to capitalize on technology to grow their business.

Astro Boy manga to hit US iPhones

2009-11-12T22:53:00.000-08:00

       Japan's Astro Boy and other comic heroes by late manga legend Osamu Tezuka will soon appear on iPhones and iPods in the United States, Japanese companies said recently.
       The English-language Weekly Astro Boy Magazine will be available for iPhone and iPod touch users as early as this month in volumes of about 100 pages each, said Tezuka Productions Co. and D-Arc Inc.
       The first large-volume manga service for mobile devices entirely in English comes after the release this weekend of a modern 3D computer animation take on Astro Boy in the United States and China.
       First sketched by Tezuka in the 1950s,the Astro Boy series charmed children across the globe with its tale of a powerful little robot boy built by a scientist in the image of his deceased son.
       A number of versions of the story have been produced since, most famously the 1960s series which heralded the rise of the influential Japanese anime style of cartoons used in television and film.
       The first mobile-device trial volume is free, and the companies aim for one million downloads, said Yoshihide Kinokawa, a director at D-Arc, who was behind the development of the English-language cartoon delivery for iPhones.
       Each volume afterwards will sell at 99 cents per weekly.
       Readers can see the whole page on the screen and zoom in for close-ups of individual cartoon cells.
       "I hope people who saw the movie will want to read the original," Kinokawa said. The companies plan to expand the service to other countries gradually.
       The digital weekly will also carry Phoenix ,Black Jack and other works by the late "God of Manga."

New twist in book-scan deal

2009-11-12T22:52:00.000-08:00

       A judge has given Google Inc more time to revise a legal settlement that has drawn government scrutiny because it would give the Internet search leader the digital rights to millions of out-of-print books.
       Under a change approved on Monday,Google and groups representing US authors and publishers now have until Friday to change an agreement reached more than a year ago. It marked the latest twist in a copyright lawsuit that the authors and publishers filed against Google's digital book project four years ago.
       The revisions to the settlement were supposed to be filed by the end of Monday, but Google and its negotiating partners told US District Judge Denny Chin they still needed to address objections raised in September by the US Justice Department. Chin signed off on the extension without comment.
       The Justice Department has warned it probably would try to block the current agreement from taking effect because antitrust regulators had concluded it threatened to thwart competition and drive up prices.
       Some of the Justice Department's preliminary findings echoed concerns from a chorus of critics that include Google rivals Microsoft Corp, Yahoo Inc and Amazon.com Inc.
       Google had insisted the settlement merited court approval until the Justice Department raised red flags.
       In its current form, the settlement would entrust Google with a digital database containing millions of copyright-protected books, including volumes no longer being published. The Internet search leader would act as the sales agent for the authors and publishers,giving 63% of the revenue to the copyright holders.
       The Justice Department believes the arrangement could lead to collusion that would raise the prices for digital books a format that is expected to become increasingly popular with the advent of electronic readers such as Amazon's Kindle.
       Google contends its plan to make digital copies of so many hard-to-find books would benefit society by making more knowledge available to anyone with an Internet connection.
       For that reason, the Justice Department has said it hopes an acceptable compromise can be worked out.

INSPIRATIONAL LIVING

2009-11-08T04:52:00.000-08:00

       Intukarn GajaseniSirisant brings Martha Stewart s Midas touch to the Thai edition of Martha Stewart Living writes Samila Wenin
       Intukarn Gajaseni Sirisant may be better known as an Isabella Bird-type than a Mrs Dalloway, as evidenced in the myriads of postcards collected from numerous places she's visited all over the world - a passion that earned the 41-year-old beauty over half a decade-long editorship post at Honeymoon & Travel magazine. Those who have not known the other side of Intukarn frowned when she took up the editor-in-chief post for the newly launched Martha Stewart Living Thailand.
       "Travel is my passion and I used to travel a lot. But I have this domestic side the Martha Stewart side - and it's my daily life," she said.
       Those close to her remember Intukarn as an excellent cook. She used to work as contributing editor for the culinary website Pai-Kin-Khao (Let's Go Eat), won a cooking contest and also co-wrote a culinary book titled,Spice of Life: The Recipes & Cooking Culture of Thailand , with renowned food stylist-columnist Ekarin Yusuksomboon.
       "The magazine is pretty close to who I am and my lifestyle, and I believe this would make it easier for me to understand what it's trying to present to readers," she explained.
       "Martha Stewart Living is a magazine for women who are interested in cooking,entertaining guests, home-keeping and doing crafts. I love to cook and entertain my friends with my home-cooked meals on the weekends. And that's why I said yes right away when I was offered the job. It's a very good opportunity."
       As part of the preparations for the launch of Martha Stewart Living Thailand, Intukarn,along with Post International Media Managing Director Siri Udomritthiruj, sales manager and art director flew to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's headquarters in New York to undergo training. Visiting the empire of the domestic queen is, as Intukarn reflected, both practical and inspirational. For example, the beautiful office that overlooks Hudson River boasts a large kitchen for the cooking team to try recipes and deliver the freshly-cooked dish to the studio for a photoshoot right from the stove.
       "What I have learned is that those who work here always go into great detail. They are real experts in the field and not just writers who go to interview experts. The crafts editor, for example, has innumerable materials stored in her office so that she can come up with and work on new ideas all the time. As for the food section, we have learned that each recipe has to be tried and tested by experts several times before it appears in the magazine."
       The team also has to work closely with headquarters. With the current content comprising of picked-up stories from the US edition and local stories -at the proportion of 80 to 20 percent - the Thai editorial team is required to send the content line-up to headquarters for approval.
       "The condition set for me is that, no matter what we do, the magazine has to stick to the Martha Stewart Living character.It has to be Martha and not any other woman. There are three key points in the framework we have to bear in mind. First,the stories are accessible for Thai readers.Second, each issue must come in a harmonious colour tone that is pleasing to the eyes for readers. Finally, you need to have a well-proportioned combination of stories to ensure the flow of content."
       Despite a large number of home, cooking and decoration magazines dominating local magazine racks, Intukarn remains confident that Martha Stewart Living Thailand will be able to secure its place in the publishing industry. Using her own experience as an example, she said that, unlike other home and decoration magazines which mostly feature content with respect to global trends,Martha Stewart Living does not pay heed to trends and instead offers ideas and tips that are timeless."I've been a fan of the magazine even before I became editor. I often borrowed ideas from it and never trashed a copy. When I was offered the job,I went back to the old issues and found that those ideas and recipes can be used even today. It's more like a reference book for dreamers and doers."

Below the surface

2009-11-08T04:51:00.002-08:00

       Sadly, Thai literature is little known outside Southeast Asia. What few books come to Western minds about the Realm were penned by farangs (i.e. Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon;A Woman of Bangkok by Jack Reynolds). For that matter authors from Japan, China and India are only marginally better known overseas.
       To the extent that Prabhassorn Savikul rings a bell, it is from his distinguished career in the Thai Foreign Service, from which he retired after 40 years. He took to writing short stories and for a spell was President of the Writers' Association of Thailand.Letter from a Blind Old Man is his most recent work, comprising 10 short stories, the title referring to one of them.
       This is a thin volume of 133 numbered pages, with two blank pages between each story. Perusing it, this reviewer realises that he writes by indirection.Prabhassorn has something to say and does so offhandedly. Thais and expats will pick up on it because they live here and share the experiences of the personae, but readers abroad might not.
       His perspective is that of an old man witnessing the ongoing modernising in the Land of Smiles and nostalgically recalls the time it supersedes. Change isn't synonymous with progress. What disturbs him mostly is that the elderly,though hardworking for decades and who fought in past wars, are treated as
       doddering fools now and forgotten in death.
       Their children left the farm for the big city,never to return. The cottage industries which were the mainstay of the economy have given way to factories, mom and pop shops to 7-elevens, rice paddies to condominiums, bahtbuses to the Skytrain.The populace is clamouring for TVs, computers, mobile phones.Politicians lie. The rich only care about getting richer.
       None of which the author rants about.Perhaps his is the style of his Foreign Office reports, couched in politically correct language. His references to the street demonstrations of the 1970s, put down with bloodshed, are meaningful to us but not to outsiders. The underlying current of these stories is why is there no empathy for those who fell trying to bring about democracy?
       The Thais, once noted for their kindness and patience, are in the process of losing both. After initially displaying politeness, sales personnel turn rude. The senile are laughed at to their face. Bus drivers treat their passengers with contempt. Activists disappear. Selfishness is the order of the day, greed is their watchword.
       Perhaps this reviewer is overstating Prabhassorn's theme, yet I don't think so. It's there, just below the surface. For which Letter from a Blind Old Man is an irritating read. He also takes odd topics and goes off on free association trips.An ear turning up at the Lost & Found.Van Gogh's? A skull, etc. It's not a profound book yet offers some insights.

SCREEN PRINTERS AIM TO ENHANCE TECHNOLOGY

2009-11-08T04:51:00.001-08:00

       The screen-printing industry plans to spend Bt600 million from the government's "Creative Economy" budget on enhancing its technology and expanding the market in a bid to achieve regional-hub status in the next five years.
       Pirach Thampipit, president of Thai Screen Printing and Graphic Imaging Association, said the sector was a genuinely creative industry which adds high value to another 18 industries, including textiles, ceramics, gifts, toys, advertising billboards, automotive and electronics.
       "Say you buy a Bt100 T-shirt and pay Bt10 for screen printing, then you sell it for Bt250. This is an easy demonstration that although the direct value of screen printing is about Bt10 billion, it can create indirect value to the country of more than Bt100 billion each year," he said.
       Under the plan, he said the industry would spend the approved budget on developing know-how and technology among local manufacturers, whose current technology follows that used in Japan and South Korea.
       One of the big difficulties in promoting local screen printing is that Thailand has none of its own global-brand products, he added.
       "Japan has Toyota and Korea has Samsung, companies which encourage their small and medium-sized enterprises to conduct research and improve their competency. But we have none. That's why we asked for the budget to do our own research and position ourselves as the best original-equipment manufacturers in the screen-printing industry instead," he added.
       Pirach said the association would cooperate with seven industries in developing printing to match demand. The selected industries are toys, gifts, advertisements, ceramics, textiles, handmade products and stationery.
       The implementation of the Asean Free Trade Agreement next year will be an opportunity for Thai manufacturers to expand their business in other countries with cheaper costs and to enlarge their customer base in the region.
       He said Thailand had been listed in the top four for screen printing in Southeast Asia, the other three countries being Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
       "We've just created the world's first-ever standard for screen printing. This will be an important step to push forward development in our industry, as it will make our people more enthusiastic about improving their production quality," he said.
       He added that the association was cooperating with the Thai Industrial Standards Institute to set up a TISI standard for the screen-printing industry.

Magnificent seven

2009-11-04T06:09:00.002-08:00

       In the most important, most revered event since the invention of the brontosaurus trap,Microsoft shipped the most incredibly fabulous operating system ever made; the release of Windows 7 also spurred a new generation of personal computers of all sizes at prices well below last month's offers.The top reason Windows 7 does not suck: There is no registered website called Windows7Sucks.com
       Kindle e-book reader maker Amazon.com and new Nook e-book reader vendor Barnes and Noble got it on; B&N got great reviews for the "Kindle killer"Nook, with dual screens and touch controls so you can "turn" pages, plays MP3s and allows many non-B&N book formats, although not the Kindle one;Amazon then killed the US version of its Kindle in favour of the international one, reduced its price to $260(8,700 baht), same as the Nook; it's not yet clear what you can get in Thailand with a Nook, but you sure can't (yet) get much, relatively speaking, with a Kindle;but here's the biggest difference so far,which Amazon.com has ignored: the Nook lets you lend e-books to any other Nook owner, just as if they were paper books; the borrowed books expire on the borrower's Nook in two weeks.
       Phone maker Nokia of Finland announced it is suing iPhone maker Apple of America for being a copycat; lawyers said they figure Nokia can get at least one, probably two per cent (retail) for every iPhone sold by Steve "President for Life" Jobs and crew via the lawsuit,which sure beats working for it -$6 (200 baht) to $12(400 baht) on 30 million phones sold so far, works out to $400 million or 25 percent of the whole Apple empire profits during the last quarter;there were 10 patent thefts, the Finnish executives said, on everything from moving data to security and encryption.
       Nokia of Finland announced that it is one month behind on shipping its new flagship N900 phone, the first to run on Linux software; delay of the $750(25,000 baht) phone had absolutely no part in making Nokia so short that it had to sue Apple, slap yourself for such a thought.
       Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web, said he had one regret:the double slash that follows the "http:"in standard web addresses; he estimated that 14.2 gazillion users have wasted 48.72 bazillion hours typing those two keystrokes, and he's sorry; of course there's no reason to ever type that, since your browser does it for you when you type "www.bangkokpost.com" but Tim needs to admit he made one error in his lifetime.
       The International Telecommunication Union of the United Nations, which doesn't sell any phones or services, announced that there should be a mobile phone charger that will work with any phone; now who would ever have thought of that, without a UN body to wind up a major study on the subject?;the GSM Association estimates that 51,000 tonnes of chargers are made each year in order to keep companies able to have their own unique ones.
       The Well, Doh Award of the Week was presented at arm's length to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; the group's deputy secretary-general Petko Draganov said that developing countries will miss some of the stuff available on the Internet if they don't install more broadband infrastructure; a report that used your tax baht to compile said that quite a few people use mobile phones but companies are more likely to invest in countries with excellent broadband connections; no one ever had thought of this before, right?
       Sun Microsystems , as a result of the Oracle takeover, said it will allow 3,000 current workers never to bother coming to work again; Sun referred to the losses as "jobs," not people; now the fourth largest server maker in the world, Sun said it lost $2.2 billion in its last fiscal year; European regulators are holding up approval of the Oracle purchase in the hope of getting some money in exchange for not involving Oracle in court cases.
       The multi-gazillionaire and very annoying investor Carl Icahn resigned from the board at Yahoo ; he spun it as a vote of confidence, saying current directors are taking the formerly threatened company seriously; Yahoo reported increased profits but smaller revenues in the third quarter.
       The US House of Representatives voted to censure Vietnam for jailing bloggers; the non-binding resolution sponsored by southern California congresswoman Loretta Sanchez said the Internet is "a crucial tool for the citizens of Vietnam to be able to exercise their freedom of expression and association;"Hanoi has recently jailed at least nine activists for up to six years apiece for holding pro-democracy banners. Iran jailed blogger Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan for 10 months - in solitary confinement.

The world in art

2009-11-04T06:09:00.001-08:00

       Ever since Yves Carcelle launched "Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion and Architecture" in September, the 400-page three0in-one book has become a collector's item. This collabo ration of nearly 100 artistts, photographers,architects since 1980s is a celebration of the brand and features works bu pi9oneers Cesar, Sol Lewitt and Oliver Debre, as well as by Marc Jacobs, stehen Sprouse, Takashi Muragami and Richard Prince. There are also some stunning shots of advertising campaigns captured by InezVan Lamsweerde& Vinoodh Matadin, Jean Lariviere and Annie Leibovitz.
       The illustrated anthology is supplemented by critical essays that analyse and shed new light on
Vuitton's commitment during one of the most fertile periods of contemporary creation. Written by international critics from the world of art, fashion and architecture, the boos are in three languages-French,English and Italian.
       The deluxe edition exclusively designed by takashi Murakami will soon be for sale in louis Vuitton stores and through
       www.Louis Vuitton.com.

Secrets jof a best-selling hack

2009-10-28T20:38:00.001-07:00

       Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as miserably as he does in How I Became a Famous Novelist . In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction,Hely, who has been a writer for David Letterman and American Dad , takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all. You are invited to trawl the mass-market fiction in your local bookstore if you think Hely is making much up.
       Since he needs a pretext for this batch of dead-on parodies, Hely invents the calculating Pete Tarslaw,hack extraordinaire. And How I Became a Famous Novelist needs to give Pete some motivation. So in a rare show of genuine literary laziness, Hely jolts Pete with the news that his college girlfriend is getting married. This qualifies as instant, just-add-water motivation. Pete wants to be a hugely popular writer so he can make this girlfriend sorry she's marrying somebody else.
       With that, Hely is off to the races.He has Pete start analysing popular books to see what makes them sell.That gives Hely a pretext to lard How I Became a Famous Writer with a wide array of supposedly viable titles, main characters, ad lines ("Blood is the new pink") and crazy premises.Sample thriller plot:"A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost 11th commandment that changes everything."
       Here are some sample titles from Hely's version of the New York Times best-seller list, which is mimicked with particular glee:Cumin: The Spice That Changed the World ,Indict to Unnerve ,The Jane Austen Women's Investigators Club and Sageknights of Darkhorn . The list also includes a sci-fi novel with the following synopsis:"In a post-nuclear future inhabited by intelligent cockroaches, Lieutenant Cccyxx discovers there was once a race of sentient humans."
       At the risk of shamelessly cannibalising Hely's humour, here are a few more. Sample military adventure title:Talon of the Warshrike . Sample writerly process: The author of "Warshrike"explains that he got a plot idea while in Venice with his ex-wife; while on a night cruise he looked back at the city and thought,"What if somebody blew this place up?" Finally and most lovably, there is this suspenseful moment from a brisk novel in which a US president is warned about a national security crisis:"Sir, how much do you know about outer space?"
       Gradually Pete begins to shape his own version of a winning formula.He is goaded by the example of a folksy, literary type named Preston Brooks who appeals greatly to women and who says things - in person, not in print - like the following, as he gives a tour of his office to a TV interviewer:"I call this the dance hall.Because characters will appear, and introduce themselves and ask me to dance. The character always leads. I bow, accept, dance for a while." Is it any wonder that Pete dreams up a scene in which a young woman admits she's never been to a formal dance in high school - and then a kindly gent named Silas Quilter dances with her in a cornfield?
       That novel of Pete's is The Tornado Ashes Club . It involves a grandson who fulfils his grandmother's wish to find a tornado into which she can throw the ashes of her long-lost lover,Luke, who appears in a young, handsome incarnation during the book's picturesquely European World War II flashbacks."Use words to describe old ladies that make them sound beautiful [graceful, regal, etc.]", Pete tells himself about pitching his story to a book-buying audience. He also concocts many other rules, like a dictum to dream up highway scenes "making driving seem poetic and magical" in order to tap into the audiobooks market.(Most audiobooks are listened to in cars.)
       The Tornado Ashes Club really does stink. So how closely is Hely going to tether How I Became a Famous Novelist to this one parody? Happily, he concocts so many other diversions and advances Pete's story so deftly that a little of Pete's bad book is allowed to go a long way. And without really straining credulity, Pete's travels through the world of publishing become exuberantly far-flung.
       He crosses paths with a businessman who has been inspired by a selfhelp book called Caesar, CEO: Business Secrets of the Ancient Romans and thus refers to a rival company as Carthage; a drab, well-known literary figure who teaches a writing class ("For ease and accuracy I'll call her SpaghettiHair HamsterFace," Pete says) and an editor who makes sadly apt notes about Pete's manuscript."Does a dying deer really smell faintly of cinnamon?" she inquires."You use the word sallow four times, and I'm not sure you ever use it right."
       Revealingly, Pete's research project never extends to the writing of endings.That may be because Hely doesn't know how to end this book. In the final chapters he torpedoes Pete's cynicism in ways that will disappoint anyone who was enjoying the jaundiced humour. And there are contrived plot complications.("An interesting fact about the US attorney's office in Boston is that they serve good coffee.")
       But the damage is already done:Hely has deftly clobbered the popularbook business. He has taken aim at lucrative "tidy candy-packaged novels you wrapped up and gave as presents",the kinds of books that go "from store shelves to home shelves to used-book sales unread". His complaints about such books are very funny. They'd be even funnier if they weren't true.

MEDIA PRIMA OFFERS TO BUY NEW STRAITS TIMES

2009-10-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

       Media Prima, Malaysia's biggest publicly traded publisher, offered to buy out the country's oldest newspaper group at a discount to its share price.
       Media Prima is offering one new share for each held in New Straits Times Press, known as NSTP, valuing each share at 2 ringgit (Bt20).
       In addition, the newspaper group's shareholders will get one free warrant for every five shares they exchange. This represents a 19 per cent discount to NSTP's last traded price of 2.46 ringgit on Thursday.
       Media Prima's managing director Amrin Awaluddin said the offer is "fair' based on NSTP's average share price over the past year, and described as "speculative" a recent surge in the stock.
       The offer values the transaction at about 246 million ringgit, based on Bloomberg News calculations of the number of NSTP shares not owned by Media prima.
       The offer ends more than two months of speculation that led to a 65-per-cent surge in NSTP's stock price since August 5, when the company announced that its main shareholders were considering options such as privatisation to boost shareholder value.
       NSTP said in a separate statement at the weekend that its board does not intend to seek any alternative offers.
       "Under the proposed transaction, the enlarged media entity will have the potential to emerge as one of the largest media groups in Malaysia in terms of sales and total shareholders' funds," Amrin told reporters in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
       The buyout would help Media Prima, which controls four television stations in Malaysia, add earnings from the New Straits Times, Berita Harian, and Harian Metro newspapers as advertising income rebounds, Sharizan Rosely, an analyst at CIMB Investment Bank, wrote in a report before the announcement.
       Earnings at New Straits Times will increase as companies spend more on newspaper advertising, said Sharizan, who kept a "neutral" rating on the stock pending the offer details.
       The offer will become unconditional once Media Prima's stake hits 51 per cent, after which it will proceed to de-list NSTP, Amrin said.
       Media Prima already owns 43.3 per cent of NSTP, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
       Amrin expects to complete the buyout by the end of the year, including the de-listing of NSTP.
       Media Prima wants to make NSTP a subsidiary, instead of an associate, so it can consolidate its earnings, he said.
       The acquisition would boost Media Prima's annual revenue to more than 1 billion ringgit and profit to more than 140 million ringgit once the companies' finances are consolidated, Media Prima said in a statement.
       To finance its working capital and investments, Media Prima also intends to sell 150 million ringgit of bonds attached with 50 million warrants that are convertible into shares in the consolidated group.
       Maybank Investment Bank raised its recommendation on Malaysia's media industry last month to "neutral" from "underweight" following a rebound in advertising income and consumer confidence.
       Advertising spending in newspapers increased 6 per cent to 291.2 million ringgit in July from a year earlier, ending monthly declines that started in October, Maybank wrote in September.
       Television and radio advertising expenditure rose 20 per cent in July, according to the report.
       Malaysia's economy may shrink less than previously forecast this year amid signs of a global recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s, the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research said October 14.
       Media Prima and NSTP shares were suspended from trading in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, and will resume on Monday.

       The buy-out would help Media prima, which controls four television stations in Malaysia, add earnings from three newspapers as advertising income rebounds.

Times scraps sale of Boston Globe

2009-10-28T20:36:00.001-07:00

       The New York Times Co said it had given up its plan to sell the Boston Globe and related businesses after drastic cuts it imposed on the daily newspaper earlier this year improved its financial position.
       The announcement caps a painful odyssey for the 137-year-old Boston Globe that began earlier this year when the Times threatened to close the paper if it could not get its unions to agree to deep cost cuts.
       Selling the Globe would have been a dismal exit from Boston for the Times.The company spent $1.1 billion to buy the Globe in 1993, at the time the most money ever paid for a single US newspaper. The offers it reportedly received for the Globe this month were less than 10% of what it paid.
       The Times did not mention the bids and officials were unavailable for comment about whether they played a role in the decision to stop the sale. The company instead said the Globe 's financial outlook has brightened.
       "The Globe has significantly improved its financial footing by following the strategic plan it set out at the beginning of the year," Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr and chief executive Janet Robinson wrote to Globe workers on Wednesday.
       "All along, we explicitly recognised that a careful restructuring of the Globe was one possible route and, thanks to your hard work, that is precisely what has been done," they wrote.
       "I think many of us felt that the more we learned about the potential buyers,the more the Times seemed to be the best possible owner for us," said Michael Paulson, a reporter who covers religion for the Globe.
       When the decision was announced in the newsroom, he said "there was no celebration but there was a sense of relief."
       The Times, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission,said it was still considering options for the Telegram & Gazette , a daily paper that serves Worcester, Massachusetts, a city about 40 miles west of Boston.
       The Times wants to reach a decision soon "and we will provide a full update to our colleagues as quickly as possible,"Sulzberger and Robinson wrote.
       It did not say if it was still trying to sell its interest in the company that owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team.

TIME FOR ASIAN WRITERS TO SHINE

2009-10-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

       Southeast Asian writers were urged by bestselling author Paul Theroux to tell their stories with honesty and integrity, without bias and hidden agendas.
       Theroux says writers are "seldom well compensated" for their efforts, especially poets who are often underrated for their contributions to society.
       But with the emergence of Asia as a new global power, he says regional governments would do well to support their own writers, he says in honouting eight regional winners of the Southeast Asian Writers Awards recently.
       At the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the venue of the gala event, Theroux reminded a packed hall that classic writers of old from abroad such as Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham need not be the only voices depicting the region.
       "It is time your own writers write the stories."
       The world should wake up to the big changes sweeping the Orient.
       The Asia Theroux wrote in his latest book "Ghost Train To The Eastern Star" traces the magical leap made by countries such as Vietnam, Singapore and Thailand the past 40 years.
       "I first came to Thailand and Vietnam in 1969," says Theroux who taught literature at the National University of Singapore from 1968-71.
       His first book on Asia, called "The Great Railway Bazaar", 30 years ago spoke about a chaotic capital that was Bangkok and of colourful trips to Indochina during the Vietnam War years.
       Those tales now serve as historical documents for a time and place long gone.
       For stories to survive, Theroux stresses the need for honesty.
       In good writing, he says, you need to exercise ethics and integrity.
       His speech before His Royal Highness Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn and his Royal Consort HRH Princess Srirasmi was the highpoint of the evening.
       The sponsors of Sea-Write, one of the most prestigious corporate social responsibility events in the Kingdom, include Bangkok Bank, Thai Airways International, Mandarin Oriental, Bank of Thailand, Export-Import Bank of Thailand, Thai Beverage, the Rex Morgan Foundation, the Chumbhot-Pantip Foundation, Toshiba Thailand and King Power Complex.
       Theroux says he owes much of his success to a table he made in Singapore in 1970.
       The table, which could be taken apart, as Theroux travels often, was made by a carpenter off Orchard Road.
       "Today Orchard Road has changed so much. None of the old shops remain," he adds.
       But the table, bought for just 240 Singapore dollars (Bt5,800), has served him well.
       It has followed him to Britain, where he lived for many years and then to Hawaii where he now resides.
       "I couldn't work on a wobbly table. The carpenter made the table out of hard wood with fatlegs," he says.
       It stood a bit lower than most tables to accommodate writing and typing work.
       Therous still writes long hand before typing the manuscript.
       About 40 books owed their origins to this table.
       Towards he end of his stay in Britain, Theroux wrote "Kingdom By The Sea" in 1978. It became one of his most celebrated works.
       "It written at a time of the Falklands War," he recalls. "I was disturbed by the event. I was against the war."
       "The Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges says it best when he compares it to tow bald men fighting over a comb."
       Commenting on today's digital age, Theroux says he trusts his calligraphy more than keyboards.
       People should not be fooled by the hype drummed up by computer companies and Internet firms. Books and newspapers will never be replaced by the electronic medium, he says.
       The prine medium is far cheaper than the new medium and does not require expensive monthly fees and repairs.
       Theroux's steady income testifies writers can still live off their books.
       "The Great Railway Bazaar" was reprinted 52 times, providing royalty income for the writer.
       Some of his works have also been made into films. His books "Dr Slaughter" became the movie "Half Moon Street" (1986) with Sigourney Weaver; "Chinese Box" (1997) with Harrison Ford and "Saint Jack" (1979) with Ben Gazzara.
       But it is his non-fiction works that Theroux is best known for.
       His trip to Asia followed his stint as a Peace Corp volunteer in Malawi in 1963.
       It was his involvement in politics in Malawi that led to his expulsion in 1965.
       After two years in Uganda, he travelled to Singapore, the backdrop to "Saint Jack".
       The tale of an American hustler who becomes involved with the world's oldest profession during the "rest and recreation" years of the Vietnam War is regarded today as an invaluable historical work.
       So much of Singapore has changed and many of the places no longer eixts.
       In 1971, he quit the English Department to begin a full-time writing career.
       "I have never held a job since."

Pared down, but still meaty

2009-10-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

       Reacting to the anticipatory effects generated by last week's commencement of construction of the tent, Bangkok fashionistas who bump into one another every other night at some party or other started bidding adieu with the new catchphrase "Bye, see you at the tent next week!"
       Disregarding the daily ominous grey clouds that pose a threat of rain, Bangkok is getting into just the right mood for Elle Fashion Week (EFW). September and early October saw several collection and brand launches.
       The Bangkok Fashion Society premiered its latest collection by holding a pop-up show a few weeks ago. Celebrity leatherwear designer Tipanan Krairiksh welcomed a large gathering of journos and invited guests at the opening of her new signature shop at Siam Paragon last week. Munchu's, Vickteerut and its sister line Robshop, together with hip children's wear boutique Rhapsody launched their new offerings this past Sunday at Fallabella. Elle Fashion Week couldn't hope for a more dynamic warm-up.
       But what is in store for the fashion crowd on this year's EFW runway? First, the number of shows has dropped to 12, not including the two special promotional shows by CentralWorld and the one by the Department of Export Promotion showcasing its brands in its Designers' Room: Now. Fortunately, size does not matter when it comes to fashion (unless you're a model) and EFW, while losing a few big names such as Issue, Greyhound and Headquarter, has managed to lure back onto the runway some show magnets like Sretsis and Kloset Red Carpet as well as keeping event favourites ranging from Zenithorial and Disaya to Senada Theory on its schedule one more time.
       If there's one thing fashionistas will miss at this year's Elle Fashion Week,which kicks off today, it's surely the leading streetwear brands that offer menswear,notably Greyhound and Headquarter.However, a show-stopper like Zenthorial will be present to guarantee excitement with its latest collection celebrating the works of revered fashion lensman Amat Nimitpark, who has been working in the Thai fashion industry for over 25 years.Its display, together with the one that will be put on by 27 Friday, which is also going to present menswear to its huge,loyal fan base, should secure a full-house tent.
       Despite the fewer show days and a less-packed schedule, Elle Fashion Week will not be compromising on style diversity.The event welcomes regular masters from Kai, Pisit to Nagara, all of whom will be rolling out their presentations on the same day to ensure that fashion followers coming to keep track of their creative mastery get full benefit by attending. Last year's young designer Vatit Itthi will also be returning to the catwalk to demonstrate that couture and meticulous cutting do not belong to only the seasoned masters.The design duo will be adhering to the
       international fashion calendar by showing off their Spring/Summer collection emphasising texture and layering.
       Making its first appearance at Elle Fashion Week is Olanor, a brainchild of former Theatre's design assistant Thanes Boonprasan, who has already taken this new brand to several trade shows and fairs abroad.Scheduled to make the scene on the same day as Kai, Nagara and Pisit, the brand will have the opportunity to attract the attention of the same crowd of trendsetters who appreciate refinement and luxury.
       Now, now, the rest is girls talk. EFW has embraced all the darlings of young female fashionistas to the fold once again.Sretsis, Senada, Kloset Red Carpet, Disaya and Asava have promised to continue to be show magnets this year. Disaya will open the event with a collection that glistens even in an era of darkness called Celestial Warrior. Asava tackles the concept of changing lifestyles brought about by the economic downturn in its Wall Street Goddess collection. Sretsis goes back to its seemingly basic yet slightly eccentric Metamorphosis theme. The collection celebrates design as a process of transformation and will feature the season's must-haves, such as reversible dresses.Kloset Red Carpet puts on the grand finale to the four-day event with a collection inspired by Tangrams, the puzzle board game.
       EFW will also be featuring two special shows by CentralWorld that will see models strutting on the runway wearing the current season's items created by international brands like Mango, Castro and Topshop to offer fashionistas mix-and-match ideas.
       Elle Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2009 at CentralWorld begins today until Sunday.

A "French chef" whose appeal doesn't translate well in France

2009-10-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

       Julia Child may have been the US's best-known "French chef", but here in Paris, few know her fabled cookbooks, let alone her name.
       Posters for the movie Julie & Julia were plastered across the city before its release here on Wednesday. But the movie was being anticipated more for Meryl Streep's performance as Child than for any particular interest in Child, the principal author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking , who died in 2004.Child's book - beloved by US cooks for almost 50 years and now a bestseller because of the film - has never been translated into French, said Anne Perrier, a manager at Galignani, an English-language bookshop here."It's the vision of a revisited France, adapted to the American taste, at a time when tastes were lifeless," she said.
       In an interview in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro last week, Streep said:"What surprises me is that the French don't know her at all. While for Americans, she was one of the best ambassadors of France ... since Lafayette!"
       French food experts are divided about Child and her cooking. Some say she caricatured French cuisine in her book and cooking show, making it seem too heavy and formal. Others believe she demystified it and see her as a role model in France, where cooking shows are rare and cuisine is not necessarily viewed as something anyone can interpret.
       "Julia Child's cuisine is academic and bourgeois," said Julie Andrieu, a television personality and cookery book author."It shows that in America, the cliche of beef, baguette and canard farci remains."
       For Jean-Claude Ribaut, the food critic at Le Monde , Child was more like "a mediator who promoted the French lifestyle in the United States, but had no influence on restaurateurs".
       But some chefs say they hope that the film will rehabilitate French cooking in the US. Gilles Epie, a chef who met Child in Los Angeles at a birthday party for her in the early 1990s, thinks French cooking has been tarnished as stodgy.
       "Americans have really slammed French cuisine," Epie said."They think we only eat boeuf bourguignon and rabbit stew, which is wrong."
       Before taking over the Citrus Etoile,in the 8th Arrondissement, Epie ran the Los Angeles restaurant L'Orangerie for more than three years. He remembered with distaste the strictness of US health rules about food.
       "My fish shop in Santa Monica smelled like a pharmacy" instead of like fresh fish, he said."And when I asked for a three-month-old baby lamb, like you can find here, they thought I was crazy and nearly called the police."
       But some French chefs say they believe that Child, through the film, could have an impact on contemporary French cooking, or at least make boeuf bourguignon,a traditional dish currently absent from most French menus, fashionable again.
       "She explains her recipes like a housewife, but she knows how to do it and she does it genuinely," said Guy Savoy, owner of the restaurant that bears his name in Paris. He met Child in 1981 in Massachusetts and remembered her as "a real character, gentle and affable".
       Andrieu, the cookbook author, said that despite Child's cliched recipes, her style could be defined as a "combination of scientific and empirical virtues" that helped explain why US authors wrote better cookbooks than the French.
       "The French think that they are natural-born cooks; they prepare a dish off the top of their heads, without testing it," she said."In France, we rush over explanations."
       After watching Julie & Julia , Andrieu said, she felt compelled to go home and make boeuf bourguignon according to Child's recipe."I cut the flour in half,and it turned out to be the best I had ever made," she said.
       Epie even thinks that Child's story should encourage the French to discuss their cuisine in a more democratic way.
       He is one of the few respected chefs in Paris to offer US food on his menu,including his signature dish: a crab cake a la francaise, prepared with shellfish oil instead of mayonnaise.
       "I want to do Julia Child, but Julia Child with real fish, real lobster, with eels to shuck and rabbit to bone," he said."That's my dream."

FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER IRVING PENN DIES AT 92

2009-10-11T23:23:00.001-07:00

       Influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, known for his elegant, minimalist portraits, died Wednesday. He was 92.
       Penn was long associated with Vogue magazine, where he first began working in the 1940s and won renown for his calm, classical compositions.
       He died at home in New York, said a representative for Pace/MacGill Gallery, which represents Penn's work.
       Although he was most famous for photographs of glamorous models - including a black-and-white, nude Gisele Bundchen - he brought the same graceful simplicity and accuracy to pictures of Peruvian peasants or New Guinea tribesmen.
       "Instead of spontaneity, Mr Penn Provided the illusion of a seance, his gaze precisely describing the profile of a Balenciaga coat or of a Moroccan djellaba in a way that could almost mesmerize the viewer," The New York Times said in an obituary.
       "Nothing escaped the edges of his photographs unless he commanded it."
       His photographs regularly fetch tens of thousands of dollars under the hammer. An auction scheduled at Christie's in New York on Thursday was to feature some 15 prints by Penn.

Aye Carumba! Marge Simpson poses for "Playboy"

2009-10-11T00:12:00.000-07:00

       Marge Simpson has done something that her husband Homer might not like but will make son Bart the proudest kid in his school: She's posed for Playboy magazine.After more than a half century featuring women like Marilyn Monroe, Cindy Crawford and the Girls of Hooters on its cover,Playboy has for the first time given the spot to a cartoon character.
       And the magazine is giving the star of The Simpsons the star treatment, complete with a data sheet, an interview and a two-page centrefold.
       The magazine's editorial director,James Jellinek, won't say exactly how much of Marge will be on show in the November edition that hits newsstands in the US on Friday - or whether she lets that big pile of blue hair down. But,he said:"It's very, very racy."
       He also stressed that the mother of three - the youngest a baby, by the way - has a lot to be proud of.
       "She is a stunning example of the cartoon form," he said on Friday at the magazine's headquarters in Chicago, appearing both pleased and surprised at the words coming out of his mouth.
       For Playboy , which has seen its circulation slip from 3.15 million to 2.60 million since 2006, putting Marge on the cover was designed to attract younger readers to a magazine where the median age of readers is 35, while not alienating older readers.
       "We knew that this would really appeal to the 20-something crowd," said Playboy spokeswoman Theresa Hennessey.
       The magazine also hopes to turn the November issue into a collectors' item by featuring Marge, sitting on a chair in the shape of the iconic Playboy bunny,on the cover of only the magazines sold in newsstands.
       Subscribers get a more traditional model on the cover.
       "It's so rare in today's digital age where you have the opportunity to send people to the newsstand to pick something up,"Mr Jellinek said.
       Playboy even convinced the 7-Eleven chain to carry the magazine in its 1,200 corporate-owned stores, something the company has only done once before in more than 20 years."We love Marge,"said 7-Eleven spokesman Margaret Chabris.
       For those who do collect the magazine - and they're out there - the cover will bring to mind another first for the magazine that occurred in 1971 when a black woman appeared on the cover in exactly the same pose and, like Marge, smiling under an impressive head of hair.
       "We knew it was something all of our readers would get a kick out of," said Ms Hennessey.
       Mr Jellinek said putting Marge on the cover, while unusual, made perfect sense.For one thing, the cover celebrates the 20th anniversary of the TV show. Further,he said there was an episode in which "Marge bears all", which suggested that she, or at least the people who drew her,would be comfortable with the Playboy treatment.
       Perhaps most important, the idea seemed like a good one to the magazine's founder, Hugh Hefner."He's a huge Simpsons fan,' said Mr Jellinek."He's been on The Simpsons ."

Search engines told to pay up

2009-10-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

       The leaders of two of the world's major news organisations said yesterday that "it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up."
       The comments from Tom Curley of the Associated Press and News Corp's Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age.Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organisations producing the material.
       "We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.
       "Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing websites of traditional news publishers,"Curley said.
       "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."
       He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.
       "We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves - at great human and economic cost - to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.
       Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.
       "The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the coopting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators - the people in this hall who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,"the News Corp chief executive said.
       Curley said in a speech earlier this week in Hong Kong that the AP was considering selling news stories to some online customers exclusively for a certain period, perhaps half an hour.
       The AP licenses its stories and photographs to many of the Internet's main hubs, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, and its work is also used by hundreds of websites owned by newspapers and broadcasters. Currently,they all get the material at the same time.
       Curley did not clarify how a product that provided some news earlier would work or specify the target customers for the potential new service.
       The AP already plans to roll out a system, called a news registry, that will track its content online and detect unlicensed uses in ways that could help boost revenue for the not-for-profit news cooperative, which was founded in 1846,and its member newspapers.
       The system will be tested in six weeks by nine newspapers along with a sports statistics provider run jointly by AP and News Corp.
       TMurdoch has been a strong advocate of charging for online content. News Corp already owns the newspaper industry's most successful Internet subscription model in the Wall Street Journal ,with more than one million customers who pay for online access.
       Murdoch had said in the past he hopes to make online fees pay off for his other publications, which include the New York Post and The Times of London . He hasn't provided specifics about his plans.
       Last month, the Wall Street Journal said it planned to start charging as much as $2 per week to read its stories on BlackBerrys, iPhones and other mobile devices.

Democracy activists gain rare court victory

2009-10-07T21:14:00.001-07:00

       A group of Singaporean pro-democracy activists won a rare legal victory after being acquitted of involvement in an illegal march two years ago,according to court documents obtained yesterday
       Public prosecutors had charged the five activists with "participating in a procession without a valid permit" but District Judge John Ng ruled that there was no evidence to support the government's case.
       The activists were charged after walking together wearing T-shirts with the words "Democracy Now" and "Freedom Now" in order to circumvent laws against public assemblies of more than four people, part of the strict political controls in Singapore.
       Meanwhile, Singapore's highest court yesterday ruled that a soon-to-be-defunct regional magazine and its editor had defamed the country's founder Lee Kuan Yew and his son Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
       The three-member Court of Appeal rejected an attempt by the publishers of the Far Eastern Economic Review and its editor, Hugo Restall, to have their conviction by a High Court judge in September 2008 overturned.
       Damages to be awarded to the Lees are to be set at a later date. Decisions by the Court of Appeal are final.

China looks to create own conglomerates

2009-10-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

       China plans to spend billions of dollars over the next few years to develop media and entertainment companies that it hopes can compete with global giants like News Corp and Time Warner, and will in the process loosen some of its tight control of these industries.
       Guidelines issued last week by China's State Council envisioned the creation of entertainment, news and culture companies with a market orientation and less government backing - in short,companies resembling Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom, analysts said.
       Along the way, Beijing will allow private and foreign companies to invest in everything from music, film and television to theatre, dance and opera productions - though largely through state-owned companies.
       One exception is likely to be news programming, which falls under the control of the Communist Party. China has also been upgrading its state-run news media, with an eye on foreign language publications, wire services and television programs to reach readers and viewers overseas.
       News Corp, Viacom and other Western media giants have for years been frustrated by their inability to produce films and television programmes for Chinese consumers; often, they have operated with Chinese joint venture partners and run into delays or political barriers. Sev-eral American companies said they were studying the new Chinese rules and declined to comment further.
       Among the first companies to benefit from the new government policy will be Shanghai Media Group, one of the country's biggest state-run news and media conglomerates. In August, the government gave the company approval to reorganise its operations and to issue stock to the public.
       SMG, as it is known, has close to $1 billion in revenues and $100 million in profits last year. It also has partnerships with companies like News Corp, Viacom and CNBC, and profitable television units,including a home shopping network,an animation channel, fashion and lifestyle programming, as well as radio,newspaper, magazine and film production units.
       Foreign media companies looking for greater access to China's vast market may be disappointed, analysts say of the new guidelines.
       "This is not an invitation for stakes by international media companies," says Vivek Couto, director of Media Partners Asia, a Hong Kong-based research firm."But this may be an invitation for private equity and foreign capital to do more."
       But other experts warn of regulatory hurdles, because media and entertainment companies report to a variety of agencies, each with their own imperatives.

Change must come from within

2009-10-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

       "I may do nothing much to reduce global warming but at least I live a simple life that doesn't cause much damage to the environment."SIN JUAJAN A MOTORCYCLE TAXI DRIVER
       Climate change negotiation has become more and more complicated and controversial with growing doubts that a practical deal will ever be reached.
       What has been going on inside negotiating rooms over recent years seems to have yielded few results; individual behaviour has been seen as the real tool to cool the earth.
       There are a lot of stories about "small people" and their efforts - from farmers in remote villages to executives in big cities - adopting low-carbon lifestyles.
       Passara Kasemsuwan, managing director of an event organising company,Kengkajkijjakam, said she had changed from a big gas-guzzling car to a smaller one which used less petrol. She also uses environment-friendly gasohol.
       This is for both economic and environmental reasons, she said.
       Norrinee Ruangnoo, assistant chief reporter of Matichon newspaper, said she took part in her office's energy-saving campaign.Matichon has organised an energy-saving competition in which the department with the lowest monthly electricity use will win a 1,000-baht reward.
       "Normally, editorial departments are the biggest electricity users, but with strong cooperation from the staff to adopt power-saving habits, our department won the prize," she said.
       Sin Juajan,52, a motorcycle taxi driver in the Klong Toey area, said global warming and climate change involved everybody. He believes deforestation is the biggest cause of global warming.
       "There used to be a large, thick forest near my house in Nakhon Ratchasima.It's all gone now," Mr Sin said.
       When asked what he had been doing to help stop global warming, Mr Sin said:"I may do nothing much to reduce global warming but at least I live a simple life that doesn't cause much damage to the environment."
       Petrol pump attendant Chanarob Benjasat said he knew nothing - and did not care - about the Kyoto Protocol,the Bangkok Climate Change Talks nor the Copenhagen summit.
       "But I've heard about global warming," said the 15-year-old native of Buri Ram, who left school and came to work in Bangkok five months ago.
       "Global warming means the weather is hotter than before because people cut down trees and forests."
       The rising number of cars in the city was another cause of global warming,the teenager said. He served more than 100 cars a day at the petrol station.
       "Sometimes I wonder why there are so many cars in Bangkok. Motorists visit the petrol station non-stop," he said.
       Chanarob also believed that frequent floods in Narong district which damaged his family's five-rai paddy field almost every year were caused by global warming. But he admitted he had no idea how to help cool the earth.
       "I don't think much about global warming. What I worry most about is how to make ends meet," he said.
       For UN climate chief Yvo de Boer,using efficient light bulbs and installing solar panels on the roof of his house are an example of individual action to curb global warming. When it comes to transport, Mr de Boer said he walked as much as possible and used a hybrid car.
       "There are things that you can do [to cut greenhouse gas emissions]," Mr de Boer said."But to say to people that you can't travel, you can't have a car, or you can't have a television because we suddenly have discovered climate change doesn't seem to be reasonable to me.
       "I think we should look much more strongly to clean technology to take us to a solution, rather than just say to people you can't have certain things in life because of climate change."

LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX TALK

2009-10-06T20:14:00.001-07:00

       Books with the "S" word emblazoned across the cover aren't usually read openly on buses or in Starbucks, but more furtively. As much as we try to hide our curiosity in polite society, however, sex is omnipresent.References to it in advertising, books, magazines, TV programmes, films and everyday conversation intrude on our eyes and ears whether we want them to or not. Yet sex is also a natural part of life, and for visitors in a strange land, or those in a cross-cultural romance, a guide might be helpful to navigate the conflicting and sensationalist messages in advertising and popular culture.
       And if you think you're a Khun Phaen (Casanova), you might want to make sure others aren't calling you a ta kae tan-ha klap (lusty old goat). If your heart is cham jai (black and blue), or you feel ngao (lonely),tired of pen soat (being single) and are now ha khoo (looking for a partner) and ready to jeep (flirt), then maybe this book can help.Kaewmala (a pseudonym) lived 10 years in the US, which gives her some perspective for comparison with Western approaches to sexuality. A reader can also get the impression (admitted to in Sex Talk's pages) that the book is a way to exorcise the author's own (and her generation's) sheltered and confused adolescence. There are digs at certain aspects of Thai culture - such as the obsession with fair skin or gender double standards - that resemble rants. And the relative sexual freedom of today's youth is often described with something resembling envy. Organised thematically, the 10 chapters provide a brief explanation of related terms. For newcomers to Thai culture these provide some interesting background information; for those more versed in Thai it is a handy guide to the amorous idiom. It could be interesting for either sex or any orientation, since it's basically just a phrase book, complete with a useful phonetic guide for students of Thai and a bilingual index for quick reference.
       There are also some interesting tangents - the odd history lesson, including one on Thailand's sexually liberal past, or on regional diversity in terms, or social change in the Northeast. It is casual about a casual social scene, but refrains from moralising. Despite the claims of the back cover ("Hook up and hang out in the Thai erotic world"), there are no pick-up lines to memorise; a publishing industry that feels sexual sensationalism is the way to greater sales has perhaps cheapened a book that is not nearly as tawdry as it claims to be. As a "guidebook to a sexual culture",Sex Talk does ride the sexual bandwagon. The claims to help you "woo a lover"or "meet your inner sexual animal" are grossly misleading and perhaps unfair to the book,which is better than popular magazines or weekly freesheets with "hook-up" issues, in that it can potentially help you navigate a modern landscape of sexual pitfalls and minefields rather than necessarily add to the confusion. It is meant to be light and accessible and improve inter-cultural communication and understanding on a confusing subject.Within its narrow, linguistic scope it succeeds somewhat.
       Does the book drastically alter the sexual landscape? No. Will it give you all the right lines to have men or women swoon over you? Unlikely. Will it help you communicate with and understand a current or future partner? Possibly. Give you some insights into Thai culture? Quite likely. Is it riding a wave of sex-help books? Most probably.
       Sex Talk ends abruptly and is hard to read from cover to cover, since essentially it is an annotated collection of listings. If it leaves you a little unsatisfied, though, fret not, because this is the first of a planned series of Sex Talk books. After all, in this age it seems you can never have too much talk about sex.

British press turns on Brown

2009-10-06T20:11:00.001-07:00

       Prime Minister Gordon Brown's relations with Britain's notoriously aggressive media hit an all-time low this week, recalling for some the way the press abandoned one of his doomed predecessors.
       An angry Mr Brown, facing polls suggesting he has little or no hope of winning elections due by next June, repeatedly showed his exasperation with members of the press at his Labour Party's annual conference.
       The tone was set on the first day of the conference in Brighton, when Mr Brown bristled at being asked whether he was on prescription painkillers, or going blind, by a senior BBC presenter.
       "I think this is the sort of questioning which is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics," he retorted sharply to Andrew Marr, who was conducting the big set-piece interview as Labour's meeting started.
       By the end of the week, Mr Brown pulled his earpiece out and tried to leave while still on camera in another interview,at one point accusing his Sky News questioner of sounding like a "propagandist".
       But the worst blow of the conference season was the announcement by the tabloid Sun , Britain's biggest-selling daily,that it was switching its allegiance from Labour to the opposition Conservatives.
       Since 1970 the Sun , with a daily circulation of 2.9 million, has always supported the eventual winner of every election. It switched from the Tories to back Tony Blair when he swept to power with his rebranded New Labour in 1997.
       The newspaper maintained its support for Labour in the 2001 and 2005 elections,in which Mr Blair led his party to victory.
       Its decision to abandon Labour comes two years after Mr Brown succeeded Mr Blair, in what some have seen as a parallel with former Tory premier John Major,who lost the media's support after succeeding Margaret Thatcher in 1990.
       "Like John Major before him, he is now a leader at war with those who report him," said Benedict Brogan of the conservative Daily Telegraph . The Sun 's move "marks the final collapse of relations between New Labour and the media", he added.
       With elections due by next June, Mr Brown faces a fate similar to that suffered by Mr Major, who became the target of increasingly personal press criticism in the run-up to a crushing defeat in 1997.
       The media-savvy Mr Blair, at ease with the cameras and riding high on a huge parliamentary majority, was helped by his high-profile communications chief Alastair Campbell.
       A former tabloid journalist himself,Mr Campbell was renowned for his tongue-lashings of reporters he did not like, but above all for his news management including judicious leaks to favoured correspondents.
       When Mr Brown took over at 10 Downing Street in June 2007, he promised to replace style with substance, and he impressed many at first with his firm handling of foiled car bomb attacks days after he took office, followed by a footand-mouth scare and floods.
       But an atrociously mismanaged leak of plans to hold a snap election, called off and denied at the last minute, suggested that Downing Street had lost its grip on the media machine.
       On a personal level, journalists have complained about Mr Brown's lack of charm during interviews, and propensity to totally ignore questions he does not want to answer.

Thai master artist paints his picture of regional unity

2009-10-06T20:09:00.000-07:00

       Anative of southern Thailand, Taveepong Limapornvanich graduated from the Department of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Kansas in the United States.
       He has built a reputation over 30 years as a painter,illustrator and designer.
       An author and illustrator of many books, his creative works and publications include Drawing Techniques ,The Drawing Bible ,Watercolour Bible Thailand Sketchbook , and Watercolour Paintings of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn .He has numerous Thai pocket books on drawing and design to his name.
       His artistic prowess is reflected in the wide range of techniques and media he uses: oil, watercolour,acrylic, and pencil.
       Today, his paintings are prized in numerous private collections around the world.
       Among his proudest achievements was his 1999 solo exhibition in Bangkok to commemorate the 72nd birthday of His Majesty The King.
       The paintings were auctioned by Christie's in Thailand and the proceeds from the auction were donated to the royal projects of Chai Pattana and the Sai Jai Thai Foundation.
       In this book Asean: Portrait of a Community ,Taveepong shares his love with all Asean member countries as depicted in his watercolour rendering of Asean countries through his artistic eyes.

Unique gift for Asean leaders

2009-10-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

       An impressive picture book on the Asean region will be Thailand's parting gift as it vacates the association's chair,writes Thanida Tansubhapol
       "L inking people with arts will help them appreciate and be proud of the closeness of one's community," said Vitavas Srivihok, director-general of the Asean Affairs Department at the Foreign Ministry.His words later inspired the birth of an artistic book entitled "Asean: Portrait of a Community" which will be presented as a special gift to the 10 Asean leaders at this year's final Asean gathering this month in Cha-am/Hua Hin.
       What makes this book unique is the compilation of sketch drawings of all Asean leaders, as well as the top tourist attractions of the region. The livelihoods of the Asean peoples are portrayed in the natural flow of water colours.
       The project took shape in June after an exchange of ideas during a friendly chat between Mr Vitavas and artist Taveepong Limapornvanich.
       "The ministry thought it should have a surprise gift for the leaders. I'm sure it will be unlike anything they have previously received from other countries," Mr Vitavas told the Bangkok Post.
       But to complete the book was quite a challenge for Mr Taveepong.
       "It took me two full months to sketch about 150 pictures from the 10 Asean countries.
       "Every day, I spent about 18 hours on average drawing about two pictures. I would start around 3pm to 4pm and finish by about 6am the next day," he said.
       In addition to the book,10 large-size smiling portraits of the leaders, which took him more than 10 hours each to finish, will be displayed at the Asean summit.
       "Although some of the leaders were not smiling in the originals, I painted them wearing a beaming smile," he said.
       He said Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's portrait was the most difficult to draw because he looked different in different poses - sometimes rather bloated,other times thin.
       "But the painting of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak came out the best," said Mr Taveepong.
       Mr Vitavas is particularly impressed by the pictures of the 10 Asean leaders shaking hands with Asean Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan. To him, they looked so real.
       Another major challenge was which distinctive tourist landmarks should be chosen from each member state for the book.
       In Indonesia and Thailand, there are simply too many attractions to choose from.
       "Since each country was afforded only six pages or 18 prominent tourist sites for entry into the book, I needed to do a lot of thinking and research before finalising the list," said Mr Taveepong.
       "I included the places which I thought would make the leaders realise that the Thais did know quite a bit about their neighbouring countries."
       "About 40% of the pictures used as samples for the drawings came from my own album, the pictures I took when I travelled to those countries," he said.
       Mr Vitavas said:"I am impressed that he was able to capture the diversity of each country and the common culture depicted in the book, such as the
       pictures of dancing girls or the type of trishaws running in the streets of Asean countries."
       "In the trishaw pictures, all Asean nations have their own style of trishaws, except Brunei, which uses a boat instead," he said.
       Mr Taveepong thought Malaysia provided an ideal country for the drawing.
       "I studied in Malaysia for two years and that made me feel accustomed to its culture and architecture,especially with what I saw in Penang," he said.
       Brunei and Burma are the only two Asean countries Mr Taveepong has never visited.
       Unlike the other water-colour drawings in the book,the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda of Burma needed to be done twice.
       He said he needed to do this because it was difficult to tell the foreground from the background in the
       sample picture. There are also many smaller pagodas around the main one, said Mr Taveepong.
       "I have not made the paintings of one country inferior or better than the other countries. If I felt that they needed to look better, I reworked them."
       "I believe that when the leaders open this book, they will be surprised at how the Thais came to know about these places [as some are not common tourist spots]," the artist said.
       In the past 40 years, no Asean country has done anything like this. It will be evidence for people to remember Thailand as the chair of Asean this year, he said.
       Mr Vitavas hopes this artistic masterpiece will help Asean to become better known among its own people and around the world.
       "The pillar of socio-culture under the Asean Charter should be improved as it would be a linkage of the people and this book will be a good gateway," he said.
       Both Mr Vitavas and Mr Taveepong believe that many countries would be surprised at how resilient Thai people are in the face of ongoing political instability in the country, which is now being expressed through art.
       The drawings are now on display for the public at Siam Paragon shopping mall until tomorrow, after which the exhibition will be moved to CentralWorld from October 5-8.
       After that, all the pictures would be put on display at the meeting venue at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Chaam/Hua Hin in order to allow all Asean leaders to appreciate their portraits on their way to the meeting room.

Grazia - The Launch Of The Thai Edition By Inspire at The Centara Hotel

2009-10-06T20:07:00.001-07:00

Inspire Entertainment lead by CEO, Khun Wiluck Lahtong and Executive Director, Goungkiet Vienravi along with the Mondadori Group from Italy, recently held the official launch of the Thai Edition of the Global Women's Fashion and Lifestyle Magazine at the Centara Hotel. Judging from overflowing turnout from the event alone, Grazia is definitely going to be successful here despite othr magazines going through bad times in the current economy.

Bloomberg teams up with Post

2009-10-06T20:05:00.000-07:00

       The Washington Post and Bloomberg News are teaming up in a new partnership that will distribute their political and financial coverage to a broader audience.
       The venture announced on Thursday includes a news service that fills the void created by the dissolution of a 47-year alliance between the Post and the Los Angeles Times .The two newspapers disclosed their plans to divorce on Wednesday.
       Besides distributing about 120 stories per day beginning on Jan 1 to other news organisations, the Post and Bloomberg will share content with each other and co-produce an online business news page on the Post 's website.Financial terms of the arrangement weren't disclosed.
       The deal will help the Post compensate for a staff that has been shrinking in recent years. Like large newspapers across the United States, the Post has been shedding employees because of a steep drop in advertising sales. The Post 's ad revenue from its print edition plunged 27% in the first half of this year, leaving the newspaper with $57 million less to pay its expenses.
       New York-based Bloomberg hasn't been as hard hit because it doesn't rely as much on advertising. It caters to investors, bankers and other financial services employees who pay to receive a variety of business coverage and data through Bloomberg terminals. Some of the Post 's coverage will now be sent to those terminals.
       The Post will be able to draw on Bloomberg's more than 1,500 reporters and editors to supplement its staff coverage online and in print.
       "This is a formidable collaboration,"said Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of the Washington Post ."It brings together the Post 's vast expertise on politics and policy news in Washington with Bloomberg's highly regarded global financial, economic and political news franchise."
       The Washington Post is the fifth-largest US newspaper with a weekday circulation of 665,000. Bloomberg News is owned by Bloomberg LP, a private company controlled by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

THIN GRUEL FOR THEISTS

2009-10-06T20:04:00.001-07:00

       Recent years have given us several books on the history of Western religion:Karen Armstrong's "A History of God", Jack Miles's "God: A B3iography" and now Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God".Armstrong is former nun,Miles a former priest,and it is evident they are trying to salvage something from the wreckage of religous belief inflicted by the ongoing onslaught of scientific materialism.
       Wright is a self-proclaimed materialist who is trying to understand religion as a product of political and economic forces,but he too seems interested in salvaging something from the wreckage.He portrays the Habrew god Yahweh as originally a storm deity,one god among many in the Middle East,who took on the characteristics of some of his competitors and eventually sought to displace them all.His evolution was conditioned by the political dynamies of the region,in which the confederated tribes of Israel were a minor player and the predominant powers were Egypt,Assyria,Babylonia,and later Persia.
       Among other theories,Wright speculates that the Israelites were never slaves in Rgypt.They were actually Canaanite hill tribes who clashed with their coastal and plains-dwelling cousins.Goodbye to Moses,the exodus from Egypt,the Ten Commandments and the forty years wandering in the wilderness! One wonders how this stupendous epic managed to emerge if the Israelited were living in the hills of Canaan all the while.Cecil B DeMille would surely be upset.
       Wright theorises that Jesus was a chauvinist whose doctrine of love was limited to the Jews,as evidenced by his frequent remarks disparaging the Gentiles (pagans).Anecdotes showing his regard for Gentiles,such a his healing of the centurion's servant,and the parable of the Good Samaritan,were added later.It was the apostle Paul who idealised Jasus and boradened his doctrine of love to include all humankind.Paul's motivation was not entirely altruistic.He wanted to convert the pagan world to Christianity,and he could hardly have done that if Jesus' doctrine of love had remanined limited to the Jews.
       Wright sees in Muhammad a synthesis of Moses and the idealised Jesus.Muhamad is like Moses because he led his people form a place of oppression (Mecca) to a place of freedom(Medina),and because he was political leader and lawgiver.He is like the idealised Jesus because he taught love and brotherhood.
       Wright downplays the fequent imprecations against infidels in the Qur'an.He notes that you can cherry-pick the Qur'an to prove a variety of viewpoints,but maintains that the weight of Qur'anic verses suggest that it is for God to punish infidels in the next life and for Muslims to practice forbearance in this one.Somebody should tell this to our contemporary Islamic terrorists.
       Wright's central thesis is that the idea of God has evolved from multiple primitive,localised,often savage supernatural powers, into a sighle invisible,universal overlord with a deep concern for morality.Insofar as that belief civilises us and makes us moral,it takes on a creative reality of its own.The impulse to morality that evolves from it(Wright calls it maral order,moral direction,even moral truth) is the closest thing we have to God.
       Theists will find this pretty thin gruel.The impulse to morality is an admirable thing,but pales beside the vigour of the feisty,interventionist,sometimes-anthropomorphie god depicted in the Abrahamic religions.Theists want a god with personality,a god they can worship,love and pray to.You can't pray to an impulse.
       But maybe theists need to grow up.A morality that springs from within is obviously superior to amorality imposed from without.You can't worshi it,but who ever claimed that the sole object of religion is to have something to worship? A higher object would be an inner transformation for the better,regardless of external realities.Wright seems to be saying that if there is anything,how ever subtle and beyond our range of knowing,that impels such transformation,although we may not call it God,it's the closest thing to Gd we've got.

THE SULTAN AND THE MERMAID QUEEN Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

2009-10-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

       The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen is a compendium of articles and essays on Asia written by Bangkok resident Paul Spencer Sochaczewski. Encompassing several decades of travel throughout the continent, they originally appeared in publications such as the International Herald Tribune ,Wall Street Journal CNN Traveller ,Geographical ,Travel and Leisure Golf and Destinasian .Sochaczewski has a knack for finding oddball characters and offbeat stories on his journeys. Within these pages we meet a homeless Hawaiian who claims to be the last real emperor of China, the last elephant hunter of Vietnam, and the Sultan of Yogyakarta who lends his name to the book's title and who professes his love for a mermaid queen.
       We also learn how Burma's generals are using white elephants to justify their hold on power and ponder the disappearance of a modern day Swiss Robin Hood who disppapeared in the Borneo jungle while trying to stand up for the rights of Penan tribesmen, among many other interesting tales.
       The author's enthusiasm for Asia is apparent throughout, as are his interests in conservation and golf. He combines all three with an article written in Bangkok which considers the ecological impact of Asia's obsession with a game that requires more land than some Balkan states.
       As a non-tree hugger I found it a bit tiring trying to read all the eco-centric articles in one sitting, likewise reading about golf, which gets me about as excited as sitting at the lights at Asok on a Friday evening. In a thunderstorm. However,this is not a book to be read all at once, much less so in lateral order from cover to cover.
       Dipping into TSATMQ is like eating squid on a stick with green chilli sauce. If you use too much then it becomes a bit overwhelming and could even make your eyes water, but applied sparingly it's a delectable and invigorating

A love-hate relationship with food

2009-10-02T19:41:00.001-07:00

       When Frank Bruni stepped on the scene as the chief restaurant critic for The New York Times more than five years ago,many industry insiders and observers thought the choice was odd.
       Bruni had no previous experience reviewing restaurants. He hadn't sweated long hours behind a hot range in a well-regarded kitchen learning his craft. He knew how to shape sentences but what did he know about simmering sauces?
       But even odder was Bruni's lovehate relationship with food - something he now acknowledges in his new memoir,Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater .The revelation isn't exactly shocking but it is unusual. Bruni, the man who had volunteered to eat out six nights a week, had obsessed about his weight for most of his life. He had battled bulimia briefly, toyed with laxatives and torpedoed many a diet - all the trimmings for his third book.
       "I remember thinking if I look up after a couple of years and I am right,and I have figured out a better way to manage my relationship with food,it's probably a pretty interesting narrative how I got to this point," Bruni says about the moment he decided to take the job.
       If waist size is an indicator of success then Bruni, with his close-cropped hair and athletic build, has been wildly successful curbing his prodigious appetite. After ballooning to around 275 pounds and sporting 42-inch pants while covering a presidential campaign in 2000, Bruni can now take a moment to brag.
       He wears size 34 jeans and doesn't look round anymore - despite eating his way through approximately 700 restaurants in New York alone during his stint as critic that came officially to an end last month.
       "I like eating, and I prefer eating in great volume to eating in minor volume," Bruni,44, said in an interview at a wine bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side near his home."No question.Having been through everything I describe in the book, I am fully aware and I struggle to remain conscious of the consequences."
       The consequences have plagued Bruni throughout his life but they came to a head when he decided in April 2004 to leave his post as Rome correspondent and tackle restaurant reviewing in New York, perhaps the most important dining city in the world and one filled with know-it-all foodies.
       For Bruni, danger loomed. A sea of calories awaited him. He took the plunge - one that has local restaurateurs now scratching their heads since learning Bruni's anguish over food.
       "It's like an alcoholic becoming a winemaker," says John Fraser, whose New York restaurant Dovetail faired exceptionally well under Bruni's withering gaze, earning three stars.
       Bruni knew the task ahead of him was great. He adjusted and learned on the job. He "ate more widely and in a much more inquisitive and thoughtful manner." He developed a "frame of reference" that was "extremely broad and unusual."
       He not only wrote about places in New York but he also ventured across America and Europe, alerting readers to gems such as Alinea in Chicago.Bruni could at times be snarky in his reviews but he was mostly right when he decided to bring out the knives,according to chefs.
       Sometimes, restaurants caught him;sometimes they did not. A well-worn picture floating around of a heftier Bruni aided his cause to slip into restaurants unnoticed.
       "We had the fat picture. You would never guess that's the same person,"Fraser said about Bruni's most current photograph posted on the food blog Eater.com and the one found inside the cover of his book.
       His style of writing attracted many followers. Not everybody loved him but they definitely talked about him.As Bruni evolved, people noticed, chatting about him at cocktail parties, said Jennifer Baum, an influential restaurant publicist who has never met Bruni but had about a dozen of her restaurants reviewed by him.
       "It stepped beyond the walls of the industry," Baum said, referring to his reviews. Baum, like other food publicists, kept a wary eye on Bruni,who once slapped around one of her celebrity chef clients, Bobby Flay, taking a star away from Mesa Grill in Manhattan. Baum wouldn't comment about her client's reaction to Bruni's takedown, but she said he was fair and honest.
       "There are some restaurants that opened where people didn't pay attention and those restaurants should be shouted out," she said."He went into the venerable restaurants and made sure they were paying attention."
       And the weight? Not only did Bruni beat back the calories through rigorous exercise and moderation, he also beat back the doubters in a city filled with them. Bruni, according to some of the toughest critics in town, prevailed.
       "When he started out, Frank famously knew almost nothing about restaurant criticism, and it showed,"GQmagazine food critic Alan Richman said."He was saved by his writing which is exuberant and charming, by his indefatigable work ethic and by his instinctive ability to write brilliant criticisms of restaurants that he either hated or loved. I'm not sure if any restaurant critic has been better at praise."
       Richman, who once eviscerated one of the most famous chefs alive, JeanGeorges Vongerichten, in a scathing article for his magazine, said it's too bad Bruni is giving up his reign as most feared critic in New York.
       "What I regret about him leaving now is that he finally has that skill,something that comes with scrutinising thousands of plates of food," Richman said."He's at his peak."
       Bruni isn't sorry. He can finally exhale after crafting about 270 reviews - visiting some spots more than once - for the newspaper that could turn a restaurant into a massive hit or major flop. He decided to end his run as critic because his "energy would fade or was fading."
       Bruni says his old gig wasn't just about eating. It was also about coordinating the meals - all the time. He always dictated the schedule, calling himself a "bully."

Top tabloid switches support from Labour

2009-10-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

       Britain's topselling daily newspaper dealt a blow to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's efforts to win a general election, declaring yesterday it had switched its support to the opposition Conservatives.
       The Sun , part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media empire, delivered a damning thumbs-down the day after Mr Brown's keynote speech to his ruling Labour Party conference.
       "After 12 long years in power, this government has lost its way," the Sun said in a front-page article, featuring a picture of Mr Brown and the headline "Labour's lost it".
       The Sun boasts a circulation of more than 3 million and a record of backing winners in elections. It switched its support to Labour before Tony Blair led the party to the first of three successive election victories in 1997.
       Mr Brown replaced Mr Blair two years ago but faces a fight for political survival.He must call an election by next June and the centre-right Conservatives are ahead by 15 points or more in polls.
       "The British people will decide the election, not a newspaper. I think people really want newspapers to report news and expect them to do so," Mr Brown said.
       Ground down by recession and angered by a scandal over lawmakers'expenses, Britons appear ready to embrace the Conservatives.
       "What this is signalling is that they [the Sun ] think their readers have turned,just as in 1996 when they switched support to Blair, a similar time out from the election," Ivor Gaber, professor of political campaigning and reporting at London's City University, said.
       "They weren't saying 'we suddenly think New Labour is good', they were saying 'we know where our readers are at', and no newspaper likes to be behind its readers."

New novel, movies in the works

2009-09-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

       So many projects, so much success.That's the theme of the life of novelist Nicholas Sparks, whose latest novel,The Last Song ,(Hachette Book Group) was released in US bookstores earlier this month. If the title sounds familiar, that's because Sparks wrote the screenplay first after Miley Cyrus specifically said she wanted him to pen a movie for her.She's been filming the movie by the same name in Georgia.
       That movie and at least one more, maybe two,based on Sparks' books will be released in 2010.The movie version of Dear John is scheduled for a February 2010 release, and The Lucky One could be on the big screen by next year, although filming hasn't started.
       His personal life is going well, too, with a private school he started near top capacity for and the high school track team he has coached winning championships. He's moving back into a new, larger home that he built on the site of his previous home outside New Bern on the Trent River, some 180km southeast of Raleigh.
       So, can he just humour the rest of us and give us a crumb about what's going wrong in his life?As it turns out, not really.
       "All of these things are not straight-line-tosuccess things," he said in a phone interview."You have all the downs that it takes to get there.There are frustrations and struggles with the track team, frustrations and struggles with the school, and frustrations and struggles with the house. We just keep trying and trying and do our best."
       Although The Last Song began as a screenplay,
       Author Nicholas Sparks attends the 'Nights In Rodanthe' world premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York.

Portuguese Nobel laureate gives up blog

2009-09-27T22:07:00.001-07:00

       Outspoken Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has given up the blog which he launched a year ago at the age of 85 to concentrate on his new book.
       "It has always been convenient that goodbyes be brief.... Goodbye therefore.Until another day? I sincerely don't think so. I have started another book and want to dedicate all my time to it," he wrote in his final blog entry.
       The author of Blindness and The Cave , who lives in acliff-top house in Lanzarote on Spain's Canary Islands launched the blog on in September 2008 with a "love letter" to Lisbon.
       He updated it regularly with lengthy entries in both Spanish and Portuguese on topics ranging from poverty in Africa to opposition to health care reform in the United States that have been published as a book in Portugal.
       In Saramago's latest novel Cain , which will be published later this year, the author absolves the Biblical figure of the same name for the murder of his younger brother Abel and puts the blame instead on God.
       Saramago left Portugal in the early 1990s after the conservative government in power at the time refused to allow his controversial novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to compete for a European literary prize.

New tallest man has longing for love

2009-09-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

       The world's new tallest man,measuring 246.5cm, said he was looking for love as he was presented by Guinness World Records in London last week.
       Sultan Kosen,26, blotted out the iconic Tower Bridge as he posed for photographs on the banks of the River Thames in his first ever trip outside his native Turkey.
       He takes over the title from China's Bao Xishun, who stands "just" 2.36 metres.
       The Turk also has the world's largest hands and largest feet, measuring 27.5cm and 36.5cm respectively.
       And his giant hands dwarfed those proffered by amazed wellwishers as he turned heads in London, while reporters strained to get their microphones within reach of his head.
       Kosen's record was unveiled to mark the launch of the Guinness World Records 2010 edition. The book, now in its 55th year, includes the world's biggest burger,made in the United States and weighing 84kg, and records for the dog with the longest ears and the world's biggest skateboard.
       Kosen was unable to complete his schooling because of his extreme height,but works occasionally as a farmer to support his family.
       He said he hoped his newfound celebrity status would enable him "to travel and see the world and have a car that accommodates my size".
       "My biggest dream though, is to get married and have children - I'm looking for love," he said.
       The extreme difficulty of squeezing into a regular-sized car is one of the main disadvantages of his height, but he says it comes in handy for replacing light bulbs and hanging curtains for his mother.
       Kosen has three brothers and a sister,who are all normal-sized, but his rate of growth surged from the age of 10 because of a tumour which caused too much growth hormone to be released from his pituitary gland.
       The tumour was successfully removed in surgery and he finally stopped growing last year. He uses walking sticks and tires quickly if he is standing.
       Another pretender to the tallest title,Ukrainian Leonid Stadnyk, who claims to be 10.5cm taller than Kosen, fails to qualify for the record because he refused to be measured by Guinness World Records officials.
       Guinness editor-in-chief Craig Glenday travelled to Turkey to personally validate Kosen's height under strict guidelines, measuring him three times in one day because bodies expand and shrink throughout the day.
       Glenday said:"Sultan's an imposing figure, but a gentle, quiet man who's totally relaxed and unfazed about his unique standing in the world."

"The Lost Symbol"

2009-09-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

       The mind of Dan Brown may be a cluster of codes, but in person he appears no more mysterious than your average tennis partner. He is that smiling, sandy-haired man with the dimpled chin you know from the jacket flap of The Da Vinci Code , the sporty looking fellow in blazer and slacks.
       After six years of letting his work do the talking - a conversation that whispered and screamed across the globe he is back, at least briefly, to promote his new novel,The Lost Symbol , and to reflect on how The Da Vinci Code changed him from unknown thriller writer to a symbol in his own right.
       "I wouldn't trade it for the world," he says, seated on a recent morning in a sunlit conference room at the headquarters of Random House, Inc."It's 95 percent wonderful. My life is much more multifaceted. My experiences have gotten to be much more interesting, the people I get to meet, the discussions I get to have."
       The book is done and he beams like a father,"so pleased this day has arrived".His publisher has blessed The Lost Symbol , with a first printing of 5 million,oversized for virtually any writer except Brown, whose sales for The Da Vinci Code top 40 million.The Lost Symbol has been at or near the top of Amazon.com's best-seller list since the novel was announced in the spring.
       The long wait for his new book, he says, is mostly due to the story,"mindboggling stuff" that required time to master. In The Lost Symbol , protagonist Robert Langdon returns from his European adventures of The Da Vinci Code .He has been summoned to Washington,D.C., and is quickly caught up in a fateful race against a murderous villain to find a hidden code that supposedly unearths an ancient secret to limitless knowledge and power.
       Like The Da Vinci Code , the new book is thriller,puzzler, research paper and travelogue. Langdon hurries about from the Library of Congress to the National Archives to the Washington Monument, a capsule of the journeys Brown took in working on the novel,travelling first class all the way, like receiving personal tours of the Library of Congress and other buildings.
       "Those things wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for The Da Vinci Code ," he notes.Library spokesman Matt Raymond confirmed that Brown had visited in April last year and had looked over some Bibles in the library's collection. He also met for about 30 minutes with Librarian of Congress James Billington for a "private discussion".
       Fame's unwonderful 5 percent is the kind that other major celebrities face: a loss of privacy that Brown says makes it impossible to tour for his new book, a heightened self-awareness that briefly, just a couple of months, he says, made it hard for him to write The Lost Symbol .He was also delayed by the 2006 copyright infringement trial in which writers Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh claimed Brown's book "appropriated the architecture" of their own work. Brown and Random House prevailed.
       "That was certainly a setback, mainly because it was a distraction and all that the energy that goes into a trial is not going into your work," he says."The worst part of it was having someone question my integrity, publicly."
       He was attacked often for The Da Vinci Code ,especially for alleging that Jesus and Mary Magdalene conceived a child. Scholars scorned him, and religious officials were offended, but Brown stands by his theory, finding it "makes more sense than the story I was told in church".
       Brown's new book is centred on the Freemasons,the secretive, centuries-old fraternity that has included George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He has great respect for the Masons, especially for their policy of accepting people of all religious faiths. But he wouldn't be surprised if someone gets angry.
       "There will be a lot said, not all of it will be nice,"he says."And I'm just kind of used to it."
       He doesn't talk a lot to the press, but Brown's history is as known as most authors' thanks in part to a mini-biography he never wished to produce a 69-page court document submitted for the London trial.
       He was born in 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire,and still lives near there. His father, Richard Brown,taught maths at Exeter Phillips Academy. His mother,Constance Brown, was a musician. The first treasure hunts he knew were the ones his father arranged at Christmas. Brown majored in English at Amherst College, but also liked music enough to debate after graduating whether he should write stories or songs.Choosing songs, he moved to Los Angeles and caught on with no one except for the woman who became his wife, Blythe Newlon, the director of artistic development for the National Academy of Songwriters.
       As a young man, he compiled a list of "187 Men to Avoid", which proved amusing enough for the Berkeley Publishing Group to release as a book, in 1995, under the pseudonym "Danielle Brown". But his real breakthrough came two years earlier, on a vacation in Tahiti, when he read Sidney Sheldon's The Doomsday Conspiracy ."It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read,"Brown wrote in his court papers."The simplicity of the prose and the efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my schooldays,and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a
       "thriller" of this type one day.
       He debuted in 1998 with The Digital Fortress , an intelligence thriller, and followed with Deception Point (a novel he found boring to write) and Angels & Demons , which introduced at least a few readers to Langdon, the Harvard professor embodied for many by Tom Hanks' portrayals in the film versions of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons .His sales were poor and by 2001 he was in the same rut as so many authors - handling his own publicity and even selling books out of his car,a process that would now require a convoy of trucks.
       Brown changed agents, changed publishers (from Simon & Schuster to Doubleday, a Random House imprint), changed his luck and changed the industry.The Da Vinci Code , published in March 2003 was an immediate hit that "just parked", Brown says, remaining on best-seller lists for more than three years. He recalls an early sign of success - an appearance at a superstore in Washington, not longer after the book came out."We drove up and the store was surrounded with people and I thought there must have been a bomb scare."
       Barnes & Noble Inc. fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley says she knew vaguely of Brown before The Da Vinci Code , but had never read him. Encouraged by a Barnes & Noble executive to try Brown's novel, she was immediately drawn to the "breathless pace, the intrigue - the science and art were fascinating".
       "But I have to say my biggest takeaway from it was that I wanted to know more about everything he wrote about," Hensley says."I Googled my fingers off! It made me wish I had Robert Langdon or Dan Brown as a professor in my college years!"
       Brown is far richer than he was a few years ago, but his working life remains steady, he says. He rises at 4am and writes until noon, seven days a week, even on Christmas. He is often too drained to read, so instead he will play tennis or go for a run on the beach. Mark Twain's religious critique Letters from the Earth is one of the few books he has read for pleasure lately.
       Brown will talk and talk about Twain, Masons,pyramids, spirituality ("a work in progress", he says)and e-books (he reads them, and the paper kind,too), but some subjects repe. Ask about his next book and he will smile, in a nice way, and change the subject. Ask about politics, and he will cringe.
       The Lost Symbol doesn't name names, but works in criticisms of waterboarding and religious intolerance,passages that suggest the author was not a fan of the George W. Bush administration."The people who have read the book have told me that the timing of the book seems preordained," he says."And they will cite, among other references, the president [Obama] and the change in attitudes toward religion."
       Asked if the book was completed after Obama's election, he answers, thoughtfully, yes. Asked for his opinion of Obama, he declines comment, for the very future of his book.
       "What I'm trying to what to do in this book is send a universal message, and the second I pick a side, it just undermines everything," he says, adding that he underwent a "transformation" on The Lost Symbol ."(It's) really two things. The idea that science is starting to show our true potential and that that potential is so much greater than most of us imagined.... Tangentially, I feel like we're entering a time where prejudice, prejudice of religion in particular, will start to evaporate."

A battle for the Earth's soul

2009-09-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

       The flood referred to by the title of Margaret Atwood's new novel isn't the biblical deluge, sent by God to wipe out wickedness and sin, but a waterless one: An uncommon pandemic that cannot be contained by "biotools and bleach", and that sweeps "through the air as if on wings", burning "through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror and butchery". This flood has killed millions upon millions, and electrical, digital and industrial systems are failing, as their human keepers die.
       In The Year of the Flood we are transported to a world that is part Hieronymus Bosch, part A Clockwork Orange ."Total breakdown" is upon the land, and a private security firm has seized power,taking control where the local police forces have collapsed from lack of financing. The Corps people not only use brutal tactics like Internal Rendition to enforce their will, but they are also conducting sinister experiments, monkeying with human and animal genetics and creating strange new mutant species.
       A kind of companion piece to her lumpy 2003 novel,Oryx and Crake , this book takes us back to that postapocalyptic future and it does so with a lot more energy, inventiveness and narrative panache.
       Like Oryx and the author's 1986 novel,The Handmaid's Tale , this is another dystopian fantasy that's meant to be a sort of cautionary tale about the wrongs and excesses of our own world - be it anti-feminism, denial of global warming,or violence and materialism. But while those earlier books were hobbled by didactic asides and a preachy, moralistic tone, Atwood has loosened up in this volume and given her imagination free rein.
       One woman, Toby, has survived inside an upscale spa, where she subsists on supplies from a storeroom and the garden, where they used to grow vegetables for customers' organic salads. She eventually ventures out, journeying back to her parents' old neighbourhood to find a rifle she'd buried under some patio stones. Her father had used the rifle to commit suicide, after his wife died of a mysterious illness.
       Toby later learns that her mother was most likely a guinea pig for a drug company named HelthWyzer that was "seeding folks with illnesses" via souped-up supplement pills -"using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses".
       After her parents' death, Toby is forced to take a series of demeaning jobs, culminating in her employment at a revolting fast-food chain called SecretBurgers, which is rumoured to run human corpses through its meat grinders.There, she becomes the sexual toy of a violent, piggish manager named Blanco - until she is unexpectedly rescued by a group of demonstrators known as God's Gardeners, a hippielike sect pledged to preserve all animal and plant life. Toby will rise through the ranks of the Gardeners and eventually become one of their elders.
       When she realises that she is one of the few survivors of the Waterless Flood,Toby wonders why she was chosen:"Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she's here for a reason - to bear witness,to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can't."
       Among the other people living with God's Gardeners is a girl named Ren,who has been brought there by her mother, Lucerne, a HelthWyzer executive's former wife, who has run away from home with a lover. Ren will later be taken back to the HelthWyzer compound, where she falls in love with Jimmy - the hero of Oryx and Crake , also known as Snowman - who will break her heart by taking up with her best friend.
       After her biofather is kidnapped, Ren winds up working as a trapeze dancer at a sex club named Scales and Tails one of her teachers actually recommends it as a good job with health benefits and a dental plan - and it is there, in an isolation room, that Ren will wait out the Waterless Flood.
       In recounting the stories of Ren and Toby, Atwood does a deft job of turning them into credible human beings - not simply cartoon heroines wandering through a special-effects-laden apocalyptic landscape in which killing droughts and hurricanes and new diseases have led many to predict "a massive die-off of the human race".
       Although some of the chapters start with annoying passages detailing the Gardeners' ecological credo, Atwood largely refrains from the sort of proselytising that tarnished her earlier ventures into science fiction. By focusing on her characters and their perilous journeys through a nightmare world, she has succeeded in writing a visceral book that showcases the talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel,The Blind Assassin.

A chilling tale of the cold war

2009-09-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

       From the sorry final years of Leonid Brezhnev's rule, which ended at his death in 1982, to the arrival of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, the Soviet Union seemed to be led, as David Remnick has put it, by a series of "half-dead men in half-lit hospitals".
       After Brezhnev came Yuri Andropov,then Konstantin Chernenko: Grey eminences who each died barely a year after coming to power. A weary Ronald Reagan asked in private, after learning of Chernenko's death,"How I am supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"
       At this same moment the Soviet Union had succession issues of a far darker sort on its mind, David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand , his authoritative and chilling new history of the Cold War arms race.
       His book takes its title from a Soviet doomsday machine first conceived under Brezhnev. Because the Soviets feared "decapitation"- the killing of its leaders in one fast, huge US nuclear strike they developed an automatic retaliatory system to launch their missiles even if their command structure no longer existed. Thus the fate of the planet would rest on the shoulders of a few low-ranking officers sweating in a concrete bunker.Those officers were the twitching fingers of a dead hand.
       Hoffman is a contributing editor at The Washington Post and was The Post 's Moscow bureau chief from 1995 to 2001.In The Dead Hand he delivers a readable,many-tentacled account of the decadeslong military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. He touches the usual bases, from the dawn of mutual assured destruction through the Nixonera attempts at detente to Reagan's unshakable devotion to the Strategic Defence Initiative, aka Star Wars.
       What's particularly valuable about Hoffman's book, however, is the skill with which he narrows his focus (and his indefatigable reporting) down to a few essential areas. Thanks to interviews and new documents, he provides the fullest - and the most terrifying - account to date of the enormous and covert Soviet biological weapons programme,developed in defiance of international treaties at the same time that the Soviets appeared to be earnestly interested in reducing their weapons stockpile.
       This biological weapons programme - Hoffman refers to it as "a dark under-side of the arms race"- included the development of a super germ that mounted a grisly one-two attack on its victims: It would make them mildly ill and then, once they appeared to recover,hammer them with a death blow.
       Hoffman details how truly paranoid the Soviets were that the US would launch an unprovoked nuclear attack. He offers an inside account of how Gorbachev stood up to his own generals to slow and then reverse the arms race. And he is particularly good on the dangers, after the Soviet Union's collapse, of its stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons,much of this material stored in unguarded warehouses.
       Almost as dangerous were (and are)the tens of thousands of newly unemployed Soviet defence workers, some willing to sell weapons or skills to the highest bidder. Hoffman recounts the story of one chemical warfare expert who ended up selling Snickers bars and blue jeans in a Moscow open-air market.
       The Dead Hand is deadly serious, but this story can verge on pitch-black comedy -"Dr Strangelove" as updated by the Coen brothers. Hoffman has an eye for bleak, jagged details. When he writes about how the Soviet disposed of nuclear waste - even nuclear reactors - by dumping it at sea, he notes that workers shot at any waste barrels that surfaced.
       He observes the curious Soviet idea that it could predict a nuclear attack by looking for a spike in prices for blood donations in Britain."The KGB failed to realise," Hoffman writes,"that British blood donors are unpaid."
       He quotes Nixon on losing his interest in biological weapons."We'll never use the damn germs, so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent?" Nixon said."If somebody uses germs on us,we'll nuke 'em."
       Hoffman gives detailed reconstructions of large Soviet blunders, like the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. But he contrasts these with quirkier (if no less unnerving, at least for the Soviets) events, like the day in 1987 when a disaffected young West German named Mathias Rust managed to land a single-engine Cessna near Red Square in Moscow.
       If The Dead Hand has a pair of looming antagonists, they are Reagan and Gorbachev, and Hoffman offers sympathetic accounts of both men's actions and thinking. About Gorbachev he is especially admiring."A leader's courage is often defined by building something, by positive action," he writes,"but in this case,Gorbachev's great contribution was in deciding what not to do." Gorbachev declined to up the ante by building a Soviet Star Wars missile system; he did not intervene during the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
       One of this book's few villains, at least on the international stage, is George H.W. Bush's Defence Department under Dick Cheney. The department opposed aiding the Soviets, as their country fell apart, to properly secure weapons.
       The Dead Hand is a large book but also a jumpy one; it's as full of quick cuts and dateline switches as a Bourne Identity movie. Hoffman is so careful not to bore his readers that he sometimes underestimates them, verging closer to Tom Clancy than to John Lewis Gaddis.More synthesis and cerebration would have made this good book better.
       The Dead Hand has a title that sounds like an early-period Stephen King novel.Its imagery is even more terrifying than King's, especially towards the end. The stray parts of the Soviet empire became - and to some degree still are, Hoffman writes -"a Home Depot of enriched uranium and plutonium, with shoppers cruising up and down the aisles".

PUTTING THE FUN BACK IN ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

2009-09-27T21:57:00.001-07:00

       It is not easy to interview Zcongklod Bangyikhan editor of a day , the famous local pop culture magazine,and writer of Dokmai Tai Loek (Underworld Flower).The book - his ninth - is being published for the third time since its release in March this year, a relatively big success by local standards.
       The uneasy part had nothing to do with the interviewee;Zcongklod turned out to be an extremely pleasant, eloquent and bright young man. To blame was my reluctance to judge whether he is a hardcore environmentalist who has become an up-and-coming editor/writer, or vice versa. Moreover, the content of the interview bounced between books and the environment.
       Thirty minutes into the interview, Zcongklod began looking like an alienated green sheep in the hyped and intellectual world of publishing. While editors of intellectual and hype magazines grow up listening to cool music,reading highbrow or underground books and eschewing mainstream films, the current editor of the famous magazine grew up involving himself in environmental or poverty reduction campaigns and got his first job researching and writing a national report on climate change policy.
       The doubt was cleared after Zcongklod - a graduate from Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Economics - offered a self-description.
       "I am through and through an environmental activist disguised as a media-savvy person,"said Zcongklod, a former employee of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the famous non-government environmental organisation.His field of expertise is environmental economics,appraising the value of seemingly immeasurable subjects such as clean air, forests, rivers and carbon emission.
       The road he took to reach the publishing world is an extraordinary one. People in the literary/publishing field usually come from a liberal arts background, while Zcongklod never dreamed of becoming a writer.
       Zcongklod, now 31, discovered his knack for writing during his university years while participating in environmental camps. To make dull and serious-sounding environmental issues more attractive to middle-class students, Zcongklod would write creative slogans and create hype campaigns.
       For instance, he spiced up serious rice cultivation problems by naming an event "Golden Grains and November Rain". The trip successfully drew attention and extensive media coverage. One of the attendants was Wongthanong Chainarongsingha, editor of a day Magazine at that time. Wongthanong subsequently invited him to join the magazine.
       Zcongklod has penned columns on the environment in respected local dailies such as Krungthep Thurakij since he worked at the WWF.
       After moving into the publishing field,a book Publication - the owner of the magazine he worked for - decided to publish his books, all of them anthologies of his columns. His eighth book,Tonmai Tai Loek (Trees Underworld), is going into its sixth print. Abhisit Vejjajiva leader of the opposition party at that time - wrote the forward for the book.
       His current book,Dokmai Tai Loek , has received rave reviews, and talk of his concise and crisp prose, and particularly his unique yet tender way of looking at the things around him. Readers cannot help thinking it is the writer's perceptive green lens that helps him see the world entirely differently than most people. For those who judge books by their covers, his minimalist-style designs are creative and admirable.
       Zcongklod prefers short sentences, suitable for young readers, and he extensively uses graphic design to attract attention. He writes mostly about modern lifestyles and inspiring stories on environmental conservation. Do not expect to read preachy tales about victims of pollution or the science of garbage recycling or carbon emission.This book is for everyone, including those who love life and its indulgences. He has a broad range of cultural reference points - Manchester City Football Club as champions in term of environmental conservation, bighearted Barcelona Football Club and the other side of Radiohead, the world's most environmentally friendly rock band. My favourite is the story of Spranq, the Dutch graphic design firm that created Sprang Eco Sens type.The font was inspired by the holes found in some types of cheese and can help reduce the levels of toxins in inks used in printing.
       The passionate environmentalist/writer said he often falls in love with pop culture artefacts, graphic design and creative advertising campaigns; he believes this marketing took can help promote social and environmental campaigns. His taste is quite different since other environmentalists and NGOs often pour scorn at consumerism,not to mention advertising.
       "I believe in public relation campaigns and commercial brand building," he says,"which goes against the grain of most Thais, who are instilled with values of do-gooders being humble and modest. I believe good deeds must be publicised because society is lacking in good examples and deprived of real heroes.
       Zcongklod has interesting opinions about local environmentalists and news on the environment."Most activists I know are decent people. But they are too reclusive and that affects their ability to draw people's attention to their campaigns." Also, environmental news is too often grim, serious and irrelevant, he adds.
       Thus his books are, in some ways, his crusade to save the planet from climate change, resources depletion and pollution. And they are not only useful and re-readable but entertaining. It is not often that reading about environmental issues is fun.

REGIONAL DELIGHTS

2009-09-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

       Winding its way down from the foothills of Tibet to the emerald green rice paddies of the delta, the Mekong River encompasses some of the most diverse backdrops in Asia. Slake your thirst for adventure with some adrenaline-fuelled activities in the jungle before relaxing on a beautiful beach overlooking the South China Sea. Delve deeper to discern the mosaic of peoples that make up the population and learn about their incredible culture and lifestyle.Discover the depth of the Mekong's delights.
       PEOPLE AND CULTURE
       Towering mountains and flat plains - the contrasting landscapes of the Mekong region have attracted a divergent group of people over the centuries. Discover the diversity of the Mekong with a visit to some of the minority regions and experience their culture.
       Xishuangbanna, Yunnan
       The original Dai (Thai) kingdom, the land of "Twelve Thousand Rice Fields" is a little slice of Southeast Asia in China. Penetrate the jungle to discover a cultural microcosm that is unlike anywhere else in the Middle Kingdom.
       Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia Translating as "Meeting of the Hills", this place is a world apart from lowland Cambodia and a blissful escape from the heat of the plains. The landscape includes a seductive blend of pine forests, dense jungle and hidden waterfalls, and provides a home to the Phnong people, famous for their elephant rearing.
       Chiang Mai, Thailand
       Undisputed capital of northern Thailand,Chiang Mai is a cultural hub that acts as a gateway to surrounding mountain retreats.It is a city of classic Lanna temples where you can learn Thai cookery, Buddhist meditation and traditional Thai massage.
       Luang Nam Tha, Laos
       Laos is an ethnic melting pot with anywhere between 49 and 132 tribal groups, depending on who you listen to. Luang Nam Tha is home to nearly 40 of these groups and acts as a gateway to the award-winning,community-based ecotourism project of Nam Ha.
       Mekong Delta, Vietnam
       Where the Mekong's epic journey comes to an end, it splits into nine dragons that give us the Vietnamese name of Cuu Long.Explore the delta on two wheels or go with the flow on a traditional boat. Get up close and personal with local life courtesy of a traditional homestay.
       Beach Retreats
       The Mekong is not the only well known water in the region - both Vietnam and Cambodia boast lengthy and beautiful coas-tlines. Vietnam might have been late to the beach party in this region, but it was worth the wait. With more than 3,400km of coastline, there are infinite stretches of powdery sand, hidden coves, lovely lagoons and tropical islands. Cambodia's coast is less developed and offers opportunities for aspiring Robinson Crusoes.
       Mui Ne, Vietnam
       Set on a seductive swathe of sand, Mui Ne,with its swaying palms and towering dunes,is an absolute charmer. Be pummelled on the beach by a masseur or pummelled by the waves with some watersports. Mui Ne blends action and inertia to perfection.
       Sihanoukville, Cambodia
       King of the Cambodian beaches, the headland is ringed by squeaky white sands,and offshore lie countless tropical islands with barely a beach hut in sight. Try Otres Beach for romance, Sokha Beach for luxury or Koh Rong for an escape.
       Phu Quoc, Vietnam
       Simply the most beautiful island in Vietnam,Phu Quoc is liberally sprinkled with picture-perfect, white-sand beaches and cloaked in dense, impenetrable jungle. Long Beach is sophisticated, Ong Lan Beach romantic and Bai Sao simply irresistible.
       Kep, Cambodia
       The original beach resort in Cambodia,the French founded this coastal retreat in 1908 as Kep-sur-Mer. Devastated by war,it has resurrected itself in recent years with boutique resorts, succulent seafood and palm-fringed islands.
       China Beach, Vietnam
       Okay, so we are using artistic licence with the name, but call it My Khe to the north and Cua Dai to the south, it's all just one long, luscious stretch of sand. Try surfing off the shores of Danang or pamper yourself at the resorts near Hoi An.
       2008 Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd.All rights reserved. For more information
       visit www.lonelyplanet.com.
       This is an edited extract from Lonely Planet's Vietnam,Cambodia, Laos and the Greater Mekong , 2nd edition by Nick Ray, et al,ฉ Lonely Planet Publications,2009.
       VIETNAM, CAMBODIA,LAOS AND THE GREATER MEKONG:925 baht from all good bookshops.

Literary mania

2009-09-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

       SIDNEY, BRITISH COLUMBIA - Here, in this coastal BC town, it's all about the books - thousands of them scattered throughout 12 stores.
       New books and rare books. Paperbacks and hardbacks. Children's books, classics and mysteries. Cookbooks, gardening books,even comic books.
       For two days, I was in literature bliss, not knowing where to start, losing track of time,and eventually being asked to leave one store because it was closing time - almost like a bartender cutting me off.
       Within seven blocks, I could find just about everything from the latest bestselling mystery by writer Michael Connelly to rare finds by 18th century writer Sir Walter Scott.
       These books quickly engage the senses and don't let go: Feel the raised letters of a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Smell the old paper from the pages of A History of Egyptian Mummies from 1834. Listen to the bookstore owners talk about their collections. Watch a new title unexpectedly catch someone's eye.
       Literary mania is a year-round preoccupation in this seaside town of 11,000 people,who live about 30 kilometres from British Columbia's capital Victoria. Wherever you are, there's a store on the next block. There's one next door. There's another a few doors down. And there's one around the corner.There's even one underground.
       Sidney is billed as Canada's only booktown, a place that emerged from the blueprint of Britain's Hay-On-Wye booktown on the English-Welsh border with 1,500 people and 30 bookstores.
       The books sit on tables, in bookshelves,and behind glass to preserve pages and bindings that survived a century long journey to this particular shelf.
       Some books get stacked along side bookcases already teeming with so many titles there is no room even for a thin paperback.
       The overflow reaches the top of shelves,putting some books slightly out of reach unless you find a stepladder.
       Some books still sit in boxes waiting to be unpacked and sorted. Sometimes store clerks are too slow for impatient customers,so it's not unusual to find a booklover begins wading through a new batch before it's on the shelves.
       Portions of the bookstores look more like a person's office, where books accumulate and await someone to come in and start reading.
       And somewhere behind every stack is someone eager to talk books.
       Start with Clive Tanner, who has a stake in five stores and started Sidney's booktown in 1994 after visiting Hay-On-Wye. He can be found roaming from Paperback Writer to Country Life Books to Time Enough for
       Books to Beacon Books.Tanner wants to know as much about readers where they are from, how they got here and when they are coming back as they do about his town.
       Or go visit Odean Long, who owns The Haunted Bookshop. One tableau underscores her love for British literature:a painting of Sir Walter Scott, famous for Ivanhoe and Rob Roy . Long refuses to stock books found on wire racks in local pharmacies. But she will have anything from a paperback of classic literature for a few bucks to a first edition of The House at Pooh Corner , which can fetch up to US$1,000 (about 35,000 baht).
       From there, walk few doors down into Galleon Books & Antiques where Rod Laurie and Brian MacLean own a shop with secondhand books shelved amid the decor of a genteel private study, surrounded by art,antiques and table centrepieces.
       Or sit down with Fred Gordon, a Scotsman who co-owns The Book Cellar, an underground bookstore with maps and more than 5,000 titles depicting the world's military history. Gordon opened the store with Tanner and sits ready to discuss his collection of Winston Churchill's works.
       If you're not browsing, buying or sitting along the coast getting lost in your latest discovery, chances are you're thinking about what's missing from your shelves.
       But it isn't always the book you're looking for. Rather, it's the one next to it or the one on the shelf below that catches your eye,allowing you to discover new titles in ways that searching the Internet would not.AP
       More INFO
       Sidney Booktown:www.sidneybooktown.ca/. Located in Sidney, British Columbia, in coastal western Canada, on Vancouver Island's Saanich Peninsula, about 30 kilometres from the provincial capital of Victoria.Getting there:Ferry service to Sidney includes BC Ferries from Vancouver, www.bcferries.bc.ca and the Coho Ferry from Victoria and Port Angeles, Wash, www.cohoferry.com. The nearest airport is in Victoria.

Rights group urges govt to stop harassing news website

2009-09-24T22:37:00.001-07:00

       A global rights group has urged Malaysia to stop harassing a news website after it put up a video of Muslim protesters stepping on a cow's head during a protest against a planned Hindu temple.
       The Aug 28 protest raised ethnic tensions in Muslim-majority Malaysia,where about 8% of the country's 28 million people are ethnic Indians. Most of the ethnic Indians are Hindus for whom cows are sacred animals.
       Independent news website Malaysiakini was told to remove two videos,including one of the protest in Shah Alam, the capital of Selangor state. The site has refused to remove them.
       The clips are only accessible to Malaysiakini subscribers with one of them showing protesters stepping and spitting on a severed cow head in front of the Selangor government's headquarters,demanding that a Hindu temple not be built in their neighbourhood. The other video was of a subsequent news conference by Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, a Muslim, who appeared to defend the protesters.
       In a statement received late on Tuesday, New York-based Human Rights Watch said the government should not tell Malaysiakini to remove the videos.
       "The government wants to make the problem disappear by taking the videos off the internet," Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch,said in the statement.
       In a Sept 3 letter to Malaysiakini, the government's Comunication and Multimedia Commission warned that the videos were against the law because they "contained offensive contents with intent to annoy any person, especially the Indians".
       The offence is punishable by up to a year in prison or up to 50,000 ringgit (484,164 baht). Commission officials have also questioned Malaysiakini's editors and staff and asked for the tapes. Malaysiakini has refused to remove the videos,saying they merely record news events.
       "The government's investigation of Malaysiakini is nothing short of media harassment and it needs to stop ...Malaysians are entitled to know all sides of a story. It is not up to the government to approve what news is fit to air, print,or post," Ms Pearson said.
       Twelve of the protesters have been charged with illegal assembly, and six of them also with sedition, defined as promoting ill will and hostility between different races. It is punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine. Illegal assembly is punishable by one year in jail and a fine.
       All mainstream media in Malaysia are linked to the government, which is dominated by Muslim Malays. They account for 60% of the population. Ethnic Chinese and Indians are the biggest minorities.
       Malaysiakini and blogs are not subject to censorship but some have faced court action for articles and comments deemed to be offensive.

ASEAN EXPORT ORDERS A BOON TO PRINTERS

2009-09-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

       The printing industry expects its exports to rise by up to 15 per cent this year mainly on advance orders from the Asean market.
       Kriengkrai Thiennukul, chairman of the Printing and Paper Packaging Industry Club of the Federation of Thai Industries, said yesterday that the main factor encouraging the industry for next year is orders from Asean, which accounts for 60 per cent of total printing exports. Overseas importers have placed orders for three to six months in advance.
       However, total printing sales this year were expected to be flat at US$1.45 billion or about Bt50 billion, he said.
       If markets abroad could improve next year, exports are estimated to reach Bt55 billion-Bt60 billion. The industry shifted its focus to Asean a few years ago as it saw stronger performance in this region than in the US and Europe.
       Printing exports in the first eight months of this year dropped by 9 per cent from the same period last year, but the export performances of other Southeast Asian countries were worse, declining 10-20 per cent.
       The Printing and Paper Packaging Industry Club formerly targeted the country to be the printing hub of Asia.
       Pornchai Rattanachaikanont, president of the Thai Printing Association, said manufacturers this year could export more kraft paper to Japan, and cardboard paper to India and Saudi Arabia.
       The industry has also gained a positive outlook for this quarter, as there are promising orders for Christmas and New Year from both local and overseas markets.
       Thailand is now hosting Pack Print International 2009 and the Thai Inter-national Plastic and Rubber Exhibition, which open today and continue to Saturday at the Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre. Some 400 printing, packaging, plastic and rubber manufacturers from 20 countries are joining the exhibition.
       Messe Dusseldorf Asia, the organiser, expects the event to attract about 20,000 visitors over its four-day run.

A piece of the action

2009-09-24T00:48:00.001-07:00

       And the crowd went wild as Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Computer came out on the stage to emcee the now-annual September music sales pitch, with loads of new stuff; in the biggest news, the iPod Nano got a video camera and FM radio, and Steve showed off the new iTunes Ver 9 management software; he also showed off the iPhone OS 3.1, available for download, which actually recommends apps you might like, has better synching for music and video, and lets you save video from email attachments into your playlist, aka Camera Roll.
       Apple cut the prices of its old iPod models just hours ahead of announcing new iPod models; the price of the 32-gigabyte iPod Touch was cut $120 to $279, or 9,500 baht in real money; a 120-gig iPod Classic now costs $229, a $20 cut by the generous folks who run Apple. Palm introduced a smaller,cheaper smartphone than the successful Pre; the Pixi, as it's called, is aimed at younger users; it's slimmer, has a smaller screen, but features a Qwerty keyboard,8GB of memory and a two-megapixel camera.
       US President Barack Obama, in a controversial school-time speech to most US children, advised them to be careful about what they put on Facebook and other social networks;"Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," he warned.
       First Solar of America signed a contract with the Chinese government to build the world's largest solar power plant in Inner Mongolia; assuming it is built, the Ordos City plant will push out 2,000 megawatts of electricity,around four times the size of the projects being built by the US Army in the Mojave Desert and by First Solar in California;the China project isn't near anything much; Ordos City is a coal-producing,eight-year-old, planned low-carbon development with about 1.5 million residents, roughly 800km west of Beijing.
       Networking firm Huawei of China,which has suffered a scandal or two in its Thailand work, was stung to the quick by mean stories in the Australian media that it might be tied to the Chinese espionage services; Guo Fulin, managing director of Huawei in Australia, was hurt by the insensitive stories that his company was under investigation by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation; Huawei is a public-owned company, he said, and it is unthinkable that any government agency would be using Huawei to conduct spying.
       The government of Cuba took a huge security gamble, and authorised post offices to provide Internet access to the public - just in case the Cuban government ever authorises the public to use the Internet at some point in the future; the only public access currently allowed is to an inside-Cuba intranet for email, provided by post offices at a cost of the equivalent of 55 baht an hour, in a country where the average wage is 680 baht a month.
       Japan fired an unmanned cargo craft into orbit; the 16.5-tonne unmanned H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) is on a mission to re-supply the space station;it will stay up there to continue ferrying stuff to the US shuttle fleet next year.
       Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologised for the way that people treated World War Two code-breaker and extraordinary computer geek Alan Turing for being gay; Turing was prosecuted for homosexual conduct in 1952,and a mere two years later, he committed suicide;"I am pleased to have the chance how deeply sorry I and we all are," said Mr Brown.
       Google , which plans to give away grazillions of books in order to get the (commercial) goods on its customers,offered to let all its opponents have a piece of the action;Amazon.com , which wants to sell grazillions of books to make tonnes of money directly, scoffed.Rupert Murdoch, the American media mogul, began collecting money at the tollgate to his news sites, in an interesting experiment to see if people will actually pay for news on the Net.
       IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp and Google all responded to a plaintive "Help" from the Newspaper Association of America on how to get money from customers who don't want to pay for news; Randy Bennett, who is the senior president for vice in newspapers, said he's looking over 11 different proposals on how to squeeze money out of you;Google, to no one's surprise, offered to put all newspapers behind one vast,semi-expensive firewall, because that would be so convenient for everyone to just pay one company one time, and then Google would spread the money around; sure, that ought to work.
       South African technology firm Unlimited IT dispatched Winston, a pigeon,from its office in Pietermaritzburg, with some data for its main hub in Durban strapped to the bird's leg; it took Winston one hour and eight minutes to fly the data card; meanwhile, Unlimited IT tried to send the same data via the speedchallenged Internet connections provided by leading Internet Telkom , and that download was four percent finished by the time Winston arrived; so it's not only countries that start with "T" that have Internet problems.
       T-Mobile of Germany and Orange of France merged their yuppiephone operations in Britain, creating a new $13.5 billion company with 28.4 mobile phone customers; the Deutsche Telekom-France Telecom venture will be the biggest provider in the UK, with a 37 percent market share, larger than O2 of Telefonica.

Web users to help digitise faded books

2009-09-24T00:45:00.000-07:00

       Google has acquired a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off that seeks to cut down on spam and fraud at websites while digitising books.
       ReCAPTCHA offers simple word puzzles that users must solve when registering at a website or completing an online purchase.
       Computers can't decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are at the keyboard.
       Unlike other word puzzles, however,ReCAPTCHA's text comes from actual books, letting the system create a digitised version in the process.
       Google Inc is already behind a major project to digitise books and put them online, mostly by scanning pages and using optical character recognition, or OCR, to make the texts searchable.
       OCR doesn't always work on text that is older, faded or distorted. In such cases,often the only way to digitise the works is to manually type them in.
       ReCAPTCHA provides an alternative.Snippets that the computer doesn't recognize are split up into single words that can be used as human tests at sites all over the Internet.
       The ReCAPTCHA system reassembles the text of the book from those responses.
       Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Luis von Ahn, who developed the tool and launched the ReCAPTCHA company in 2008 said:"From the start,people assumed the project was connected to Google, so it only makes sense that ReCAPTCHA Inc ultimately would find a home within Google."

Freed shoe thrower Zaidi wants to live in Switzerland

2009-09-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

       The Iraqi journalist who was jailed for throwing his shoes at George W. Bush said in an interview that he wants to move to Switzerland and rally Iraqis to take the ex-US president to court.
       "I really want to go to Switzerland because it is a neutral country and because it is a country that did not support the occupation of Iraq,"Muntazer al-Zaidi told TSR television in an interview broadcast on Monday.
       "Switzerland hosts many international organisations, including some that fight for children, and Switzerland is a country that has a great democratic tradition. It is an example for the world," he said in an interview taped on Thursday from an undisclosed location.
       Zaidi, who says he was tortured while in prison, was freed last week after being jailed for nine months for hurling the shoes at Mr Bush last December during
       a Baghdad press conference one month before he stood down as US president.
       His employer, Al-Baghdadia TV station in Baghdad, and a family member have said that Zaidi had left Iraq for Syria and would travel on to Greece for medical treatment.
       Zaidi told TSR that he wants to launch a "vast operation" to rally Iraqi families in order to lodge a legal complaint against Mr Bush.
       Mr Bush and his collaborators should face trial in an international tribunal for "war crimes committed during the occupation of Iraq", he said.
       Zaidi told the Swiss broadcaster that he was beaten with metal bars, tortured with electric cables and endured simulated drowning during his detention.
       An attorney in Geneva said in February that he had lodged a political asylum application on Zaidi's behalf. But one of Zaidi's brothers denied this.

63-year-old FEER ceases publication

2009-09-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

       The Hong Kong-based monthly magazine Far Eastern Economic Review will cease publication in December due to falling readership and advertising revenue, the publisher confirmed yesterday.
       The 63-year-old magazine has continued to lose readers and advertisers despite several attempts at invigorating the brand, publisher Dow Jones Consumer Media Group said.
       But faced with continuing readership declines at the Review , the company said it has chosen to concentrate its efforts on its core print and online publications, in an effort to boost the company's growth in Asia.
       Todd Larsen, chief operating officer at Dow Jones Consumer Media Group,said the company had been proud to be associated with the magazine and its invaluable contributions to the understanding of the Asia region.
       "The decision to cease publication of the Review is a difficult one made after a careful study of the magazine's prospects in a challenging business climate,"he said.
       "The magazine has a rich history of pioneering journalism and helped to set the standard for the press in Asia in the post-World War II era, when local publications often lacked the freedom to report honestly."
       Dow Jones has already expanded its Asian content in the Wall Street Journal and in its online editions with a redesigned WSJ.com website.
       It has also launched a mobile application that delivers news content via BlackBerry and iPhones.
       The company said these investments in Asia had translated into an increased print circulation of 6.3% year-over-year for the January-to-June period, with particularly significant growth in Hong Kong,India, Malaysia and Taiwan.
       Founded by Eric Halpern, an immigrant from Vienna, in Hong Kong in 1946, the Review published freelance analysis and opinion for some 30 years before becoming a weekly news magazine that charted Asia's turbulent economic and political rise. It was the subject of lawsuits from Singapore's leaders and banned from the island nation.
       Dwindling readership and advertising following the Asian financial crisis and dot.com meltdown forced a return to its roots in 2004. Nearly all the magazine's 80-plus staff were cut and it reverted to publishing mostly academic-style opinion and analysis in a monthly journal format.
       The Review as a monthly publication had a little over 12,000 subscribers across Asia, Europe and the United States.
       Its current editor, Hugo Restall, will remain on the Wall Street Journal 's editorial board.
       The company said current subscribers would be offered a one-year subscription to the Asian online edition of the Wall Street Journal.

D'Estaing pens "Princess Di" tale

2009-09-24T00:36:00.000-07:00

       Eighty-three-year-old former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing has brightened his long retirement by writing a steamy romantic novel about a French leader's affair with a British princess.
       The Princess and the President recounts the secret and passionate love of two characters clearly modelled closely on both Mr Giscard himself and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, according to yesterday's edition of the daily Le Figaro .Recast as President Jacques-Henri Lambertye and Princess Patricia of Cardiff, the pair meet at the closing dinner of a G7 summit after the young British royal has been left miserable by her princely husband's adultery.
       "I kissed her hand and she gave me a questioning look, her slate grey eyes widening as she tilted her head gently forward," the presidential first-person narrator recounts, according to an excerpt published in Le Figaro .The newspaper said Mr d'Estaing's book rises above the level of a wellwritten romantic novel because of the wealth of details he is able to supply about the French and British characters and the palaces in which they meet.
       As befits a member of the prestigious Academie Francaise, the president also alludes to the literary classics, such as Alexandre Dumas' tales of the love between French Princess Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham.
       But the book will most likely cause a stir as the latest to cash in on the posthumous Diana publishing industry,particularly as it includes a playful hint that there might be an element of truth in the story.
       According to Le Figaro , the book opens with the phrase "Promise kept" and ends with:"'You asked me for permission for you to write your story,' she told me.'I give you it, but you must make me a promise ...'."
       While marketed as a novel, there is little doubt that the characters are closely modelled on real-life figures from recent history.
       Princess Patricia shares Diana's passion for charity work with children with Aids and campaigns as she did against anti-personnel mines.
       "A fortnight before my marriage, my future husband told me that he had a mistress and was determined to continue his relationship with her," Princess Patricia tells her French lover, according to the leaked extract.
       President Lambertye also appears to be a close fit with Mr d'Estaing, except for one key detail, one that suggests that the author is keen to reimagine history in a more flattering light.
       While the fictional President Lam-bertye wins a second term with a comfortable 56%, the real Mr d'Estaing was turfed out of office in 1981 after being accused of corruptly receiving diamonds from Emperor Bokassa of Central Africa.
       Mr d'Estaing lost the vote in May 1981, costing him the chance of representing France two months later when Diana Spencer married Prince Charles,and thus the pair were never simultaneously The Princess and the President .Nevertheless, some commentators said that Mr d'Estaing had left himself open to ridicule by penning a book even hinting at an affair - he was 55 years old in 1981, Diana was 19. Some warned he risked tainting his legacy.
       "How does he want posterity to remember him?" demanded the magazine Marianne on its website."As the guy who legalised abortion? Who gave 18-year-olds the vote? Who brought female ministers into government?
       "By talking about Diana, Giscard is remaking himself the great inventor of the celebrity presidency. A low-brow gossip president who needs the skills of a psychoanalyst to understand history,"it stormed.
       Diana died in a road accident with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in Paris in August 1997.The Princess and the President will be released in Paris in French on Oct 1 by publishers Fallois-Xo.

Famed "Shin-chan" cartoonist dies in fall

2009-09-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

       Tributes poured in yesterday for Japanese cartoonist Yoshito Usui after confirmation the bruised body of a man found on a mountain was that of the creator of the popular Crayon Shin-chan series.
       Usui, 51, who was popular worldwide among manga enthusiasts, disappeared on Sept 11 after he went hiking on his own on a mountain range straddling Gunma and Nagano prefectures, north of Tokyo.
       A body was found on Saturday by a fellow hiker and his family late Sunday confirmed it was Usui,a recluse who was married with two daughters.
       The indications are he fell and there was no suggestion of suicide, police
       and reports said.
       His death dampened celebration yesterday on the Respect for the Aged holiday in Kas-
       kabe, a suburban city
       outside Tokyo which has become wellknown nationally as the place where the ca-
       toonist lived and set
       the Crayon Shin-chan story.
       "I'm deeply depressed to hear the
       unfortunate news. I pray his soul rests in peace with citizens here," Kasukabe mayor Ryozo Ishikawa said by telephone.
       "I saw many sorrowful citizens today as 'Shin-chan' is definitely a Kasukabe kid. We hope 'Shin-chan', a byword for cheerfulness, will keep staying here with his family," he said.
       Usui made his debut as a manga author in 1987 and sprang to prominence in the 1990s with Crayon Shin-chan ,which features the daily life of Shinnosuke, a mischievous five-year-old boy.
       The series ran regularly in a magazine and later was made into a book and animation version.
       "We had been praying for Mr Usui's safety with his family but now feel the utmost regret over how things have turned out. We are in a big shock,"Futabasha, the publishing house of Crayon Shin-chan , said in a statement.His books have been translated in 14 countries and the animated version has been aired in 30 countries.

Newspapers "not yet out of woods"

2009-09-23T23:56:00.001-07:00

       Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free-fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010.
       With 10 days left in the third quarter,analysts, publishers and ad buyers say ad revenue will be down about 25%industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less.
       They predict that the decline will be smaller in the fourth quarter. Several of them say the usual back-to-school uptick in newspaper advertising seems to have been a little better than in most years, if only because July and August were so weak.
       Ordinarily, such numbers would be seen as catastrophic, but these times are not ordinary.
       The drop in combined print and digital ad revenue in 2008,16.6%, according to the Newspaper Association of America,was the worst since the Depression. But it looks rosy next to 2009, when revenue fell 28.3% in the first quarter and 29% in the second.
       In the last few days, signs of life have been seen from struggling retailers, and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, and others have speculated that the recession has ended. Media executives, including Rupert Murdoch,have talked about advertising starting to rebound. Last week, shares in several newspaper companies, including Gannett, McClatchy and the New York Times Co, jumped 10% or more, to their highest prices this year.
       Alexia Quadrani, an analyst at J.P.Morgan, said newspaper stocks had benefited from a trickle-down effect as investors, hearing positive news about advertising, asked,"What stocks are still looking relatively inexpensive among media stocks?"
       She said ad revenue would show a percentage decline in the mid-20s for the third quarter, about 20 in the fourth quarter and, next year,"more modestly negative, but still negative."
       Several publishing executives said those numbers seemed about right. The executives, who insisted on anonymity because they are prohibited from discussing financial information until it is made public, also said they saw no particular justification for the recent spike in stock prices.
       If the rate of decline in advertising slows, it will largely be because 2008 grew steadily worse as the year wore on and the recession deepened, making year-to-year comparisons less stark. The figures for the fourth quarter of 2009 will be compared with the final quarter of 2008, when the financial markets were in crisis and newspaper advertising fell almost 20 percent, at that time the worst performance in generations.
       Roberta Garfinkle, director of print strategy at TargetCast TCM, was sceptical about any improvement in the third quarter, but said signs of recovery could appear in the fourth quarter.
       "Newspapers will be the last media to get any ad comeback," Garfinkle said."But we're seeing more people wanting to have the conversation about doing some print advertising, where earlier we weren't even having the conversation."

Bestseller sees plots and profit in crisis

2009-09-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

       A disaster worse than the financial crisis will engulf the world,predicts China's latest financial bestseller,and its author is preparing to profit from the turmoil. But that profit will not be in US dollars.
       In Currency Wars 2 , Song Hongbing claims a shadowy global elite will introduce a single world currency around 2024, tossing the dollar into the dustbin,condemned by loose-spending Washington policies and the waning dominance of the West.
       Song's book, a sequel to his 2007 bestseller, claims this murky establishment of bankers and politicians stood by as markets crashed last year, hoping the trauma would hasten the world's acceptance of a single currency and world government.
       "This crisis was bound to occur, but there were people who understood that beforehand and set in place the arrangements," Song told Reuters in an interview in his office.
       "This crisis was just warming up public opinion for a single global currency ...Another, even bigger crisis will be needed to launch the world currency into reality,"he added.
       Currency Wars 2 will not convince many economists. But its popularity is a telling sign of China's contradictory times.
       It echoes the mix of disdain, suspicion and awe of the United States that is reflected in Chinese media and official comment.
       Song's intricate diagrams and claims of generations of purported conspirators guiding the world's course read like the plot of a thriller novel, and footnotes in his book suggest familiarity with farright US conspiracy theories.
       When Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh this week, he is sure to deliver a sobre mix of proposals and admonitions that avoids such heady claims.
       Yet China often says the United States has long backed plots seeking to subjugate it, even while Beijing is the world's biggest holder of US treasury debt, which makes up a big chunk of its foreign exchange holdings.
       "The popularity of Currency Wars reflects a widespread feeling that China's power isn't properly reflected in the way the global financial system works," said Wang Yong, a professor of international political economy at Peking University.
       "A conspiracy theory is always an easy way to explain that imbalance ... It helps make sense of complicated issues."
       A US decision to put high duties on Chinese-made tyres could stoke the Chinese public anger with Washington that helped make Song's two books bestsellers, he said.
       Yet in the looming turmoil, China should be pragmatic and focus on seizing economic opportunities."There are always opportunities to make money, even during a crisis or depression."
       Song is no stranger to the United States. Now 41, he studied education at American University in Washington, D.C.,before a business career and work as a financial pundit.
       He likened the financial crisis to Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, which he claimed President Roosevelt was warned about but chose not to stop.
       Likewise, Song argued, the world's central bankers stood by despite mounting signs of a looming financial crash.
       "It was a crisis they perhaps awaited,with the goal of establishing consensus for a unified global currency."
       Seeing that the US dollar "is doomed,Federal Reserve bankers are backing plan for a currency based on gold reserves and greenhouse gas emissions credits,which may eventually leave China holding mountains of worthless dollars."
       The role of Jewish financiers from the Rothschilds onwards is a thread throughout his two books. He said he was not hostile to Jews."They aren't singled out. They are one group competing along with Protestant and Catholic financiers."
       Before the currency and a world government to control it can be born, the United States will suffer a decline echoing the hyperinflation and chaos that Germany endured before the emergence of Nazism.
       He said smart investors could profit from the crisis by buying gold and platinum."Beijing should resist backing the plans until it has grown strong enough to match the West and win a big say in the new order.
       "This will be a massive reshuffling of global wealth," he said."If that's the way things are headed and you can't stop it, then why not try to get rich from it?"

AMARIN'S MAGAZINES SEEK WEBSITE BOOST

2009-09-23T23:52:00.000-07:00

       Amarin Printing and Publishing will focus more on connecting its magazines with their readers next year, to increase advertising revenue and reader numbers.
       The plan is the company's main business strategy to boost sustainable growth amid the changing of lifestyles towards the huge popularity of social networking. Rarin Utakapan Panjarungrot, managing director of the Publishing Business Division, last week said one way to create greater connectivity was to improve the magazines' websites to give them more content than in the past and provide interactive online columns, such as questions and answers on beauty topics.
       Some content unable to be published in the magazines will be posted on the websites. This, as well as interactive articles, will differentiate the websites' content from that of the magazines. It is hoped this will attract more readers and website visitors.
       This model is quite new for the Thai magazine market but recognised abroad, Rarin siad.
       Amarin began to create online social networks with two magazines-Baan Lae Suan and Room-last year. The next is Praew, Amarin's flagship magazine for women, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.
       "After we fixed more attention on online media, Baan Lae Suan's website visitors, for example, increased 50 per cent to 130,000 a month, while circulation rose 10 per cent. This was beyond our expectations in this tough year. We expect to experience the same response from Praew and other magazines," Rarin said.
       At present, advertising revenue from the websites accounts for only 2 per cent of the company's ad revenue. It expects this to increase to 5 per cent next year and 10 per cent within three years, she said.
       Advertising contributes 30 per cent of the total revenue of the Publishing Business Division. The rest comes from magazine sales, book publishing and event organising, at contribution rates of 30 per cent, 30 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively.
       Rarin believes the company's revenue growth this year may fall to a single-digit rate. Last year, it recorded revenue of Bt1.87 billion. The performance is expected to improve next year, due to the economic recovery and the company's new business strategy.
       As well as increasing advertising revenue through online media, she said Amarin would also focus more on its event-organising business next year by expanding to serve outside clients. It now organises only its own events, such as a Baan Lae Suan fair. It will recruit more event-business unit.
       "We have enough experience in this field and are confident we can do this. Organising events is a business that generates greater gross-profit margins than publishing, because we don't have fixed costs. This could publishing business, which relies mostly on ad revenue," she said.

Hardline rebels ban "un-Islamic books"

2009-09-21T23:58:00.001-07:00

       Somalia's hardline alShabaab insurgents have warned schools not to use textbooks provided by UN agencies and other donors they accuse of being un-Islamic.
       The rebel group, which Washington says is al-Qaeda's proxy in Somalia, hit the African Union's main base in Mogadishu with twin suicide car bombs on Thursday, killing 17 peacekeepers in a country of growing concern to Western security analysts.
       And in a sign of the insurgents' growing influence in the chaotic city, the rebels issued orders to schools on Saturday.
       "Some UN agencies like Unesco are supplying Somali schools with text books to try to teach our children un-Islamic subjects," al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told Koranic students gathered at Mogadishu's Nasrudin mosque.
       "I call upon all Somali parents not to send their youngsters to schools with curriculum supported by the UN agencies."

A Midwest chronicle

2009-09-21T23:57:00.000-07:00

       Lorrie Moore had just begun working on what would become her new novel,A Gate at the Stairs , when she told one interviewer that she was writing a book "about hate".
       Later she recalled telling someone else that it was a novel about chores.
       In May, speaking to a roomful of booksellers at BookExpo America, the publishing industry's annual convention, she said she had written a book - her first in 11 years - about a 20-yearold woman because she viewed 20 as "the universal age of passion".
       And in a recent interview at a brasserie here,two blocks from her home in a neighbourhood of colourful Victorian and prairie-style houses,Moore described the book as a meditation on "what it meant to be in this town in the Midwest in this particular time in contemporary America".
       As it turns out, Moore's slippery characterisations of A Gate at the Stairs , published by Alfred A. Knopf, are quite apt.
       The novel takes place in the aftermath of September 11,2001, with the threat of terrorism and war hovering over a liberal university town described as "the Athens of the Midwest".
       It also features a prickly couple, Sarah Brink and Edward Thornwood, whose marital relations sometimes veer toward something that looks like hate. Tassie Keltjin, the 20-year-old college student who narrates the novel, falls in love, for the first time, with a mysterious foreign student.Passion ensues.
       And about those chores: During one of the book's most startling revelations, the housecleaner can be heard "at the back door, with his stabbing,fidgeting key in the lock and his clanking pails and mops".
       Moore's fans - ardent, even cultish - have been waiting ever since Birds of America , her last book, a story collection, was published in 1998.That book, widely praised, broke onto The New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list for five weeks.
       It also subjected Moore, who at 52 still seems girlish with her shoulder-length brown hair and voice that swoops from low to high registers, to the intruding curiosity of those who wanted to know more about her personal life after reading People Like That Are the Only People Here , a short story about a baby with cancer that Moore acknowledged was somewhat autobiographical.
       "The problem of course is you don't want everyone talking about your kid," Moore said,recalling the rounds of publicity."And that was really hard to avoid."
       This time around she is remaining circumspect about any autobiographical antecedents to AGate at the Stairs , her seventh book.In one of the novel's central plotlines, Tassie takes a job as a baby sitter working for Sarah, the owner of a local restaurant, and Edward, a cancer researcher, as they adopt a part African-American baby girl. As the girl's devoted care-giver, Tassie is exposed to both explicit and implicit racism.Moore's own teenage son is adopted and part African-American, but she would say only that some of the incidents in the novel may have happened to other children and parents she knew.
       Instead she invoked Madame Butterfly and Jane Eyre , works that feature themes of abandonment and orphanhood."I'm interested in adoption because those kids become Jane Eyre,"said Moore, alternately sipping from a cup of coffee and a small glass of pale Belgian beer."Not to push the Jane Eyre thing too much, but of course there is that racial aspect to it," she said, alluding to the Creole heritage of the Mrs Rochester character."And there's a racial component to Madame Butterfly , so these were the Ur-texts hovering over my desk while I just barrelled ahead and wrote a Midwestern story."
       As one of the most nuanced writers working today, Moore is as likely to write about sweeping themes as she is to deliver sharp-witted and trenchant observations about life's small moments. Her career has been building since she sold her first story collection,Self-Help , at 26,gaining instant literary credibility.
       "Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary American writer," the novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote in The New York Times Book Review on Sunday ."Brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, Moore is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows."
       And in her review in The Times , Michiko Kakutani wrote that "in this haunting novel, Ms Moore gives us stark, melancholy glimpses into her characters' hearts."
       In A Gate at the Stairs those sorrows and melancholy glimpses come in some brutally heartrending scenes."There are times when you feel like stepping into a dark dream, and you really want to travel to some very unhappy place,"Moore said,"in order, in some ways, to close the book and step away from it".
       Moore, who had recently had cataracts diagnosed and sometimes used prescription sunglasses to see inside, said that part of the reason it took her so long to finish the novel was that she could not bring herself to write those devastating passages.
       "There were certain scenes that felt so heartbreaking to me that I didn't know how I was going to write them," she said."I cried all the way through the writing of it."
       Then there were the more practical constraints on her time. Since 1984 Moore has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,and eight years ago she divorced her husband (no, she doesn't want to talk about it) and is now raising her son as a single mother.
       Moore sees such challenges falling disproportionately on women."You look out into the world and you say,'Who are the working meaning you also have a job, not just writing novels - single mums who are writing novels that you want to read?"' she said.
       Jayne Anne Phillips, a fellow writer and fan,said balancing a job and child-rearing with writing had shaped Moore's work."The double edge of it is that I think any form of real spiritual surrender does inform one's work," Phillips said."But the problem is that oftentimes one doesn't have time to write the work."
       In A Gate at the Stairs Sarah struggles to juggle her fervent desire to be a mother with her allconsuming job as a restaurant owner. Writing about food allowed Moore to play with the terminology that was infiltrating menus around town. At one point Tassie reads a menu from Sarah's restaurant:
       "There were ramps and fiddleheads, vinaigrettes and roux - summer had not yet taken these away."
       And then, in a moment of pure Lorrie Mooreness, Tassie observes,"Though only now did I realise that roux was not spelled rue, as surely it should be and would be soon."
       Although she has spent a quarter-century in the Midwest, Moore, who commuted between New York and Madison for several years, maintains some of the arch distance of the outsider. Strolling by an Indian restaurant near the state capitol,she sniffed the air and noted:"You walk around and you get a whiff of garlic and you feel like you are in a real city."
       But living far from the literary nerve centre of New York, she said, has allowed some liberties.
       "If you live in Madison, Wisconsin, and teach creative writing, you've already made some decisions about what you're going to do as an artist, and you're quite free to do as you please,"she said.
       "Some people get their books on the bestseller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way. I already have been luckier than I ever dreamed that I could ever be."

A truer Kennedy compass

2009-09-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

       In a memoir being published this month,Sen Edward M. Kennedy called his behaviour after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne "inexcusable"and said the events may have shortened the life of his ailing father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
       In that book,True Compass , Kennedy said he was dazed, afraid and panicked in the minutes and hours after he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Kopechne as his passenger.
       The senator, who left the scene and did not report the accident to the police until after her body was found the next day, admitted in the memoir that he had "made terrible decisions"at Chappaquiddick. He also said that he had hardly known Kopechne, a young woman who had been an aide to his late brother Robert,and that he had had no romantic relationship with her.
       The account by Kennedy, who died on August 25 at 77 years of age, adds little to what is known about the accident and its aftermath but recounts how they weighed on him and his family. The book does not shy from the accident, or from some other less savory aspects of the senator's life, including a notorious 1991 drinking episode in Palm Beach, Florida,or the years of heavy drinking and womenchasing that followed his 1982 divorce from his wife, Joan.
       But it also offers rich detail on his relationships with his father, siblings and children that round out a portrait of a man who lived the most public of lives and yet remained something of a mystery. Among other things,it says that in 1984 he decided against seeking the presidency after hearing the emotional objections of his children, who, it says, feared for his life.
       In the 532-page memoir, Kennedy also said he had always accepted the finding of a presidential commission that a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was responsible for former president John F. Kennedy's assassination.Robert F. Kennedy grieved so deeply over the killing of the president that family members feared for his emotional health, Kennedy wrote,saying that it "veered close to being a tragedy within a tragedy".
       Kennedy's book provides new details about life in the US's famous political family and covers the remarkable career that was celebrated in memorials last week before his burial near John and Robert Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery. It provides his personal account of being stricken by the brain cancer that took his life and his decision to battle the disease as aggressively as he could. And it deals openly and regretfully with "selfdestructive drinking", especially after Robert's death.
       Kennedy said that his father had encouraged intensive competition among his children,especially his sons, which fed his recurrent feelings of inadequacy after the death of his three brothers, all of them older.
       "Competition, of course, is the route to achievement in America," Kennedy wrote."As I think back to my three brothers, and about what they had accomplished before I was even out of my childhood, it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up."
       The book, published by Twelve, a division of the Hachette book group, was originally scheduled to be published in 2010 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the election of former president Kennedy but was moved up because of the senator's illness. Much of the book, written with a collaborator, Ron Powers,was based on notes taken by Kennedy over 50 years as well as hours of recordings for an oral history project at the University of Virginia.
       The memoir also suggested that former president Kennedy had grown uneasy about Vietnam and was increasingly convinced that the conflict could not be resolved militarily. It said the president's "antenna" was up, and surmised that he was "on his way to finding that way out", though "he just never got the chance". Kennedy wrote of a secret meeting in the spring of 1967 between former president Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, whose increasingly outspoken criticism of the war in Southeast Asia was becoming a political threat to Johnson. According to the book, Robert Kennedy proposed that Johnson give him authority to personally negotiate a peace treaty in Vietnam. This implicitly would have kept Robert from running for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, a prospect that worried Johnson.
       "If the president had accepted his offer,"the book said,"Bobby certainly would have been too immersed in the peace process to become involved in a presidential primary."
       But Johnson could not take the offer at face value, concerned that Kennedy had ulterior motives, the senator wrote.
       In raw and often intimate terms, Kennedy wrote of the despair he experienced after Robert's assassination in 1968. It was at first impossible for him to return to the Senate.And even when he managed to, he could not focus on his work. He spent days on the ocean,taking long sails from the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
       He described drinking to excess during that period and driving Joan Kennedy "deeper into her anguish". He drove himself and his staff hard."I tried to stay ahead of the darkness."
       The shooting of his brothers traumatised him in ways both existential and mundane,Kennedy noted. He would flinch at loud, sudden noises like the explosion of firecrackers, or hit the deck whenever a car backfired.
       Kennedy also revealed that he had written a letter to the Los Angeles district attorney asking that he not seek the death penalty for Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.(The judge, Herbert V. Walker, disregarded the letter,Kennedy said, though Sirhan's life would be spared by the California Supreme Court.)
       The book opens with an account of Kennedy's falling ill and then, in May of last year, receiving a diagnosis of a lethal brain tumour. Doctors said he had just a few months to live, Kennedy wrote, but he refused to believe the grim prognosis, because he had been raised not to give up. His son Teddy Jr had survived a supposedly fatal cancer in his leg, and his daughter, Kara, had beaten lung cancer, against long odds.
       "And I believe that approaching adversity with a positive attitude at least gives you a chance for success," he said."Approaching it with a defeatist attitude predestines the outcome: Defeat. And a defeatist's attitude is just not in my DNA."
       Kennedy expressed regret over the 1991 episode in Palm Beach, when he went drinking with his son Patrick and his nephew, William K. Smith, who would be charged with rape that allegedly occurred that night.(Smith was later acquitted.)
       Those events hobbled him later that year when Clarence Thomas was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. Kennedy strongly opposed the nomination, but, he wrote, he could not speak out as forcefully as he would have liked.
       "I also understood another hard truth: with all the background noise about Palm Beach and my bachelor lifestyle, I would have been the wrong person" to raise questions about Thomas' alleged sexual harassment of Anita F. Hill.
       But even as Kennedy offered apologies for the darker moments of his life, he raged against the portrait of him in some tabloids, magazines and books. He described some of those accounts as "totally false, bizarre and evil theories".
       Of his indulgences, Kennedy wrote:"I have enjoyed the company of women. I have enjoyed a stiff drink or two or three, and I've relished the smooth taste of a good wine. At times, I've enjoyed these pleasures too much. I've heard the tales about my exploits as a hell-raiser some accurate, some with a wisp of truth to them and some so outrageous that I can't imagine how anyone could really believe them."
       Kennedy wrote about his views of various presidents, sometimes affectionately, sometimes harshly. Some of his most critical words are directed against Jimmy Carter.
       He said that while they had found common cause on a few issues, their relationship had broken down over health care. He accused Carter of timidity that doomed any chance of meaningful health insurance reform and said the president had been virtually impossible to talk to."Clearly President Carter was a difficult man to convince - of anything," Kennedy wrote."One reason for this was that he did not really listen."
       While Kennedy had little patience for the president's piety and punctiliousness, he found the disengagement of Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, at times oddly charming, though at other times frustrating. The senator said it had been difficult to get Reagan to focus on policy matters. He described a meeting with him that he and other senators had sought to press for shoe and textile import limits.
       The senators were told that they would have just 30 minutes with the president. Reagan began the meeting, the book said, commenting on Kennedy's shoes - asking if they were Bostonians - and then talking for 20 minutes about shoes and his experience selling shoes for his father."Several of us began conspicuously to glance at our watches." But to no avail."And it was over! No one got a word in about shoe or textile quota legislation."
       Kennedy also complained that White House meetings had been barely tolerable, in part because no liquor was ever served during Carter's term."He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living," Kennedy wrote.
       Kennedy said he had been disappointed by former president Bill Clinton's inability to enact comprehensive health care legislation, but he did not blame Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who helped write the administration's proposal.
       He also said he called Clinton immediately after the president appeared on television to confess his affair with Monica Lewinsky,reassuring him that he would stand by him during that difficult period.
       In the midst of recounting that anecdote,Kennedy took a break to offer his views on the scrutinising of the private lives of public officials,something with which he clearly was quite familiar. Kennedy said he had no quarrel with such inquiries.
       "But do I think it tells the whole story of character? No I truly do not," he wrote. Men and women, he said, are more complicated than that."Some people make mistakes and try to learn from them and do better. Our sins don't define the whole picture of who we are."

The many mysteries of Wat Si Chum

2009-09-21T23:53:00.000-07:00

       Wat Si Chum in Sukhothai is perhaps the most intriguing of old Siam's monuments.The peekaboo view of the image through the slit entranceway gives the building a secretive air. Louis Fournereau's photographs from 1891 bathed the ruins in an atmosphere of ancient enchantment.The massive walls hide a narrow twisting staircase roofed with beautiful engravings of Jataka tales. Curiously, there are only 100 Jatakas illustrated, rather than the 500-plus usual for such displays. The roof seems to have totally disappeared.Inscription Two, found inside the temple,is so rich and jumbled that there are at least four interpretations of what it says and means.
       This mystery has invited imagination.Most people have imagined the roof was an inverted bowl shape by analogy with similar looking buildings such as Wat Phaya Dam in Si Satchanalai. Eighty years ago, George Coedes proposed that the Jataka engravings had been moved from an original location at Sukhothai's Wat Mahathat. Griswold and Prasert endorsed this idea on grounds that Jatakas were meant for "edification of the general public". Betty Gosling ingeniously reconstructed how they might have appeared at Wat Mahathat, and suggested they had been "hidden away" in
       Wat Si Chum after a liturgical schism.
       As this beautiful and erudite book shows, all this speculation was possible because none of these scholars went to take a proper look.
       After examining the engraved slabs in situ in the concealed staircase, the architect-historian Pierre Pichard shows that they were not moved from elsewhere, but purpose-made to fit
       this location. ML Pattaratorn Chir-
       pravati adds that there was
       nothing strange about them
       being "hidden" in such an apparently obscure place. As
       with the paintings deep in the sealed crypt of Wat
       Ratburana in Ayutthaya,they were offerings, created
       as part of the sacredness of the building, and were never meant to be seen.Pichard also has a stunning idea about the roof. The giveaway is that
       the walls are unusually thick and heavily buttressed, as if designed to bear an exceptionally heavy weight. What if the surviving structure were only a fraction of the intended building? What if the original design,such as the Chedi Ku Kut in Lamphun province, was a five-stage tower?The base could stand it. The staircase continuing up another four levels could have accommodated the full 500-plus Jataka tales.Pichard has computerconstructed a possible image of what it might have looked like - a massive tower rising 60m and weighing 7,400 tonnes.
       Who had the vision and power to attempt such a project? Mr Pattaratorn argues that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to associate the great monk Si Sattha with Wat Si Chum.Further, the clue to the building may lie in Inscription Two, which is an account of Si Sattha's forebears, life, works and travels.
       Mr Pattaratorn argues that the Mahathat mentioned in Inscription Two is not in either Sukhothai or Sri Lanka,but is clearly the Sri Dhanyakataka, a massive stupa that once stood near Amaraoti in central India.She speculates that Si Sattha travelled to this site as well as to Sri Lanka, and was inspired to build something as grand as he had seen on his travels back in his hometown of Sukhothai. She calculates that Si Sattha must have returned around 1350. By comparing some motifs in the Jataka engravings (fan, ascetics, peonies,etc.) with other, datable depictions, she estimates the engravings were made around 1370.
       Peter Skilling traces the depictions of the Jatakas from the earliest Indian reliefs in the 1st century BC, through the first appearances in Siam at Chula Pathon Chedi in the Dvaravati era, up to their modern appearance in comic books.
       Skilling also provides an exhaustive account of the modern discovery and interpretation of Wat Si Chum.
       The second part of the book contains a catalogue of the Jataka slabs compiled by Skilling, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn and Santi Pakdeekham. Each engraving is beautifully photographed, with an additional close-up of the inscription. In most cases, Fournereau's
       1891 rubbing is presented for comparison, showing how much the engravings have deteriorated in the interim. The compilers had the wonderful
       idea of showing the depictions
       of the same story at Wat Khrua Wan in Thon Buri, the Ananda Temple in Pagan, and occasionally elsewhere. They
       also transcribe and translate
       the inscription,and provide a full English rendering of the Jataka
       tale. Where the slabs are now totally unreadable,they guess which tales
       would have been depicted at this location based on the sequence.
       Wat Si Chum has not lost its intrigue. This team has cleared up some old mysteries, but then created a new one.Instead of a tale of engravings being chipped off the Wat
       Mahathat and furtively hidden away, we have a story about the most ambitious construction project in the Chao Phraya basin of its time, and a mystery of why it went unfinished. Probably the project faltered when Si Sattha died at an unknown date after 1376. Pichard surmises that Si Sattha had a "touch of megalomania" and would always have faced opposition to his overblown vision.Mr Pattaratorn wonders if the repeated raiding by Ayutthaya armies frightened away the craftsmen and manpower needed for such a massive project.Possibly the kings and nobles were not at all keen on a building that consumed so much local manpower, and glorified religion more than worldly matters.
       This superb study invites us to look at Wat Si Chum in a whole new light.Rather than a rather squat, blocky building, we can now imagine it as one-fifth of a fantastic tower. Rather than wondering why the Jataka slabs were "hidden away", we can view them as intrinsic to a very ambitious project of religious construction. This revised view of the building raises new questions about Sukhothai's history. What should we make of the fact that this massive project was sited outside the royal city, among the forest monasteries? Why was it never completed? was it never completed?

CHINA'S ATTACKS ON THE MEDIA UNACCEPTABLE

2009-09-19T21:48:00.001-07:00

       Emerging superpower's violent trampling of press freedom is a major cause for concern About a week ago, some 700 journalists in Hong Kong got together to voice their concerns over the recent assault on one of their colleagues who was sent to the restive Xianjiang region to cover the disturbances in the Muslim-majority region.
       They were calling on the Xinjiang government to apologise to the reporters and called on Beijing to do more to stop media repression and intimidation.
       On September 4, television reporter Lam Tsz-ho, and two cameraman - Lau Wing-chuen and Lam Chun-wai - were reportedly tied up and beaten by police while they were covering protests in Urumqi that erupted after a spate of needle attacks in the city.
       When the Chinese authorities broke their silence on the issue just a few days later, the Xinjiang government spokeswoman, Hou Hanmin, said the authorities regretted the incident but nevertheless blamed the journalists for inciting unrest.
       Mak Yin-ting, chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), called the statement "outrageous and blatantly false" allegations against the journalists.
       "This is a violent trampling of press freedom," Mak said. "It is not a single incident. Even last year, lots of our journalists were beaten up while reporting in China. The situation is getting worse now," she added.
       In August, Chinese authorities detained two Hong Kong NOW TV journalists covering the trial of rights activist Tan Zuoren.
       Police said they were looking for drugs. But after seven hours of searching the rooms they came up with noting. We never realised the Chinese authorities were so strict about illicit drugs. Perhaps they just didn't like that Tan, who led an investigation into the collapse of schools in the Sichuan earthquake, was receiving media attention.
       This past Friday, Chinese authorities assaulted three journalists from Kyodo News, a Japanese news agency, in their Beijing hotel room.
       The three were reportedly kicked and their computers destroyed by pounding on the floor. The journalists were in the Chinese capital to cover the National Day rehearsals when authorities stormed into the room.
       They chose the hotel so they could get a good view of the Tiananmen Square, the venue for the upcoming 60th National Day celebration scheduled for October 1.
       On this day columns of tanks and assorted other military vehicles bearing missiles and an array of other military hardware will rumble down the Avenue of Heavenly Peace as they make their way towards the square.
       Naturally, they wanted a good view. But the authorities thought they had violated a government order to all journalists that they were not permitted to photograph the rehearsal in spite of the fact that it was being conducted out in the open.
       It is difficult to understand the logic of such an order. Was the Beijing government afraid that somehow pictures of the rehearsals will detract from the actual event?
       Or was it because they just didn't like the fact that somebody out there might be violating their order?
       In this day and age where just about every mobile phone has a built-in camera, the idea of keeping such an enormous public event, rehearsal or not, a state secret is nothing less than absurd.
       We really hope that the authorities didn't beat up the Kyodo reporters and cameramen because they were working for a Japanese news agency.
       For a country that has been billed as an emerging superpower, which is looking to strengthen ties with countries abroad, it is disturbing that the Communist giant does not understand that press freedom is the cornerstone of society.
       Beating up journalists, regardless of what outfit they are working for, is, indeed, a non-starter.
       The attacks against reporters in Xinjiang and in Hong Kong were not the first and probably will not be the last. The world community and the media industry needs to applaud the reporters in Hong Kong, including the Foreign Correspondents' Club there, for speaking out against such behaviour.
       "It is the first time the entire spectrum of Hong Kong society, including senior government officials and National People's Congress delegates, have condemned such treatment of reporters," the club's president Tom Mitchell was reported by Agence-France Presse as saying.
       Let's hope that the Beijing government takes notice.

CHINESE GUARDS BEAT JAPANESE JOURNALISTS

2009-09-19T21:47:00.001-07:00

       Chinese authorities assaulted three journalists from a Japanese news agency in their Beijing hotel room, the agency said yesterday, kicking them and destroying two computers.
       The three journalists from Kyodo News were in the Chinese capital covering a National Day rehearsal when authorities stormed into the room of their hotel on Friday night, the news agency said. Kyodo alleged a reporter and two cameramen were kicked "and hit their heads to make them kneel down...", without specifying who the "authorities" were.
       They threw the two computers out of the room and into the corridor of the hotel, which is near Tiananmen Square, the venue of the National Day celebrations scheduled for October 1.
       Yasushi Kato, bureau chief of the Kyodo News Beijing office, said several men stormed into the hotel room after one of the journalists opened the door, but they did ntot identify themselves.
       Kyodo reported they destroyed two computers by throwing them into the corridor. Kato said a reporter and a cameraman were Japanese and the third was a Chinese assistant.
       China's Foreign Ministry had ordered news organisations not to take photos when the country conducted a rehearsal September 6, but the ministry has not issued such an order since then, according to Kyodo.
       Security forces have swarmed over central Beijing in the lead-up to a parade that will mark 60 years since the founding of Communist China.
       Businesses, schools, and traffic shut down as columns of tanks and assorted other military vehicles bearing missiles and an array of other hardware rumbled down the city's deserted mainest-west thoroughtfare, the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, and towards Tiananmen Square.
       Security forces had earlier swarmed over cental Beijing, shooing citizens away from what will be the parade's route through the heart of the city.
       Earlier this week, hundreds of journalists protects in Hong Kong, in southern China, ahainst alleged police brutality towards three of their colleagues covering syringe attacks in China's restive Xinjiang region.
       Around 700 demonstrators, wearing black and holding placards, held a march to call on the Xinjiang govekrnment to apologise to the reporters and demanded Beijing move to stop media repression.

NICE BRICKWORK FROM DAN BROWN

2009-09-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

       "The Lost Symbol", the follow-up to Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller "The Da Vinci Code", has been released, and you don't have to be a Freemason to enjoy it - although that wouldn't hurt.
       Like "angels and Demons", published in 2000, and "Da Vinci Code", "The Lost Symbol" solves puzzles, analyses paintings and reveals forgotten histories.
       Brown's tireless hero Robert Langdon tracks down a legendary Masonic treasure despite special-ops squads dogging him and a bizarre killer who has kidnapped his dear friend and mentor.
       There is one mystery, though, that remains unsolved after three books.
       Will Langdon ever get to rest?
       You'd think a 46-year-old Harvard symbologist's most strenuous chores would be grinding his Sumatran coffee beans in the morning or persuading bored undergrads to appreciate hidden meanings in the world around them.
       Langdon does these things, but he's also the guy who survived an antimatter explosion at the Vatican and a Paris manhunt and uncovered the truth about the Holy Grail (although, according to the new novel, he's kept this a secret).
       So Langdon is unlikely to get any rest anytime soon. After all, he specialises in what all esoteric evildoers need: rituals and their transcendent meanings.
       Consider an early incident in "Symbol", a scene that 's as gruesome and allusive as the opening of "Code", in whice a dying, bloodcovered curator in the Louvre arranges his body into a puzzle.
       Langdon arrives in Washington, invited by his wealthy friend Peter Solomon, a highranking Mason, to deliver a speech in the Capitl Building.
       The moment he enters the rotunda, however, Langdon discovers there is no speech.
       The "invitation" has been faked by an 1865 painting of George Washington depicted as a pagan god.
       As horrific as this is, Langdon recognises that the grisly object resembles something called "the Hand of the Mysteries".
       "It seems the man we are dealing with, in addition to being mentally unstable, is also highly educated," Langdon says. "This hand is proof that he is well versed in the Mysteries as well as their code of secrecy ... The Hand of the Mysteries is a sacred invitation."
       That educated, unstable person calls himself Mal'akh ("angel" in Hebrew), and in him Brown gives us a villain as unique, zealous and eerie as teh albino monk Silas in "Code".
       Mal'akh is a muscled, tattooed eunuch, a chameleon-like figure who seeks a hidden Masonic pyramid because, the legend goes, it contains the power of transformation.
       It seems Mal'akh gained the trust not only of Peter but also of Peter's sister Katherine, a scientist through whom Brown introduces the theme of science versus magic - not to mention the possibility that a wedding might be in Langdon's future.
       Like the "cryptex" in "Code", an antique object aids Langdon and Katherine on a hunt across and beneath the city. It's a hunt in which they're helped and hindered by characters including the blind dean of Washington's National Cathedral and the gnomic director of the CIA's Office of Security, Inoue Sato (don't mess with her).
       All of this is going to feel very familiar to readers of the previous Langdon books, even though Brown has shifted from foreign places to plant his thriller firmly on American soil.
       That, of course, is fine for Langdon: He finds this country's past as rich and mysterious as any other. "Seriously," he tells his students, "Washington, DC, has some of the world's finest architecture, art and symbolism. Why would you go oversas before visiting your own capital?"
       Why, indeed. Some people believe Freemasonry's origins in mediaeval craft guilds include a darker, conspiratorial side. Historians point out that the secrecy of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, in particular, has led to its being the least understood of Masonry's variants - a situation Brown exploits to the fullest with depictions of occult ceremonies.
       Hidden knowledge takes many shapes in "Symbol". Alchemists, Egyptians and rabbi sages are invoked, and so are the US government's eavesdropping tactics in the war on terror, superstring theory and the New Agesounding study of noetics, which Katherine believes one day will enable the mind to bring about real changes in the physical world.
       Brown's narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopaedias ("The sacred symbol of the Hebrews is the Jewish star - the Seal of Solomon - an important symbol to the Masons!").
       But no one reads brown for style, right? The reason we read Dan Brown is to see what happens to Langdon: We want to know if he will overcome long odds to uncover Mal'akh's motives and a cunning plan that, while not involving antimatter, is a major threat to national security.
       And yet, it's hard to imagine anyone, after reading "Symbol", debating about Freemasonry in Washington, the way people did Brown's radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in "Code".
       "The Lost Symbol" is more like the experience on any roller coaster - thrilling, entertaining and then it's over.

OUTLIERS Malcolm Gladwell

2009-09-19T21:45:00.002-07:00

       What is it that makes a person successful? And when I say "successful" I don't mean leaving RCA linking arms with someone with their own teeth on a Saturday night.
       I'm talking about tangible achievements that inevitably lead to riches. The kind of success that makes people like Microsoft's Bill Gates, prominent US lawyer Joe Flom or Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy "outliers"- men and women who, according to Malcolm Gladwell,"For one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August."
       Is it hard work? Intelligence? Ambition? Yes, says Gladwell. It's all these things. But it's also so much more. Gladwell argues that we have a crude way of looking at how people achieve. He says that we are far too focused on the individual. That nobody makes it alone.
       To understand an outlier we must look at their culture and the community around them. Are Asians really better than Caucasians at maths, and if so why? Gladwell argues that the stereotype is true and can be explained by cultural reasons ranging from language to a history of farming rice.
       Does the culture of a country directly relate to the safety record of its national airline? Again, yes - and Gladwell explains why.
       Using empirical evidence, the author demonstrates that one of the conditions for success is often as simple as the date a person is born professional athletes like footballers and ice hockey players are more often than not the oldest kids in their school year. Success also comes from opportunity - the young Bill Gates got the chance to programme computers thanks to some extraordinary luck, for example.
       Outliers will change the way you think about success and quite possibly make you feel a lot better about yourself if you haven't yet achieved it.

Brown's latest breaks record

2009-09-19T21:45:00.001-07:00

       The latest novel from The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown,The Lost Symbol , broke one-day sales records, its publisher and booksellers said.
       Readers snapped up over 1 million hardcover copies across the US, Canada and the UK after it was released on Tuesday, said publisher Knopf Doubleday, a division of Random House.
       "We are seeing historic, recordbreaking sales across all types of our accounts in North America for The Lost Symbol ," said Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, called the book its bestselling first-day adult fiction title ever,including pre-orders.
       The success of Mr Brown's latest is a boost to publisher Knopf Doubleday and booksellers, which have endured sliding sales in the midst of the recession.Booksellers have anxiously awaited a popular title that will resonate with readers and fuel the same sort of frenzy seen earlier this decade with the Harry Potter series, from author J.K. Rowling.
       But the $25 billion US high street book market has wallowed in a slump in recent years as more readers make their purchases online, or forego books altogether for online games and other forms of media and entertainment. Now,digital books and electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle or Sony's Reader are seen as avenues of growth and sources of competition for traditional media, and publishers and booksellers are scrambling to respond.
       The highly anticipated book from Mr Brown comes six years after the release of The Da Vinci Code . It continues the adventures of Harvard professor Robert Langdon and is set in the secret world of Freemasons in Washington D.C.
       The Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies worldwide. It was made into a film starring Tom Hanks that grossed more than $758 million.

Google offers its digital books for printing

2009-09-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

       Google is giving 2 million books in its digital library a chance to be reincarnated as paperbacks.
       As part of a deal announced yesterday,Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under 5 minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an electronic reader like those made by Amazon.com and Sony.
       The "Espresso Book Machine" has been around for several years, but it figures to become a hotter commodity now that it has access to so many books scanned from some of the world's largest libraries. And On Demand Books, the Espresso's maker, potentially could get access to even more hard-to-find books if Google wins court approval of a classaction settlement giving it the right to sell out-of-print books.
       "This is a seminal event for us," said Dane Neller, On Demand Books' chief executive, as he oversaw a demonstration of the Espresso Book Machine on Wednesday at Google's Mountain View,California, headquarters.
       In the background, some of the books that Google spent the past five years scanning into a digital format were returning to their paper origins.
       "It's like things are coming full circle,"Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said."This will allow people to pick up the physical copy of a book even if there may be just one or two other copies in some library, or maybe it's not even available at all." On Demand's printing machines already are in more than a dozen locations in the United States,Canada, Australia, England and Egypt,mostly at campus book stores, libraries and small retailers. The Harvard Book Store will be among the first equipped with an instant-publishing machine to have access to Google's digital library.
       The books published by The Espresso Machine will have a recommended sales price of US$8(270 baht) per copy,although the final decision will be left to each retailer. New York-based On Demand Books will get a $1 of each sale with another $1 going to Google, which says it will donate its commission to charities and other nonprofit causes.
       The high-speed publishing machine itself sells for about $100,000, although On Demand Books is willing to lease the equipment to retailers instead.
       For starters, Google is only allowing The Espresso Machine publish from the section of its digital library that consists of 2 million books no longer protected by copyright.
       These "public domain" books were published before 1923- an era that includes classics like Moby Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well as very obscure titles. The paperbacks churned out in Wednesday's demonstration of the Espresso included Lathe Work For Beginners
       Lathe Dame Curtsey's Book
       MOf Candy Making , and Memoirs Of A Cavalier , a Daniel Defoe novel that never caught on quite like his most famous work,Robinson Crusoe .Millions more titles could be added to On Demand's virtual inventory if Google gets federal court approval of a classaction settlement that would grant it the right to sell copyrighted books no longer being published. Google estimates it already has made digital copies of about 6 million out-of-print books.
       The settlement terms includes a provision that could authorise republishing the books with a machine like the Espresso. Some of Google's rivals and a long list of other critics are hoping to block the settlement, mainly because they believe it will give Google a monopoly on the digital rights to out-of-print books and make it too easy to track people's reading preferences.
       The US Justice Department is investigating the monopoly allegations and is scheduled to share some of its preliminary thoughts with District Judge Denny Chin in a brief due today.
       Mr Neller is thrilled just to have the right to publish selections fromGoogle's digital library of public domain books.
       He thinks it could help him reach his ambition to turn the Espresso machine into publishing's equivalent of an ATM.
       "It's more efficient for everyone and readers are the biggest beneficiaries,"Mr Neller said.

Vietnam journalist blames "disastrous misunderstanding" for arrest

2009-09-16T19:14:00.000-07:00

       A Vietnamese journalist yesterday blamed a "disastrous misunderstanding" for her recent arrest that sparked an outcry from global press and human rights groups.
       Pham Doan Trang, who wrote for the prominent VietnamNet news website,was one of three online writers who had touched on the sensitive topic of relations with China. All were held for more than one week recently but have been freed.
       Ms Trang said she thought police arrested her outside a Hanoi cafe late last month after a misunderstanding that she was involved in a venture to produce T-shirts with politically sensitive slogans.
       "I was shocked ... I had never thought that I could be arrested some day,especially over a disastrous misunderstanding," Ms Trang said.
       "I was not involved in the effort," she said.
       The shirts called for a halt to a bauxite mining project and declared Vietnamese sovereignty over two South China Sea archipelagos, the Spratlys and Paracels.
       "I was later detained for nine days as the police wanted to know more about my work and my relationships as a reporter," said Ms Trang.
       Police told her "to consider things carefully before writing anything" as a reporter, she said.

"WALL STREET JOURNAL" TO CHARGE FOR MOBILE ACCESS

2009-09-16T19:13:00.002-07:00

       Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Wall Street Journal, announced plans yesterday to begin charging for access to the newspaper on mobile devices suche as the Blackberry or iPhone.
       Murdoch, speaking to financial analysts at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVIII Conference in New York, also predicted that print newspapers would be extinct within 20 to 30 years, replaced by portable electronic readers.
       "Starting in a month or two, people who are getting The Wall Street Journal on their Blackberry are going to be paying $2 (Bt67) a week," Murdoch said. "Same with the iPhone." Mobile access to the Journal would cost $1 a week for subscribers to the newspaper, the News Corp chairman and chief executive said.
       News Corp, he added, was looking at ways to begin charging users of popular online video website Hulu.com.
       News Corp is a partner in Hulu.com, a fast-growing rival to YouTube that offers full-length television shows and movies, along with The Walt Disney Co and NBC Universal.
       "Are we looking at Hulu with a view to adding subscription services there and pay per view? Yes, we are looking at that," Murdoch said, although cautioning that "no decision had been made yet".
       Murdoch dismissed suggestions that News Corp, which owns MySpace, the Fox television network, the 20th Century Fox movie studio and the STAR and SKY television networks, in addition to its newspaper properties, had become more of an entertainment empire than a news operation.
       "We're living in a very complicated world in which news is more valuable than it has ever been," he said. "If we were Newspaper Corp I would say yes, we would certainly change [the name]."
       He said "way over a million" people were paying for online access to The Wall Street Journal, numbers that are "expanding all the time".
       Some 25,000 people have subscribed to read the Journal on Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, he added.
       Murdoch said he personally did not enjoy reading a newspaper on the Kindle but e-readers were the future of newspapers.
       "I don't think it's months away, I think it's years away," he said of completing a satisfactory e-reader. "But I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on reading panels, portable, foldable panels, than buying it on crushed trees," he added.
       "I think that is certainly coming. It may be 20 years before it totally replaces newspapers. It may be 30."

ONE BATTLE SHE ALMOST LOST

2009-09-16T19:13:00.001-07:00

       Women and children's rights activist Paveena Hongsakula tells of her secret struggle with cancer
       Paveena Hongsakula is famous for high-profile battles against abusers of women and children, but less well known is the war she's been waging against breast cancer for several years.
       In 2004, she found a lump in her right breast while taking a bath -- only two months after her last mammogram.
       Doctors at Queen Sirikit Centre for Breast Cancer confirmed it was a cancerous tumour, and she began treatment.
       Diagnosis or death sentence?
       "As soon as I heard the diagnosis, I assumed it was a death sentence. My first thought was, 'will I be able to wrap everything up? Who will run my foundation when I'm gone, and how will my son cope? When I gave him the news he was in tears."
       In November 2004, she had an operation to remove the tumour. Two months later doctors discovered the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes; she had another operation. Then, as she was about to undergo chemotherapy, doctors found something wrong with her heart. Her pulse was racing at 200-300 times per minute -- 60-90 times is normal -- so she had another operation to implant the pacemaker needed to protect her heart from the stress of chemotherapy.
       Kris Chatamra, head and founder of the Centre, says apart from the three operations, Paveena had 30 doses of radiotherapy and six courses of chemotherapy.
       "My son, Supamon has kept me going," says Paveena. "He buys me DVDs of my favourite comedies and always reminds me to take my medicine and rest. I've kept up my work with women and children for the foundation throughout the treatment and only told family members about the disease."
       The key to prevention
       Kris says Paveena was lucky because she found the tumour early, giving her a greater chance of recovery.
       "Paveena has recovered 95 per cent so far," he says.
       Paveena is sharing the story of her five-year cancer battle with readers of her new book.
       She was recently chosen as the centre's ambassador for breast cancer 2009 with the job of encouraging women to check their breasts regularly.

       Xtra
       Her story
       "Diary Pavena Hongsakul: Soo Chana Mareng Rai Nai 5 Pii" is available at 7/Eleven shops and other bookstores for Bt179.
       Income from the books' sale will go to the Queen Sirikit Centre for Breast Cancer and the Paveena Hongsakula Foundation.

DAN BROWN REVEALS THE SECRET ... OF HYPE

2009-09-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

       The books are under guard, the plot is a secret, the author is silent, but all that will change today when Dan Brown's latest conspiracy potboiler, "The Lost Symbol", is unleashed.
       Extraordinary measures have been taken to keep the sequel to 2003 mega-hit "The Da Vinci Code" under wraps, right down to posting guards in book warehouses.
       But much as in Brown's tangled - some say nonsensical - plots about secret societies, the Catholic Church, and symbologist Robert Langdon, not everything is as it seems.
       The secretive treatment is all part of a huge publicity campaign as Doubleday's publishers try to repeat the success of "Code", which sold a record 80 million copies.
       Five million copies have been printed and, in a bold step, an e-version of the novel is also being released today. Pre-sales rocketed "The Lost Symbol" to the top of Amazon's best-seller list.
       Expect a PR blitz starting today, including a rare appearance by the reclusive American writer on American television's "Today Show."
       Staff of the show report that anyone coming into contact with the book at Doubleday has had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, while copies of the finished product are literally under lock and key.
       "We have closed-circuit TVs that are monitoring the books at all times in a secure area that is also guarded," said Jacqueline Updike at Random House, Doubleday's partent company.
       The cover of the book, third in a series featuring Langdon, shows the US Capitol in Washington and a wax seal containing a double-headed phoenix, the numeral 33, and the words ordo ae chao, Latin for "order to chaos."
       The design supports rumours that Freemasons are at the heart of the story.
       But beyond these titbits, and the revelation by Brown's editor Jason Kaufman that the narrative takes place in a 12-hour period, almost nothing is known.
       Speculation, fuelled by specially seeded cluses, is raging on Facebook, Twitter and Widget accounts linked to the book and author.
       However, the clues were reportedly concocted by employees who didn't actually read the book, and are therefore of limited value.
       "Felled in 6 days at a church of sound," a recent Twitter entry said. "At the head of the Niagra, Parade of Dark Horses."
       Similarly, the author's website provides only the barest biographical information. Instead, you're invited to play "the symbol quest", a guessing game in which esoteric symbols are fit in a compass-like circle.
       If Brown's financial success is predicatable, so is the reaction his new work is likely to provoke.
       Serious literary critics have long been horrified by what they consider Brown's appalling writing. Salman Rushdie famously said "The Da Vinci Code" is "a novel so bad that it gives bad novels and a bad name."
       The Vatican accused the "Code" land its multitude of spin-offs, including a popular film starring Tom Hanks, of anti-Catholic prejudice.

AMAZING MIDDLE EAST

2009-09-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

       The Middle East is one of history's grand epics in the making. Once the cradle of civilisation, now a region where modern human history is daily being written upon the stones of the past, the Middle East is where the lines between history's story and the magic of the travel experience are forever being blurred.
       Few places in the world can match the Middle East's roll-call of ancient ruins, landscapes of rare beauty and extraordinary cities whose personalities seem to spring from the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. More than that, the unforgettable travel moments that the Middle East has to offer are almost as diverse as the stunning backdrops in which to enjoy them. You'll never forget the wide-eyed wonder of that first time you dip below the surface of the Red Sea and discover an underwater world of dazzling colour and otherworldly coral.
       Or the feelings of well-being as you sit by the feet of the Middle East's last storyteller in Damascus and he weaves an intricate web of fact and fable worthy of Sheherezade. Or the spiritual stirrings in your soul the first time you hear the haunting call to prayer carried by the wind through the lanes of old Jerusalem.
       Many travellers fall irretrievably in love with the region and its cities. Cairo is known as "the mother of the world"; it is a clamorous cultural hub for the Middle East, not to mention the home of the Pyramids of Giza. There's also something special about Damascus with its compelling claim to be the world's oldest continuously inhabited city (at least four other cities, all in the Middle East, make a similar claim); it is a place where the layers of history infuse every aspect of daily life.
       HISTORY EGYPTIAN STYLE
       When it comes to the most famous pyramids in the world there are few superlatives that do them justice. As the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, these 4,000-year-old goliaths continue to astound with their impossibly perfect geometry and towering dimensions.
       If you spend any time in Cairo then a must-see is the Egyptian Museum. Cramming one of the most significant collections of antiquities in the world into one space, with more than 100,000 relics from almost every period of ancient Egyptian history, if you spent only one minute at each exhibit it would take more than nine months to see everything.
       SHOPPING IN TURKEY
       Why not hone your haggling skills before dipping into the mind-boggling Grand Bazaar. Just north of Divan Yolu, this labyrinthine mediaeval shopping mall consists of some 4,000 shops selling everything from carpets to clothing, including silverware, jewellery, antiques and belly-dancing costumes.
       MIDDLE EAST: Available from all good bookshops for 1,050 baht.
       It's probably the most confusing and manic shopping precinct you could hope to experience.
       IRAQ'S ANCIENT WORLD
       Babylon is Iraq's most famous archaeological site, and one of the most important in the world.
       Its very name has become synonymous with depravity and hubris.
       Babylon dates back to at least 2300 BC. It was the capital city of two of the most famous kings of antiquity: Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who introduced the world's first law code, and Nebuchadnezzar (604-562 BC), who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
       Today, little remains of ancient Babylon except for several mounds and the famous Lion of Babylon, a basalt statue carved more than 2,500 years ago.
       2008 Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd.
       All rights reserved. For more information
       visit http://www.lonelyplanet.com.
       This is an edited extract from 'Middle East 6th Edition', by Anthony Ham Lonely Planet Publications.

Journalists round on coalition

2009-09-12T17:35:00.001-07:00

       A group of Afghan journalists blamed the international coalition yesterday for the death of a kidnapped colleague during the British commando rescue of a New York Times reporter and accused the troops of having a double standard for Western and Afghan lives.
       The accusation came as British Prime Minister Gordon Browns office said troops had carried out the raid on Wednesday in an attempt to recover both British-Irish reporter Stephen Farrell and his Afghan translator Sultan Munadi and that the mission was authorised as the best chance of protecting life.
       The newly formed Media Club of Afghanistan, set up by Afghan reporters who work with international news outlets,also condemned the Taliban for abducting both journalists last week in northern Afghanistan as they investigated reports of civilian deaths in a German-ordered air strike. More than 50 Afghan reporters laid flowers yesterday at the Kabul cemetery grave of Munadi, 34,who died in gunfire as British commandos launched the rescue operation in northern Kunduz province.
       Mr Farrell survived and was taken away in a helicopter. One British commando was also killed in the raid.
       The German officer who ordered the deadly bombing of fuel trucks in Afghanistan violated procedures, a preliminary Nato probe has found, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily reported yesterday.Col Georg Klein overstepped his authority and poorly evaluated the situation, says the Nato report conducted following the air strike last Friday in the Kunduz province, which killed dozens.It is completely clear Col Klein did not respect decision-making procedures,a high-ranking German officer in Nato told the daily.
       Such a decision should have been referred to the headquarters of the Natoled International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), he said.
       Col Klein called in US warplanes last Friday to bomb two coalition fuel trucks that had been captured by Taliban militants, fearing they would be used as truck bombs against Nato forces.
       The preliminary report concluded however that Isaf troops were not in imminent danger as the trucks were stuck in the sand and were being monitored.
       Meanwhile, the UN-backed commission investigating fraud in Afghanistans presidential election has thrown out ballots from 83 polling stations across the country, all in areas with strong support for President Hamid Karzai. Mr Karzai has over 50% of the vote count.But if the commission throws out enough votes, he could drop below 50% and be forced into a run-off.

Australia to probe 'Balibo Five' deaths

2009-09-10T00:54:00.000-07:00

       Australian police yesterday announced a long-awaited war crimes investigation into the deaths of the "Balibo Five" journalists killed by Indonesian troops in 1975.
       The surprise move comes nearly two years after a coroner's investigation ruled the five Australia-based men were murdered in an East Timor border town as they tried to surrender to invading Indonesian forces.
       The coroner called for war crimes charges against a number of generals,including one who rose to become Indonesia's information minister in the late 1990s.
       "Allegations of war crimes committed overseas give rise to complex legal and factual issues that require careful consideration by law enforcement agencies before deciding to investigate," Australian Federal Police said in a statement.
       The inquiry also follows the recent release of a hard-hitting movie,Balibo ,depicting the deaths of Australians Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Britons Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie and New Zealander Gary Cunningham.
       Jakarta has always maintained the reporters died in crossfire as Indonesian troops fought East Timorese Fretilin rebels, a version of events accepted by successive Australian governments.
       If enough evidence was found to show "criminality or a real possibility of criminality", police will ask Australia's chief prosecutor to consider whether war crimes charges should be laid.
       "The standard of proof in a criminal proceeding is high, and differs from that of a coronial inquiry," police said.
       The journalists were covering Indonesia's advance into East Timor, then a Portuguese colony, at the beginning of a 24-year occupation marked by serious human rights abuses.
       Sydney coroner Dorelle Pinch found in 2007 that they were murdered to keep the invasion a secret.
       Paul Stewart, whose brother Tony,21, was the youngest of the Balibo Five,welcomed the investigation but said it was long overdue.
       He also called for a probe into the estimated 183,000 East Timorese deaths during Indonesia's occupation.
       "I am pleased at the move," he said."While they're investigating my brother's death maybe they'd also like to look into my Timorese mates, the death of all their family members as well."
       Greig Cunningham, the brother of cameraman Gary, said it was time for those responsible to be brought to justice.
       "It has to be done, it can't not happen,"he told public broadcaster ABC.
       Sydney coroner Pinch found the five were captured and "shot and or stabbed deliberately by members of the Indonesian Special Forces including Christoforus Da Silva and Captain Yunus Yosfiah".
       Mr Yosfiah, who became Indonesia's information minister in the late 1990s and is now a retired general, has admitted leading the attack on Balibo.

Rakluke Group targets online audience

2009-09-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

       The Rakluke Group, which specialises in parenting and children's magazines,has diversified its expertise in family content to the online world at momypedia.com to reach a wider audience.
       The Internet has become a highly influential media and Rakluke has been prompt to adapt, but the group will not change their stance, according to Rakluke Group president and CEO Subhawadee Harnmethee.
       The company has invested 30 million baht implementing its online business as she noted that the online business will be a unit creating online content and will work along with the team behind the magazine content.
       Momypedia.com is a space for selflearning and self-development for everyone of any age, she said.
       The company's first website, planpublishing.com, was launched in 2000 and has changed its name to raklukefamilygroup.com and shifted to momypedia.com after Plan Group took out its stake.
       Subhawadee said that the number of members had fallen when the old website closed down. However, members have now returned with some 20,000 interacting with momypedia.com each day.
       "We are the number one family and children website with approximately 200,000 page views and some 40,000 members," the CEO said.
       Vatayos Atvisejsiwakulm, marketing manager online business, noted that a strong community has lead to more sponsors. The quality content of mo-mypedia.com will allow the company to do business more efficiently.
       "Web2.0 is all about power of the network and when we are going to the web3.0 where a big collection of database is created and can be connected on demand, we can then serve the users' demands with more personalisation,"Vatayos said.
       Rakluke has accumulated a database to integrate every function, all related information, and can connect people on the standard, he said.
       "The success of web3.0 is not about technology, but the data which will allow the intelligent website," he said.
       According to managing director of Online Business Chanida Intaravisut,the company is now testing the "live chat with expert" broadcasting via online TV and radio.
       "We have all resources, content, experts, team and studio and this will be another new channel to communicate with the audience," she said, adding that the program is now on a trial run and will be broadcast by the year's end.
       "Users can pose questions to experts on various topics that they are interested," she said.

Google Books moves to reassure EU

2009-09-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

       Internet search leader Google said yesterday it is making concessions to European publishers to try and soothe worries over its Google Books project, which aims to put hard-to-find books online.
       Google's digital library has raised hackles among rivals such as Microsoft, yahoo and Amazon and raised fears among European copyright holders that their exclusive rights could be eroded.
       Google spokesman Bill Echikson said the company would take these concerns on board and would appoint two European representative for authors and one for publishers. He also said that Google would do more the check that English-language editions of books originally published in a European language weren't wrongly listed as out-of-print in the United States. Publishers feared that adding such books to the Google library would lose them sales.
       The European Commission yesterday held a hearing to examine the effect of Google's 10-month settlement with US authors and publishers on copyright holders in the EU. Unlike the US deal, Google is only right European books over 150 years of age to avoid infringing copyrighted material.

Retailers and publishers turn social networking into sales

2009-09-06T20:56:00.000-07:00

       Retailers and publishing houses have been turning increasingly to social networking to strengthen their relationships with loyal customers and get feedback.
       Central Pattana Plc, the operator of Central Plaza shopping centres, said it has realised the importance of social networking to promote business at low cost.
       Sakorn Thavisin, senior marketing manager, said CPN set up its interactive media division in April to handle social media in a serious way. It allows more than 200 marketing staff stationed at different shopping complexes to use Facebook to tell their friends about promotional campaigns or events at their stores.
       "Our community is quite strong and those who actively use social media such as Facebook and Twitter are trend-setters.Most of them don't believe in advertising but prefer to listen to what their friends tell them," he said.
       According to a global online consumer survey by Nielsen, recommendations from others are the most trusted form of advertising in Thailand and globally.Personal recommendations and editorial content play a major role in the decisionmaking process of Thais.
       "Consumer opinion posted online can gain the trust of Thai internet users as well," the survey said.
       Mr Sakorn said his recent promotional campaign for the clothing brand CHAPS by Ananda was introduced through Facebook to target customers and it really worked.
       "I think this is the power of social networking: to promote products and at the same time get valuable feedback,"he said.
       Bliss Publishing, a subsidiary of GMM Grammy Plc, said it had successfully used social media to promote its pocket books and receive reliable feedback from readers.
       Managing director Laddawan Rattanadilokchai said the company applied a number of social networking tools to provide information and promote new books to its readers. Readers also have the opportunity to provide feedback about its books.
       "Social media have created a strong community among our book readers as they are intellectual and like to use these media to communicate and discuss ideas," she said.
       Bliss Publishing has more than 100,000 members in these communities and many regularly follow its Facebook, Hi5 and Twitter pages. Moreover, readers can give their opinions directly to some authors, such as Ploy Chariyavej, who is a longtime user of Facebook.
       Since discovering social media, Bliss rarely spends on mass marketing."Social media help us save on operating costs while building a strong relationship with customers," she said.

A DESTINED WRITE OF PASSAGE

2009-09-06T05:05:00.000-07:00

       If you ask a professional writer how to excel in their industry or seek out such advice from how-to-become-a-writer books, the advice you will most likely discover would be something along the lines of "just write" - as simple as that.
       But committing your life to the job title of "writer" may require second thoughts, said travel writer Ploy Mallikamas.
       "Anybody can write, as I was once told by a professional writer. But, to write for a living, in Thailand especially, you need a good deal of courage and a back-up plan before pledging your life for your passion instead of your pay cheque."
       And for a woman who turned her back on a position with a lucrative salary in the advertising world to become a full-time writer, the motivation behind her career U-turn is full of intrigue.
       For those who are new to her work, her latest book, Tokyo Miyage (Tokyo Souvenir), a tale from her 40 days in one of the world's busiest cities, may not appear as a guidebook. In fact, the attractive cover of the publication could easily mislead readers into thinking of it is a Japanese art design publication, and after skimming through a few chapters, some would suggest that it also belongs on the "memoir" shelf of a bookstore.
       "If you walk into a bookstore, there are two types of books on travelling - one is the information-packed guidebook and the other is the diary-style travelogue. My books are in between. I write like I'm talking to a friend," she said, adding that it may have something to do with her favourite book genre - children's literature - which she enjoyed reading throughout her youth.
       "I grew up in a family of bookworms. Every weekend, my parents would take us to the bookstore. So, I was the kind of girl who couldn't care less about watching TV, but instead spent all day reading, mostly Japanese manga and children's books, especially those written by Roald Dahl."
       As a dutiful daughter and student, Ploy revealed that at the age of 15, she passed the entrance examination to Thailand's top university. At that time, she said, she was too young to think for herself as to what she really wanted to study or what exactly her dream was.
       "It was a kind of play-it-safe situation as I was so young. But my life-changing moment came when I graduated. I didn't become a politician or a civil servant as my degree suggested, but instead took a position at an indie music company, Bakery Music, on its teen-targeted magazine called Katch."
       This was also the first time she got to write small articles and become involved with printing production, although, she said, she had not yet felt the love of writing at that time.
       Two years after her first job, Ploy pursued a career in advertising. With skill and hard work, Ploy succeeded in her new industry, gaining the highest title of Account Director.
       "I spent almost eight years working in the client service department. But the higher the rank I achieved, the more I suffered. I visited the hospital regularly due to stress-related sicknesses. And when your job is called 'client service', it means you need to keep your patience in check and always do what 'others' want. Finally, I realised that I didn't like the job I was doing, but I kept doing it because I was afraid to make a change. I was afraid to make the wrong decision," she added.
       "So to take my mind off the stress, I began taking a few trips and spending more time alone. That was when I first discovered my love of travelling."
       Shortly after her trip, Ploy was encouraged by a friend to write and submit her travel memoirs to Sudsupda magazine. After a few issues and some positive feedback from readers, Ploy's passion for writing had begun to grow.
       Her mother was then diagnosed with a brain-damaging disease, which lead her to make a big decision.
       "Finally, I quit my long-time permanent job," Ploy recalled, adding that some friends disagreed with her decision saying that she shouldn't throw away her career. However, after years of suffering and, more importantly, wanting to have more time for her family, Ploy said to them she was sure she had made the right choice.
       In the same year, Ploy married her long-time director boyfriend, citing the idea of marriage to put her mother's mind at ease as a reason.
       "I couldn't have done it without him," said Ploy of her husband. "When I asked him whether I should resign, he said, 'Do it', because he knew all along how I really felt about my job, especially when my mother got sick. He was fully supportive; kind of the 'wind beneath my wings'," she joked, laughing.
       Towards the end of 2007, the collection of small pieces of writing she had submitted to different magazines was being reassembled to form her first travel book. Prior to its release, Ploy shared that once she told herself she wanted to make a living from writing, she began to start talking to different publishers until she found her perfect match.
       "I talked to different companies but Wongklom has always been my top choice. They enjoy my work and allow me to share ideas in the whole process. What I want most is to work with artists I like," she said, proudly presenting her work partner Chuanchom Boonmeekerdsup, whose acclaimed print art won an award at the national art contest.
       "I love books and when it comes to my own, I tend to be very meticulous about their every detail," she said. "I was lucky that not only my publisher, but the sponsors also trusted my ideas and writing style. Some sponsors would have preferred the book to be more commercially oriented, which I wouldn't have been comfortable with."
       Travel writers, she explained, also need support from sponsors, which are mostly tour agencies or airlines, in the form of revenue from advertorials that appear inside the book. With her advertising background, Ploy used her unique writing style, neat artwork and uncommercial venue-knowledge which certain readers had been looking for, to convince her investors she has a target group.
       "I have friends who live in Japan, and they introduced me to out-of-the-way places, which many of my readers find interesting," she said. "So my books are mostly for young and adventurous tourists, who prefer something different, not the typical tour group stops."
       "I like the idea of unplanned or at least less planned trips. As I experienced myself, my least impressive trip was to France, where I planned my schedule perfectly in Thailand before I left. During the trip, when something didn't go as planned, I got really upset. When I returned home, I realised that it hadn't been a fun trip at all. At the end of the day, travelling should be about enjoying the outside world and relaxing," she added.
       Today, the 33-year-old writer says she is very happy with the job title that is printed on her name card. Although it is only a few years back that she first launched her book, the name Ploy Mallikamas has recently become synonymous with travel books for many Thai globetrotters. Her four outings are continuously reprinted.
       Asked, as time rushed the interview to the end, whether she had given a second thought to turning back time and changing any particular moment, Ploy responded immediately.
       "I am now happy that at least a few days a week, I can visit my parents without worrying how many leave days I have left. More importantly, thanks to different journeys that have shown me answers, I think I have found what I have been looking for all my life."
       "I think all people should take a trip, alone if possible, so they can learn to be with themselves, to listen to the voices inside them. I have learned through these years of travelling that I' m such a weak and very homesick person. But still, I'll keep travelling, as the more I do, the stronger I become."

KOREA DRAGGED JOURNOS FROM CHINESE TERRITORY

2009-09-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

       Two US journalists jailed for illegally entering North Korea told how they were dragged back into the Stalinist state from China by soldiers, in their first account of the incident.
       Television journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to 12 years of hard labour by North Korea before being freed as part of a diplomatic mission spearheaded by former US President Bill Clinton last month.
       In a lengthy statement posted on the website of the pair's employers, Current TV, Lee and Ling said North Korean troops chased them back into Chinese territory and abducted them after they briefly crossed the border on March 17.
       "We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us," said the women, who had been working on a story about human trafficking in the region at the time of their detention.
       "We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the soldiers.
       "They violently dragged us back across the ice to North army base, where we were detained."
       Lee and Ling said that during the 140 days of captivity that followed, they were "isolated from one another, repeatedly interrogated and eventually put on trial and sentenced".
       While parts of their captivity "are still too painful to revisit", the journalists said their experiences "pale when compared to the hardship facing so many people living in North Korea or as illegal immigrants in China".
       Although there were no signs marking China's frontier with North Korea or as illegal immigrants in China".
       Although there were no signs marking China's frontier with North Korea, the pair said they were aware that they heading toward the border crossing as they moved on foot across the frozen Tumen River.
       They followed their Korean Chines guide across the river, who then pointed to a nearby village where illegal immigrants were believed to be waiting in safe houses.
       But they then grew anxious and decided to turn back and cross the river back into China.
       "Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling," they said.
       "We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran."
       The guide and another producer from Current TV, Mitchh Koss, were able to outrun the soldiers but Lee and Ling were captured.
       "We didn't spend more than a minute on North Korean soil before turning back, but it is a minute we deeply regret," lee and Ling said.
       The two women hinted that they may have been led into an ambush by their guide, who had acted "oddly" on the morning of their capture.
       "To this day, we still dont't know if we were lured into a trap. In retrospect, the guide behaved oddly, changing our starting point on the river at the last moment and donning a chinese police overcoat for the crossing, measures we assumed were security precautions," they said.
       "But it was ultimately our decision to follow him, and we continue to pay for that decision today with dark memories of our captivity."
       They expressed concern about how their well-publicised detention may have led to gither security measures and more scrutiny toward activists and North Koreans living along the border.
       "The activists' work," Lee and Ling said, "was inspiring, courageous and crucial'.
       The journalists revealed how they scrambled to destroy notes and damage videotape in a brief moment when they were left alone with their belingings in an attempt to protect their sources.
       "With gurds right outside the room, we destroyed evidence in our possession by swallowing notes and damaging videotapes," they said.
       "We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no matchh for the soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained."

US magazine sales tumble in first half

2009-09-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

       Americans are buying fewer magazines at newsstands given the deep recession and the availability of plenty of free reading material online.
       An industry group said on Monday that single-copy sales tumbled 12% in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2008.
       Total circulation, including subscriptions, edged down 1%.
       The figures were released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, based on 521 magazines that gave circulation numbers for both years. The total circulation of those titles stands at roughly 340 million.
       Total paid subscriptions held steady,but the roughly 36 million magazines sold at newsstands and other retailers account for a disproportionate amount of publishers' earnings because subscriptions are generally discounted. Publishers are often able to prop up overall circulation - and meet guarantees they make to advertisers - by deeply discounting subscriptions.
       Hearst Corp's Cosmopolitan is still the most popular magazine at newsstands, though sales fell nearly 8% to 1.6 million.
       In overall circulation figures,Playboy and TV Guide Magazine fared the worst,down 9% and 10%, respectively.People magazine's circulation fell nearly 5%and Reader's Digest saw a 3% decline.

LOVE CHILDREN WEBSITE EXPANDS INTO ONLINE BUSINESS

2009-08-31T20:11:00.000-07:00

       Bangkok-based Rakluke Group has expanded into online business via its website www.momypedia.com and plans to provide personal information to users.
       The group's president Subhawadee Harnmethee, said Rakluke (love children) intended the website to create a community of families and parents who wanted to communicate and share experiences and knowledge via an online network.
       The company is also keen to sell advertising space on the website to companies wanting to promote their business on a family-based network, and is open to application for membership registration from Internet users who are prepared to pay for its services.
       Subhawadee said the website would provide online media and solution services and business services such as online research and surveying.
       The marketing manager of www.momypedia.com, Vatayos Atvisejsiwakul, said that in a "next step", the website planned to provide Web 3.0 - creating a large collection of databases that could be connected on demand. This will enable users to access information on demand, providing them with knowledge to support their lifestyles.
       Www.momypedia.com will also provide live chat facilities with experts such as doctors next year, as well as producing online television programmes and radio over its online network. It will also begin marketing commercial businesses to customers next year, Subhawadee said
       Rakluke Group's managing director Chanida Intaravisut said the website was not only a Web-based community for families, enabling members to create activities together, but was also a new marketing channel for businesses.
       It has already won three international awards, including bronze awards from 8th Annual Horizon Interactive Awards and the 2009 Summit Creative Awards, both in the United States. It also won an Award of Distinction at the 15th Communicator Awards, Chanida said.

Amish newspaper succeeds the old-fashioned way

2009-08-31T06:01:00.000-07:00

       The writers' grievances came in the form of angry letters,carried over bumpy rural roads to the newspaper office serving the Amish community.
       In a world where news still travels at a mail carrier's pace,the farmers, preachers and mechanics responsible for filling The Budget threatened to go on strike if the 119-year-old Amish weekly went ahead with its plan to go online.
       The Budget is the dominant means of comunication among the Amish, a Christian denomination with about 227,000 members in the US,who shun cars for horse-drawn buggies and avoid hooking up to the electrical grid.
       The writers, known asscribes, feared their plainspoken dispatches would become fodder for entertainment in the "English", or non-Amish,world. The editors hastily rescinded the plan shortly after proposing it in 2006, and today,only local news briefs appear onThe Budget 's bare-bones website.
       "My gosh, they spoke in volume," said Keith Rathbun,publisher of The Budget , a newspaper mailed to nearly 20,000 subscribers across the US and Canada."I'd be a fool to not pay attention to it."
       Far from impeding the newspaper's success, shunning the internet actually solidified its steadfast fan base.
       As other newspapers increasingly shed staff and reduce the frequency of their print editions in the face of growing competition from the internet,The Budget is plodding along comfortably in the recession.
       Subscriptions, which cost $42(1,433 baht) a year and account for most of the newspaper's revenue, have dropped by just a few hundred in the past year.Advertisers, who are mostly Amish, are not fleeing to the internet. And plans are in the works to add a couple of reporters to The Budget 's editorial staff of about 12 people.
       Rathbun's most pressing concern isn't the threat of the internet but ensuring that his readers, scattered across remote stretches of farmland, get their newspapers on time.
       "People call The Budget the Amish internet," Rathbun says."It's nonelectric, it's on paper, but it's the same thing."
       The local edition, mailed to about 10,000 Ohio subscribers, is a typical community newspaper produced by The Budget 's own employees, and their local stories are all that appear online. There's a page dedicated to church news and another to farming - there you get the going price for alfalfa and hay.
       The national edition and the source of its faithful following - is a patchwork of dispatches from scribes,which include both freshfaced teenagers and bearded old men.
       "Supper and singing were held at our house last night,so have been busy this morning getting dishes away and house in order," says a writer from Sligo, Pennsylvania.
       "We've had some nice rain the last few days and grass is greening up nicely," says another in Middlebury, Indiana.
       On white sheets of paper or "tablets",the scribes chronicle the fabric of their daily lives, generally writing them by hand and submitting them weekly by airmail or fax.
       The news isn't always upbeat. They'll write about the child whose arm got caught in a threshing machine, and the family that was killed in a buggy accident.When a gunman shot and killed five Amish girls in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006, the scribes detailed the aftermath.
       The Budget is published in Sugarcreek,an eastern Ohio town of dairy farmers and bricklayers at the heart of the US's largest Amish settlement. It was born in 1890 as a series of letters swapped among Amish families who had dispersed across the Midwest.
       It is the oldest and largest among Amish publications, which include Die Botschaft , a rival weekly formed in the 1970s by people who believed The Budget was too liberal.
       Inside The Budget 's brown-shuttered office, tables are piled with handwritten letters and the computers look dusty.On Rathbun's desk is a beige box filled with contacts written on index cards and a clunky calculator that spits out receipt paper.
       The archives, preserved on microfilm,are "a history of a people", explains Fannie Erb-Miller, who edits the scribes'letters. A copy of The Budget is sometimes the only record of a birth in the Amish world, where official birth certificates are scarce.
       Amish newspapers provide a sort of social glue for the community, says Don Kraybill, a leading expert on the Amish.
       "They may not be able to worship together or collaborate together, but they can learn about each other through these newspapers," Kraybill explains.
       Rathbun, who is not Amish, took over The Budget eight years ago after running an alternative weekly newspaper in Cleveland.
       The Budget 's owners - a local, nonAmish family who own a chain of dry goods shops that cater to the Amish wanted to bring in someone with a fresh perspective and a background in journalism, Rathbun explains. He later bought a 10 percent stake in the newspaper.
       Rathbun grins proudly as he boasts about The Budget 'ssuccess, but grows nervous when the conversation turns to his readers.
       "I need to be really careful about this," he says."So I don't betray a confidence with them."
       Rathbun declined to release The Budget 's annual profits but admitted that he worries about the future of the printing industry. Newsprint is expensive,and he has refused to raise advertising rates for the past three years.
       Unlike most of its counterparts,The Budget has a staff that is not Amish (the unpaid scribes, on the other hand, are typically Amish). As such, the selfdescribed newspaper of "good news"takes pains not to offend its pious readers,who are quick to revolt at any whiff of impropriety in its pages.
       The newspaper rejects advertisements for products considered taboo, such as beer, tobacco and drugs that treat sexual dysfunction. A public outcry ensued when the newspaper ran an illustration of a woman clad in a bra.

Ad revenue dries up for Nation

2009-08-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

       Nation Multimedia expects its 2009 revenues to drop to 2.3 billion baht from 3.2 billion last year as advertising fell sharply with the global downturn.
       NMG, the publisher of The Nation and Krungthep Turakij dailies, expects to move forward with plans to list two subsidiaries on the Market for Alternative Investment in the fourth quarter.
       Chief executive Thanachai Santichaikul said that if sentiment remained weak, listing could be delayed until 2010.
       NMG reported first half losses of 110 million baht, compared with a profit of 1.11 million the same period last year. Second-quarter losses were 33.47 million baht, compared with a loss of 5.83 million the same period last year.
       The company blamed a 27% decline in ad revenues in the first half for the loss. Sales and service revenues in the first half fell 21% compared with the same period last year, with print ad revenues off 36% and new media advertising down 8%. Broadcast ad revenues rose 16% year-on-year for the first half.
       Circulation revenues fell 19% in the first half from the same period last year, with newspaper circulation down 8% and revenues from pocket books and comic books down 33%. Revenues from printing, magazine distribution and logistics services rose 35% year-on-year.
       Cost of sales and operating expenses for the first six months of 2009 decreased by 14% compared to the same period of 2008, thanks largely to a 13% decline in transport costs as a result of falling fuel prices. Sales promotion expenses fell by 36% in the first half from last year.
       Printing operations accounted for 75% of group revenues in the first half, with TV accounting for another 15% and other businesses the rest.
       NMG plans to list Nation International Edutainment (NINE), which prints pocket books and other publications, and Nation Broadcasting Corp, the Nation Channel's TV operator, on the MAI.
       Shares of NMG closed yesterday on the SET at 3.32 baht, up two satang, in trade worth 52,000 baht.

BANGKOK DAYS Lawrence Osborne

2009-08-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

       Lawrence Osborne wanders aimlessly around Bangkok, stopping only to loiter with intent in Bangkok Days , a meandering travelogue described on the blurb as:"A love letter to the city that revived [his] faith in adventure and the world."
       These "adventures and misadventures in the world's hottest metropolis"have a dream-like quality,written in a languid style that drifts at a lilting pace,much like the author's walks around town.
       Osborne examines the theme of loneliness, asking why men, older men especially, leave the West to settle here. He theorises that it's all about contact - not necessarily sex. Be it a foot massage,a meal at a "no hands" restaurant, or simply crowded streets, Bangkok offers a tactile experience lacking in the sterile West.
       For many of the characters that Osborne introduces us to - a retired Aussie bank manager marking time on Soi 22 with painting and cheap hookers,a Scottish ex-soldier who runs an ecolodge in the Cambodian jungle, or McGinnis, an eccentric Englishman who claims to sell air-conditioning units isolation seems no stranger.
       Osborne's prose borders on the pseudo-intellectual at times:"I dreamt I was lying with a girl on a river beach,
       painting her body with a fine calligraphic brush dipped in dark-green paint."
       He also describes walking down his street,"sniffing in the industrial aromas of the hairdressing salons and the sweetness of fried doughnuts and pork crackling as familiar things that had long ago become a molecular part of me."
       The only thing I can smell on my soi is the drains. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to criticise what is an entertaining read because of a couple of suspect paragraphs.
       And although his description of a short-lived career as a gigolo seems unbelievable, in Osborne's Bangkok the absurd or incredible is often the reality.G
       Available at Asia Books priced B650.

Media to monitor projects

2009-08-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

       Members of the media will be invited to sit on a committee to monitor the scandal-plagued community sufficiency programme, says Mechai Viravaidya who is tipped to head the scheme.
       The vice chairman of the Community Sufficiency Economy Project said he would set up the committee to work on new strategies to clean up the programme as soon as he was appointed by the prime minister as chairman of the board of directors of the Sufficiency Economy for Community Development Programme.
       The committee's duties would include keeping track on sufficiency project activities. It would include at least two members of the media who would follow up on the projects.
       Mr Mechai said he had been thinking of ways to overhaul the programme but said he could not say much because he had not yet been named chairman.
       He would present his plans for a revamp of the programme when he meets the prime minister.
       Sufficiency projects have come under the spotlight after it was found equipment such as water machines bought by villagers were grossly overpriced.
       Complaints have also been raised about a monopoly on the sale of the equipment enjoyed by suppliers with links to the government and officials.
       Mr Mechai, the founder of the Population and Development Association, said the programme must adhere to key fundamental principles.
       Villagers must take the initiative in running the projects, which must strengthen the villages.
       He said communities in the past had not participated actively in the projects because they were not adequately informed about them.

McCurry gazes eastwards

2009-08-26T20:26:00.000-07:00

       His best-known image is that haunting depiction of an Afghan girl staring out from the cover of the June,1985 issue of National Geographic ,but for Steve McCurry, the Philadelphia-born lensman who's been covering wars around the world for the past three decades, the initial motivation was not a thirst for the truth but simple wanderlust.
       "I have curiosity about life so I travel to see the world"is how he put it.
       McCurry got his first camera at the age of 18 from a photographer uncle and not long afterwards began having photos published in The Daily Collegian newspaper at Pennsylvania State University. It was while he was studying there that he first started travelling abroad, to various countries in Latin America and Africa. He initially dabbled with film history, cinematography and film-making, but ended up with a degree in theatre arts and graduating cum laude in 1974.He worked as a news photographer for two years before chucking it in to fly to India and try his hand at freelance photojournalism. It was "curiosity" which impelled him to cross the Pakistani border into Afghanistan just before the Russian invasion in late 1979.
       "For journalists, covering areas of conflict is important.We want to find out for ourselves what's going on. It's insane to do that, but it isimportant for the world to know."
       His coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan later won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad."It was a human drama," he noted with great understatement."Life and death."
       After two years getting a portfolio together, he approached National Geographic magazine."To get to that point [took]four and a half years ...24/7... of work. A big commitment ... it was intense."
       Style and approach
       McCurry has the uncommon ability to see beauty in common objects. After several years' experience, he said,a photographer begins to see things in a particular, individual way and starts to express himself.
       For him,"light is important. It's everything.My style comes out of a particular light that I like to work in ... I enjoy playing with light."
       He prefers to work with the minimum of colours - a couple in one photo is sufficient - in the early morning or at dusk. He finds the sky especially beautiful 10 minutes after sunset and said there's the added benefit of not having to use a filter or flash at this time.
       To obtain the most representative image he'll often return to the same location on numerous occasions. To get the perfect shot of Angkor Wat, for example, he visited the temple complex dozens of times to capture it in different moods - in full sunlight, on rainy days, when the place was crowded and when it was quiet. Eventually he got a tableau he considered satisfactory - that of a group of monks walking peacefully in the rain.
       McCurry also has a passion for doing portraiture."I like taking photos of people on the street. Mostly my portraits are of individuals I just bump into," he said.
       He likes to make direct eye contact and wait until the ambient light is dim enough to force the subject's eyes to open fully.
       To capture the mood of strangers to depict them while they're most natural, he must first break the ice and win their trust. He does this by using body language to demonstrate respect and let the person know that he finds them fascinating."You either work fast before people notice you. Or you hang around for so long that people get bored or forget that you're there."
       A sense of humour is also a big help, he said."I'm happy working with Asian people. I'm short so I don't always show up in their radar," he joked.
       Does he always ask permission before taking someone's
       photo? Not necessarily.
       "I have bunches of pictures of people sleeping," he said, adding:"It's fun trying to capture human behaviour, how [people] are in real life."
       He strives to avoid any conflict and disturbances from the environment so that he can work with a "clear and calm mind".
       In the field
       Before setting out on an assignment, he'll research his destination and recruit a fixer.
       "If I was assigned to take pictures of Bangkok I'll analyse what the story is to be about, what makes this city different from others. I'll look for particular situations, like the monsoon, for instance."
       He might take a helicopter ride to get a broad perspective on a metropolis then walk the streets to snap portraits of its residents.
       He'll take anything from five to 20 shots of one subject or location, changing the perspective - moving a little bit forward, backwards, a little to the left or right; going for both vertical and horizontal angles. Then he'll try out different exposures and change lenses for different results."You think you have something wonderful, but you don't know for sure ... something might turn out to be better [when you look at the pics later]."
       Going digital
       "The benefit of digital cameras is that you can review your work quickly and shoot in impossibly low light."
       But this technology also has its drawbacks."With a slide or negative that you keep in a drawer, you have a real thing to go back to 20 years from now. Going digital and storing your work on a hard-disk drive, on the other hand,can be problematic as data can get corrupted," he said,revealing that he spent US$40,000(about 1.3 million baht)last year on data recovery alone.
       He recommends that photographers keep at least three back-ups."Keeping only one copy is insane. Two is risky.Three is sensible."
       Advances in technology also mean that he can now do lab-quality prints himself at home.
       He has four large-format Epson printers in his studio in New York."I'm pleased with the quality in terms of realistic colours."
       "I generally don't crop [pictures]," he went on."And if I take 100 pictures [of one subject/location], I might choose only one because I've got to maintain high standards."
       On the road
       Now 59, McCurry is still on the move for an average of nine months of the year, but always travels light, making do with a single camera and a 28-70mm zoom lens.
       "It's enough for me. I like to keep things as light as possible."
       Anyone thinking of becoming a professional photojournalist needs both an insatiable sense of curiosity, he said, plus oodles of dedication."If you work hard, you'll have a certain degree of success."
       His current interest is Buddhism and his forthcoming book will cover the practice of that philosophy in several countries in this region including Tibet, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand.
       "My job is to tell a story in virtual terms. Life is so short,so we should do things that please us and are meaningful."
       "I love what I do, so it's great!"
       GIRLS HUDDLE TOGETHER FOR PROTECTION DURING A DUST STORM IN INDIA.

WPP sees profit slump

2009-08-26T20:25:00.001-07:00

       WPP, the world's secondbiggest advertising group, said yesterday its first-half net profit sank 47.9% because of the global downturn but forecast a brighter performance for the rest of 2009.
       Net earnings sank to ฃ108.4 million ($177 million) in the six months to June from ฃ208.2 million a year earlier, WPP said in a results statement.
       Pre-tax profits dived 47% to ฃ179.3 million as a result of the "severe" worldwide recession.
       "The results continue to reflect the impact of the significant global economic contraction on most regions and service sectors," WPP said."The impact continued to intensify in the second quarter,though results for July did indicate a 'less-worse' picture."
       The group said revenues increased 28.4% to ฃ4.29 billion, boosted by the takeover of market research company Taylor Nelson Sofres.
       WPP, which ranks second behind the US giant Omnicom, said it had slashed around 6,525 jobs over the past year as it sought to improve profitability.
       "The impact of the recession on the group's profitability in the first half was severe," WPP said, adding that action had also been taken to cut discretionary costs such as travel and training.
       "Further cost actions have been taken in the second quarter, which have also impacted profitability in the first half,through additional severance costs but [this] will improve the picture in the second half."
       The group also predicted that revenues would be flat next year despite a host of large events that should boost spending on advertising.
       "Although it is still very early to budget or forecast what may happen in 2010,top line revenues will probably be (flat)despite the positive impact of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the World Expo in Shanghai, the Asian Games in Guangzhou, the Fifa World Cup in South Africa and the mid-term Congressional elections in the United States," WPP said.
       The group bought British firm Taylor Nelson Sofres for ฃ1.2 billion in late 2008.

Korn warns upturn at risk

2009-08-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

       Renewed political violence could jeopardise Thailand's budding economic recovery, Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij warns.
       "The economy is improving, thanks to the efforts of all parties," he said yesterday."But [violence] will certainly hurt the business environment, and be a drag on efforts towards economic recovery."
       The Democrat-led government has announced it would use powers under the Internal Security Act to keep law and order from Saturday to Tuesday in anticipation of red shirt protests in the capital on Sunday.
       The protesters, under the banner of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, oppose the government and are largely supporters of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
       Last April, UDD-led protests led to the disruption of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Pattaya and several days of rioting in Bangkok.
       Mr Korn asked all parties to "remain within the limits of the law", saying the government respected the people's right to peaceful assembly.
       Speaking at a ceremony to launch the Thai-Asean News Network, Mr Korn insisted the government had made strides in reviving the economy.
       The National Economic and Social Development Board this week said the economy shrank 4.9% in the second quarter from last year, a slower pace of decline compared with the 7.1%year-on-year contraction in the first quarter. The economy in the second quarter grew 2.3% from the end of March, compared with a 1.8% decline quarter-on-quarter in the first three months of the year.
       Mr Korn said there were clear signals of economic recovery, and state stimulus programmes had played a key part in helping to reduce job losses as a result of the global economic crisis.
       Unemployment now stood at700,000 people, a significantly better outcome than had been originally feared of 2 million without work.
       The "Thailand Strength" investment programme, to be formally launched next week, would create 2 million new jobs over the next three years and pave the way for sustained, medium-term growth, the minister said.
       Mr Korn said 1.06 trillion baht worth of investment projects under the Thai-land Strength programme had been approved and were ready to begin,out of a total 1.5 trillion baht in spending earmarked through 2012.
       A website would be set up for the public to monitor the progress of each project to ensure the transparency of the programme.
       "The Thailand Strength projects were selected from among those ready to go. We dropped a number of projects,not because they were bad but because they were not ready," Mr Korn said.
       "[These are the] projects that the public have been waiting for."
       Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva welcomed the launch of the Thai-Asean News Network.
       He said the country remained fully committed to press freedom.
       A strong, free press helped increase transparency within a society as well as support democracy, he said.

Top Khatami aides put on trial

2009-08-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

       Several aides to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami were out on trial yesterday on charges of masterminding post-election unrest and plotting a "soft coup" in the Islamic republic.
       Among the 20 or so people in the dock in the revolutionary court in tehran were a former minister and a number of other top political figures as well as reformist journalists and academics, local media reported.
       The prosecution charged that some political groups "with the cooperation of Western media and colonial embassies disrupted the situation and misused the supporters of defeated candidates to launch a soft coup d'etat."
       Iran has alreadt stagejd mass trials of around 140 people on offences linked to the massive demonstrations and street violence that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hotly-disputed victory in the June election.
       The court proceedings, which are open only to Iranian news agencies and which opposition leaders denounced as "show trials", have angered the international community and heightened political tensions as Iran battles its worst crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
       The prosecution called for the dissolition of reformist movements such as the Islamic Iran Participation Front and the Islamic Revolution Mujahedeen Organisation after accusing them of "lying" and spreading "rumours of fraud in the election".
       The news agencies said those in the dock included Khatami aides such as former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajazadeh, former deputy foreign minister Mohsen Aminzadeh, ex-deputy economy minister Mohsen Ssafaie-Farahani and reformist activists Mohsen Mirdamadi and Abdollah Ramezanzadeh.
       Another leading reformist Saeed Hajjarian, who has been under house arrest since his detention on June 16 was also in court, the ISNA news agency said.
       In written testimony read out on his behalf by another defendant, apparently for health reasons, Hajjarian apologised for "huge mistakes" he committed due to "wrong analysis."

Fairfax books loss on writedowns, ad fall

2009-08-24T21:54:00.000-07:00

       Australia's second-largest newspaper group Fairfax Media Ltd yesterday reported an annual net loss of A$380.0 million (US$315.4 million) as the global downturn and the Internet hit earnings.
       Fairfax, which publishes the flagship Sydney Morning Herald and the Age in Melbourne, said the same factors that had caused numerous newspaper closures around the globe weighed on the bottom line.
       "Over the past financial year, the company has faced a business environment unprecedented in its long history," it said.
       "Three factors have had a major im-pact - the speed of the economic slowdown, particularly in the second half, cuts to discretionary advertising (and) the necessity to respond to online challenges."
       The result for the year to June, which included writedowns of A$664.3 million,turned around a $386.9 million net profit in the previous financial year.
       Fairfax, said net profit excluding writedowns was down 40% at A$226.7 million.
       "Performance for the 2009 financial year reflects a fundamentally profitable business with a number of one-off charges," the company said.
       It said most of the one-off costs related to writedowns in the carrying value of its mastheads and goodwill.
       Fairfax, which announced at the start of the financial year that it would slash 5% of its workforce or 550 jobs, said underlying earnings were down 27.2%at $605.0 million.
       The company also said that it would not pay an annual dividend but offered some hope that advertising revenues were stabilising.
       "Trading results in the first seven weeks of the new financial year indicate that the decline in advertising revenues appears to have bottomed but a material recovery in advertising has not yet commenced," it said.

A PRIZE FOR THE PRODIGAL

2009-08-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

       SeaWrite Award winner Uthit Haemamoon left home at 15, but his heart returns again and again.

       "Lap Lae Khaeng Khoi" ("Mysteries of Khaeng Khoi"), the novel that this year's SeaWrite judges just "couldn't put down", stays close to the heart of author Uthit Haemamoon.
       Told as a somewhat mysterious and complex first-person narrative, it's an emotional, semi-autobiographical story about an ordinary family of the Thai countryside dealing with its problems.
       Uthit, a 34-year-old Saraburi native, is proud of his humble background.
       He wanted to go into visual arts he told reporters at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel last week, but his parents thought it inappropriate. Nevertheless, rebellious Uthit left home at 15 to pursue his dream, taking a series of odd jobs to support his education.
       Uthit's experiences in youth shaped both who he is and his Sea Write-winning novel, which offers a vivid depicition of his life and family and the community in which he grew up.
       "Looking back, I think my world was very narrow", he said. "My house and my family were in the country-side. My whole life revolved around that small village.
       "I felt when I was in primary school that I was happiest when I was doing art.
       "My life changed even before I was a student at Silpakorn University in Bangkok. Since I was a village guy, my lifestyle was very backward and I was narrow-minded. So when I came to the city it was an eye-opener. I saw and experienced many new things.
       "I was excited and eager to absorb these new ideas. My friends often shared their opinions about music, books, art and culture, so I became more interested in reading books and writing."
       At university, Uthit spent most of his time reading literary classics, both Thai and foreign. He loves the way Italo Calvino, for example, explores the subjectivity of meaning and the relation between fiction and life, themes that are resonant in his own novel.
       "Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' has a plot that's an open trajectory, where the author intervenes to question himself about his motives for writing," Uthit pointed out.
       "Like Calvino, there were times I felt that I was too fed up to carry on, and there were times I was happy and eager to continue my work."
       Uthit also drew inspiration from Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" and the writing of 2003 Nobel laureate JM Coetzee.
       "Ive been working on another novel for a few months now, which I look forward to publishing soon," he said.