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Phiphat eager to address outrage
Phiphat eager to address outrage
BANGKOK: Tourism and Sports Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn says the controversy involving the Thai police and Thailand Privilege Card (TPC) has damaged the reputation of law enforcement and tourism organisations, with his ministry aiming to clarify the allegations before a Cabinet meeting next week.
Phuket Town festival highlights local culture, ‘City of Gastronomy’
Phuket Town festival highlights local culture, ‘City of Gastronomy’
PHUKET: Phuket Governor Narong Woonciew presided over the formal opening of the Phuket Old Town Festival yesterday evening (Jan 27), noting that the annual event highlighting Phuket’s local culture and status as a UN ‘City of Gastronomy’ helps promote the island’s ‘soft power’ in attracting tourists.
‘Stop the hate’ online, UN chief pleads on Holocaust Day
‘Stop the hate’ online, UN chief pleads on Holocaust Day
Antonio Guterres said parts of the internet were turning into “toxic waste dumps for hate and vicious lies” that were driving “extremism from the margins to the mainstream”. “Today, I am issuing an urgent appeal to everyone with influence across the information ecosystem,” Guterres said at a commemoration ceremony at the United Nations. “Stop the hate. Set up guardrails. And enforce them."” He accused social media platforms and advertisers of profiting off the spread of hateful content. “By using algorithms that amplify hate to keep users glued to their screens, social media platforms are complicit,” added Guterres. “And so are the advertisers subsidizing this business model.” Guterres drew parallels with the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany, when people didn’t pay attention or protest. “Today, we can hear echoes of those same siren songs to hate. From an economic crisis that is breeding discontent to populist demagogues using the crisis to seduce voters to runaway misinformation, paranoid conspiracy theories and unchecked hate speech.” He lamented the rise of anti-Semitism, which he said also reflects a rise of all kinds of hate. “And what is true for anti-Semitism is true for other forms of hate. Racism. Anti-Muslim bigotry. Xenophobia. Homophobia. Misogyny.” QUARTER OF YOUNG DUTCH BELIEVE HOLOCAUST EXAGGERATED: STUDY Dutch politicians reacted with shock Wednesday after a study showed almost a quarter of adults under 40 in the Netherlands believed the Holocaust was a myth or the number of deaths exaggerated. The survey, done by the influential group Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Conference in New York, found some 12% of respondents overall shared the same view. Researchers said that 23% of Millennial and Generation Z respondents ‒ those born between the early 1980s and around 2010 ‒ thought the extermination of more than 6 million of Jews by the Nazis before and during World War II was a fallacy or overblown. The findings “exposed a disturbing lack of awareness of key historical facts about the Holocaust and the Netherlands’ own connection to Holocaust history,” the Claims Conference group said. “The numbers overall regarding denial and distortion are also higher compared to other countries we have surveyed,” added the group’s president Greg Schneider. Other countries surveyed were Britain and Canada, where 9% of respondents overall held the same view, and Austria and France (10%). Although 89% of 2,000 Dutch respondents knew of teenage diarist Anne Frank ‒ who hid from the Nazis with her family in a house in Amsterdam ‒ some 27% did not know she died at the Belsen concentration camp shortly before the war ended in 1945. “I find it shocking,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said of the study’s findings. “We can debate everything, but it’s important that we all agree on the facts,” he told the ANP national news agency. “It is astonishing and extremely worrying that almost a quarter of Dutch young people question these facts,” tweeted Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra. Dutch Education Minister Dennis Wiersma said “a stronger commitment is needed” in schools “to learn about the facts about WWII atrocities”. Two-thirds of respondents said Holocaust education should be compulsory, and some 65% of all respondents believed that there was anti-Semitism in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is still coming to terms with its role in the persecution of Jews almost 80 years after the end of World War II. It opened a Holocaust memorial in Amsterdam in 2021, inscribed with the names of more than 102,000 Dutch Jews killed during the war. Many Dutch citizens, along with the police and railway companies, actively collaborated with the German occupation to round up Jews and send them to concentration camps. GERMAN PARLIAMENT SPOTLIGHTS NAZIS’ LGBTQ VICTIMS The German parliament on Friday for the first time focused its annual Holocaust memorial commemorations on people persecuted and killed for their sexual or gender identity. Campaigners worked for two decades to establish an official ceremony for LGBTQ victims of the Nazis, saying their experience had long been forgotten or marginalised. “This group is important to me because it still suffers from discrimination and hostility,” Baerbel Bas, president of the Bundestag lower house, told AFP. Germany has officially marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day ‒ the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation ‒ since 1996 with a solemn ceremony at the Bundestag and commemorations across the country. The event traditionally focuses on the Holocaust’s 6 million Jewish victims, although, at the first ceremony, then president Roman Herzog did also pay tribute to gay men and lesbians murdered under Adolf Hitler. Henny Engels of the German Lesbian and Gay Association rights group called Friday’s commemoration an “important symbol of recognition” of “the suffering and the dignity of the imprisoned, tortured and murdered victims”. - Pink triangle - Section 175 of Germany’s penal code outlawed sex between men. Although it dated from 1871, it was rarely enforced and cities such as Berlin during the Weimar Republic had a thriving LGBTQ scene until the Nazis came to power. In 1935 the Nazis toughened the law to carry a sentence of 10 years of forced labour. Some 57,000 men were imprisoned, while between 6,000 and 10,000 were sent to concentration camps and given uniforms emblazoned with a pink triangle designating their sexuality. Historians say between 3,000 and 10,000 gay men died and many were castrated or subjected to horrific “medical” experiments. Thousands of lesbians, transgender people and sex workers were branded “degenerates” and also imprisoned at the camps under brutal conditions. Dani Dayan, chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, said that while Jews were the Nazis’ primary target, he welcomed the broadening of Germany’s remembrance culture. “The Holocaust was an onslaught against humanity: LGBTQ individuals, Roma and Sinti, mentally disabled persons, but especially against the Jewish people,” he told AFP on a visit to Berlin this week. “We respect and we honour all the victims.” The head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, agreed that while the main group of Holocaust victims were Jews, “they weren’t the only ones”. “It shows that the developments seen in the Nazi period can lead to any societal group being targeted,” he told AFP. - ‘Very late date’ - Bas opened the ceremony at the glass-domed Reichstag building, followed by a speech from Dutch Jewish survivor Rozette Kats. Kats, 80, lived out the Holocaust as a toddler in hiding in Amsterdam with adoptive parents while her own mother and father were killed at Auschwitz. Actors will read texts about two LGBTQ victims who “exemplify” the fate of queer people under Hitler, Bas said. Klaus Schirdewahn, who was convicted in 1964 over a sexual relationship with another man under a Nazi-era law still on the books, will also tell his story to the chamber. Bas regretted that there were no LGBTQ survivors of the Nazi period left to address parliament, and noted that gay men, lesbians and transgender people still faced state persecution even decades after the war. “We will draw attention at the ceremony to the so-called ’gay laws’ which were only lifted at a very late date,” she said. “By the time there were reparations, many (victims) were no longer alive.” In 2017, parliament voted to quash the convictions of 50,000 gay men sentenced for homosexuality under Section 175, which remained in force after the war, and offered compensation to victims. In 2002, a new law overturned their convictions but did not include post-war prosecutions. Section 175 was finally dropped from the penal code in East Germany in 1968. In West Germany, it reverted to the pre-Nazi era version in 1969 and was only fully repealed in 1994. RUSSIA NOT INVITED TO CEREMONY MARKING AUSCHWITZ LIBERATION: MUSEUM The Auschwitz museum said Wednesday that because of the war in Ukraine Russia will be excluded from the upcoming ceremony marking 78 years since the Red Army liberated the Nazi death camp. “Given the aggression against a free and independent Ukraine, representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to attend this year’s commemoration,” Piotr Sawicki, spokesman for the museum at the site of the former camp, told AFP. Friday is the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland ‒ a date that has become Holocaust Memorial Day. Until now, Russia has always taken part in the commemoration held every year on January 27, with its delegate speaking at the main ceremony. Museum director Piotr Cywinski said it was obvious that he could “sign no letter to the Russian ambassador having an inviting tone” in the current context. “I hope that will change in the future but we have a long way to go,” he said, according to the PAP news agency. “Russia will need an extremely long time and very deep self-examination after this conflict in order to return to gatherings of the civilised world.” The museum denounced the Russian offensive as a “barbaric act” on the day Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 last year. Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of 6 million European Jews, 1 million of whom died at the camp between 1940 and 1945 along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.
IOC’s move to reintegrate Russia into Olympics meets opposition
IOC’s move to reintegrate Russia into Olympics meets opposition
OLYMPICS: The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) efforts to find a “pathway” for Russians to take part in the 2024 Paris Games despite the invasion of Ukraine were strongly criticised by Britain on Thursday (Jan 26).
COVID-19 cases ‘declining’ despite foreign arrival surge
COVID-19 cases ‘declining’ despite foreign arrival surge
BANGKOK: The number of COVID-19 cases has gradually declined, despite the spike in foreign visitors entering the country, said government spokeswoman Traisuree Taisaranakul.
PHUKET XTRA: VIDEO: Kathu Mayor OUT, Fair vendors arrested for gambling, Pot noodles pulled || January 27
PHUKET XTRA: VIDEO: Kathu Mayor OUT, Fair vendors arrested for gambling, Pot noodles pulled || January 27
PHUKET XTRA - January 27 || Brought to you by @PVC Phuket Hosted by: JP Mestanza || #Phuket #PhuketNews #Thailand
Man City and Arsenal take league rivalry into FA Cup
Man City and Arsenal take league rivalry into FA Cup
FOOTBALL: Manchester City and Arsenal take a break from an intense Premier League title race this weekend - only to face each other in a heavyweight FA Cup clash at the Etihad.
Tourist behind ‘escort’ clip has left
Tourist behind ‘escort’ clip has left
BANGKOK: The Chinese tourist who posted a video clip showing three Thai police officers offering her a shortcut through immigration and a police escort to her hotel in Pattaya has already left the country, the Tourist Police Bureau (TBP) said on Thursday (Jan 26).
99 monks ordained as Phuket prayers continue for HRH Bajrakitiyabha
99 monks ordained as Phuket prayers continue for HRH Bajrakitiyabha
PHUKET: Phuket Governor Narong Woonciew joined a mass ordination of 99 monks yesterday (Jan 26) held to make merit and offer blessings and best wishes for Her Royal Highness Princess Bajrakitiyabha Narendiradebyavati.
Kathu Mayor sacked over illegal water probe
Kathu Mayor sacked over illegal water probe
PHUKET: Chai-anan Suthikul has been removed from office as Mayor of Kathu by order of the Phuket Governor following an investigation into allowing a private operator to pump water from a lagoon at the Tin Mine Museum in Kathu.
Wat Chalong Fair vendors arrested for gambling
Wat Chalong Fair vendors arrested for gambling
PHUKET: Police have arrested 18 people, mostly stall vendors, for gambling at Wat Chalong, gathering each night after the events for the ongoing Wat Chalong Fair shut down.
Rocking on the beach at the Rassada Music Festival
Rocking on the beach at the Rassada Music Festival
PHUKET: Fans of Rock and Roll music can look forward to rocking out with the sand beneath their feet after news yesterday (Jan 26) that the Rassada Music Festival 2023 has been confirmed.
Emergency decree endorsed in order to tackle online fraud
Emergency decree endorsed in order to tackle online fraud
BANGKOK: The Cabinet has approved a draft emergency decree meant to combat online fraud, enabling financial institutions to halt suspicious transactions temporarily for scrutiny, says Digital Economy and Society (DES) Minister Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn.
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PHUKET XTRA: VIDEO: Suspect arrested after 10 years, Airport taxi driver drug tests, Old Phuket Town Fest || January 26
PHUKET XTRA: VIDEO: Suspect arrested after 10 years, Airport taxi driver drug tests, Old Phuket Town Fest || January 26
PHUKET XTRA - January 26 || Brought to you by @PVC Phuket Hosted by: JP Mestanza || #Phuket #PhuketNews #Thailand
Weekend of fun ahead at the Phuket Old Town Festival
Weekend of fun ahead at the Phuket Old Town Festival
PHUKET: This year’s Phuket Old Town Festival kicks off in Phuket Town tomorrow (Jan 27) to coincide with celebrations for the Chinese New Year.
Visit from top player gives Phuket Pickleball a boost
Visit from top player gives Phuket Pickleball a boost
PICKLEBALL: Fast becoming a popular sport in Phuket, pickleball received a major boost last week with the visit of a renowned player and his coach to help continue the development of the game on the island.
Myanmar opium farming booming after coup: UN
Myanmar opium farming booming after coup: UN
MYANMAR: Opium poppy production in Myanmar ramped up dramatically following the 2021 military coup, the UN’s drugs office said today (Jan 26), as political and economic turmoil drove farmers to cultivate the crop.
Russian suffering bipolar disorder found hanged in Rawai
Russian suffering bipolar disorder found hanged in Rawai
PHUKET: A 36-year-old Russian man suffering from bipolar disorder was found hanged at his rented room in Rawai yesterday (Jan 25).
After 10 years, suspect arrested for Phuket tourist business attack, arson
After 10 years, suspect arrested for Phuket tourist business attack, arson
PHUKET: A man wanted for his role in the assault of a security guard and arson of a snake show and health nutriments business on Sai Ta-iad, Chalong, in 2012 has been arrested in Bangkok and brought to Phuket to face charges.