Thu, February 23, 2012 06:43:07 AM
Bangkok Post
Thu, February 23, 2012 06:43:07 AM
Bangkok Post
The brouhaha surrounding the prime minister's visit to a hotel instead of attending parliament, has dragged on long enough. If one is to believe the flood of criticism posted on social network sites, the reputation of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has certainly taken a drubbing.
Robert Zoellick will depart in June as president of the World Bank, once again raising the thorny issue of leadership of the Bretton Woods twins _ the bank and the International Monetary Fund. At their birth, John Maynard Keynes memorably warned that if these institutions did not get good leaders they would "fall into an eternal slumber, never to waken or be heard of again in the courts and markets of Mankind".
Re: ''PM urged to clarify hotel meet'' (BP, Feb 22). It seems the people in the Pheu Thai Party are overreacting to queries pertaining to PM Yingluck's activities on Feb 8.
The Yingluck government has admitted it will be impossible to prevent flooding this year if the country is again hit by several tropical storms. But it can lessen the severity by storing excess floodwater in 2 million rai of lowlying land to be bought from farmers and house owners in the Central Plains and outer areas of Bangkok.
Three draft bills on charter amendments sponsored by the government, Pheu Thai Party and Chartthaipattana Party, respectively, should pose no problem for the joint sitting of the lower and upper houses to deliberate on when they are debated in parliament today and tomorrow.
Help the mother, and you help her whole family. Who can argue with that? Why then has the 7.7-billion-baht Women's Fund got the thumbs-down from many women's rights groups and legal experts? The answer lies in their common concern regarding abuse for political gain. This is a real concern.
It's incredible how the prospect of making money from tourists can bring out the entrepreneurial spirit.
This is a compilation of Bangkok Post editorial cartoons for the whole of February 2012.
There were welcome words from Prime Minister Najib Razak on Monday. In talks with Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra during her official visit to Kuala Lumpur, Mr Najib addressed the problems in Thailand's deep South. In direct and uncompromising terms, he put the blame for the violence and murders where it belonged, with three vital points.
When US President Richard Nixon embarked on his historic trip to China 40 years ago, he could not have imagined what his gamble would unleash. The immediate diplomatic impact, of course, was to reshape Eurasia's geopolitical balance and put the Soviet Union on the defensive. But the long-term outcome of America's rapprochement with China became visible only recently, with the economic integration of the People's Republic into the world economy.
