News

To this day, when Thai schoolchildren learn by rote the main achievements of their past prime ministers, they are taught that Anand Panyarachun was responsible for the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ Free Trade Area (AFTA). What this might mean to them ...

Few have heard of the Mergui Archipelago, and even fewer have managed to visit the 400km string of scattered islands in the Bay of Bengal’s Andaman Sea.Most of the 800 offshore islands are uninhabited, apart from a few seasonal settlements of the seafaring nomadic Moken, ...

Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon insisted political parties will have about 60 days for election campaigning after the ban on political activities is lifted. The 60-day period for campaigning should be long enough when compared to the campaign for the 2011 election called by former ...

As Thailand gears up to chair Asean next year, a sense of deja vu is setting in. The last time Thailand held its rotational turn at Asean’s helm from July 2008 to December 2009, it was undermined by domestic street protests that ended up disrupting ...

A recent report by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature showed that between 1970 and 2014 the vertebrate population declined by an average of 60 percent. While this was mostly due to habitat loss, the illegal trade in wildlife—whether rhino horn, tiger bone, or animals ...

The countries of the Mekong should build a “community of shared future” said China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in December last year. The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Framework (LMC) is “practical and highly effective”, he said. “We do not go after a high-profile ‘talk shop’ but a ...

Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) policy committee has approved five major infrastructure projects. The EEC policy committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, approved the first phase development plan for the economic corridor and the 2018 EEC Act, which calls for five major infrastructure projects. Keep reading ...

Based on the themes of resilience and innovation, Thailand is preparing to make sustainability more of a priority for Asean as the kingdom prepares to chair the regional bloc next year. Suriya Chindawongse, director-general of the Department of Asean Affairs, said Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha ...

Thailand is seeking to further flesh out its strategic economic cooperation with China by promoting another layer of ties built on direct connections with some Chinese provinces.After meeting China’s State Councillor Wang Yong in Beijing on Wednesday (Nov,7 ), Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak revealed ...

In a bid to boost government transparency and accountability, new technologies should be explored and used to fight corruption more  effectively. One of the most promising technologies is called blockchain, which is essentially a list of records linked together using crytography and time-stamps. This forms ...