Dana White, President of Ultimate Fighting Championship, speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday. Photo: John Locher / Associated Press
NEW YORK — Another former soap star, Kimberlin Brown, brought up the rear Tuesday at the Republican National Convention, her late-night limelight delayed by a long delegate count in the Donald Trump nominating process.
Brown, a California avocado farmer and mom of two, played the villainous Sheila Carter on both “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful” from 1990 until 2006. Antonio Sabato Jr., another “Bold” alum, spoke on the convention’s opening day Monday.
Cameras panned to empty seats as Brown spoke, though plenty of delegates remained. She angrily noted some vitriol she had received on social media for agreeing to speak for Trump, but had some vitriol of her own for Hillary Clinton, whom she accused of not doing enough to help businesswomen.
Of the avocado-growing business, a steely-eyed Brown said, “I’ve seen firsthand our domestic market flooded with imports that harmed local farmers and even drove some out of business.”
She added, “We need someone who knows how to build things, who knows how to create jobs and who knows how to negotiate.”
Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White called Trump a loyal friend who always took a keen interest in White’s career.
“I’ve been in the fight business my whole life. I know fighters. Ladies and gentleman, Donald Trump is a fighter and I know he will fight for this country,” White said.
According to the Republicans, Trump hosted the once-controversial mixed martial arts competitions at his Trump Taj Mahal when other venues refused.
Oh, and also on the night’s program: A low-ranked professional golfer, Natalie Gulbis. She was a Season 2 contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice” whom Trump fired eight episodes in. Apparently she’s OK with that. She called Trump “generous” and “inspiring.”
Gulbis, who once had her own reality show on the Golf Channel, borrowed a line from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in praising Trump as the guy who urged her to be fearless and to “lean in” when faced with age (she’s 33) and gender challenges as a businesswoman.
One of the schoolgirls signs a report July 18 at the Khanu Woralaksaburi Police Station in Kampheng Phet province.
KAMPHAENG PHET — When two 8-year-old girls ripped a voter registration notice from a board near their school in Kamphaeng Phet province because they wanted the pink-colored paper, local police officers must have thought it was a cute, harmless incident.
But regional police commander Chanasit Wattanarangkul thought otherwise and on Tuesday ordered the local police chief removed from his post because he didn’t file urgently report the vandalism.
The incident took place at Vachirasansuksa School, which has been designated a polling station for the Aug. 7 referendum, in which the public will vote whether to accept the new constitution drafted under the military government.
At around 5:30pm on Monday, the two schoolgirls removed the document listing registered voters from a wooden board there, and police officers were soon at the scene asking why they did it.
The original police report concluded the girls “believed the the pink-colored paper was beautiful” so they tore it off and kept it. The girls were released without charge.
Local police station chief Itthi Chamnanmor didn’t file any report about the incident to his supervisor. For that failure, Lt. Gen. Chanasit transferred him to an inactive post and placed him under disciplinary investigation.
The notice, released to the media Tuesday, said Itthi broke protocol by letting Chanasit find out about the girls’ antics from the media instead of an internal report.
Police inspect the crime scene at Wat Baan Non Khae on Wednesday morning.
SISAKET — The parishioners of Wat Baan Non Khae will have to observe the beginning of Buddhist Lent without the usual dhamma teachings, thanks to a thief who stole its sound equipment Wednesday morning.
Abbot Supol Jirasubodhi told police the thief most likely burgled the temple around 6am while he and the other monks were out collecting morning alms.
When Phra Supol returned to the temple, their 20,000 baht loudspeaker, which the monks used for broadcasting Buddhist chants and teachings to templegoers on religious holidays, was gone.
“The thief took the loudspeaker and the rest of the equipment,” Phra Supol said.
He added that the audio system was donated to his temple by local Buddhists.
Police said they are investigating the incident.
Wednesday marked the first day of the three-month Buddhist Lent, during which time monks must stay confined to their monasteries and temples. Religious Buddhists also refrain from drinking alcohol during the Lent.
A shopper stands on an escalator March 20 in an electronics store in Tokyo. Photo: Shizuo Kambayashi / Associated Press
TOKYO — For Nintendo, “Pokemon Go” just keeps on giving.
Shares in the Japanese game maker closed up 14 percent at 31,700 yen (about 10,500 baht) on the Tokyo Stock exchange Tuesday, having more than doubled in value since the wildly popular augmented-reality game launched on July 6.
Nintendo accounted for nearly one in four shares that changed hands on the TSE’s main board. The sharp rise has doubled the Kyoto-based company’s market capitalization to 4.5 trillion yen (USD$42.4 billion).
“Pokemon Go,” a smartphone app that uses Google Maps to overlay reality with Pokemon creatures, was developed by Niantic, a Google spinoff that Nintendo Co. invested in last year. The game has yet to be released in Japan and most of Asia.
The release of “Pokemon Go” has been at least a temporary reprieve for Nintendo, which had struggled as the shift in gaming to mobile devices ate into its highly successful handheld game machine business.
The windfall could help reverse Nintendo’s fortunes, although some analysts think its impact on the company’s revenues will be limited because the game is free apart from certain revenue-earning features.
Activists Paisarn Likhitpreechakul and Pimsiri Petchnamrob on stage after a screening last year of 'The Times of Harvey Milk' at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.
BANGKOK — “I’m a girl. I like hanging around with male friends. But I’m never sure whether it’s boys or girls I’m attracted to,” the 20-year-old student told the others in the room without a trace of embarrassment, shame or unease about her sexual agency.
A transgender man in his 30s talked about the difficulties with his parents since his masculinity took hold in high school.
“I’ve taken testosterone hormone for a month already, but I haven’t told my family yet,” he said, because they don’t accept him as “him.”
Another of the 15 or so people who gathered on a recent Sunday afternoon at a Bangkok cafe, Ruangtup Kaeokamechun, discussed coming out to her mother by giving her “Letters to Mothers,” a collection of letters from LGBT sons and daughters to their parents.
The session was notable for marking a shift in how Thailand’s LGBT community talks about itself: It was outspoken instead of reticent, candid instead of shy and forceful, not timid.
The cover of ‘Letters to Mothers,’ a book published with the support of LGBT organizations such as Anjaree Foundation, the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation and Faculty of Medicine at Ramathibodi Hospital.
Just a month after the Orlando massacre shook LGBT communities everywhere, Thailand is speaking a little louder and prouder, with some saying they feel prompted to be more visible, more active and more open about who they are.
Though the 49 people shot to death in the Pulse nightclub were 15,000 kilometers from Bangkok, their deaths had a strong impact on LGBT individuals and communities in Thailand, Thammasat University professor Pawin Malaiwong said.
“The incident was unnerving and many people were shaken and felt emotionally involved even though they’re not there,” said Pawin, who also teaches in the university’s Queer Studies elective program.
Tragedy Drives Pursuit of Equality
While Orlando may have been an emotional tipping point, Pawin said it was not the only catalyst to wake LGBT political awareness. Before people started advocating for themselves, they mobilized during the past year for the sake of a gay, foreign couple.
“Bring Carmen Home” became a cause celebre in Thailand’s LGBT community, which widely supported the Spanish and American couple stuck in Bangkok for the duration of a 15-month custody battle for their daughter born to a Thai surrogate mother.
The legal battle served to put Thailand’s LGBT citizens on notice: Tolerance doesn’t translate into equality.
“The prolonged case to ‘Bring Carmen Home’ was another example which helped raise local LGBT awareness and showed that being accepted is not enough, LGBT people also needs basic rights like other human beings,” Pawin said.
And so they have been, with a surge of LGBT-related events actively attended, from frank discussions of sexual violence, a documentary on the early U.S. gay rights movement, a casual screening of a porn star-turned-transman, a gay open-mic night and more where people are openly sharing their experiences and disclosing their identities.
Just last week, an intern at a public radio station went to use the restroom, only to find a sign had been hung telling her transgender women were not welcome to use it.
A sign posted outside a restroom July 12 at Radio Thailand’s offices in Bangkok. Photo: Twitter / @_Foremostt
Instead of quietly shouldering the indignity, she called it out online, sparking a heated debate over something that – albeit not new – has been little discussed.
Ruangtup, the 31-year-old who came out to her mother through the book of letters, said her mom finished reading it in a few weeks.
“I’m glad. At least she tried to understand who I am,” Ruangtup said.
She’s now an active member of a community that she avoided until recently. She would walk past LGBT seminars and snap a few photos from the entrance but otherwise preferred staying home to watch Orange is the New Black.
“I felt I wasn’t brave enough. I felt I had no friends. I felt uncomfortable with the society I lived in,” Ruangtup said.
She joined the first LGBT event of her life in October because she was curious about how her life might be different with like-minded friends to talk about her same struggles.
“I didn’t feel I was alone anymore,” she said. “I became more confident talking out loud about who I am. I also feel people around me are more open-minded about this.”
Cascading Issues
‘Can’t be fixed. Too late to change. I’m so normal,’ Ruangtup displayed at a recent seminar on discrimination and violence against lesbians, bisexual women and transgender men at Thammasat University. Photo: Ruang Kaeokamechun / Facebook
More than 100 people showed up to share stories of sexual violence against lesbians, bisexual women and transmen recently at Thammasat University.
People discussed the verbal attacks passed off casually – things like “Cold fingers aren’t as good as a warm penis,” “Fix butch into belle” – at the event.
And worse.
While violence in the mainstream media is portrayed as something done by men to women, no one really has a measure of how much is committed against gay women or men born as women because it is nearly invisible.
“We found so many unreported cases of raped tomboys,” said Sulaiporn Chonwilai, organizer of Fix Butch, Repair Femme: Rhetoric, Derogatory and Violence. “They’re too embarrassed to file charges at a police station. Many of them prefer to not talk about this. They want to let it go – the faster the better.”
Asked if these things signaled progress in the normalization of the LGBT movement, Sulaiporn said it’s only the beginning.
An important distinction, Thammasat’s Pawin said, is the conversation is coming out of the classroom and into the streets.
The issues are becoming more accessible to the public and not only already erudite academic seminars because there needs to be more “street talk,” he said.
“Many people felt that talking about LGBT issues is something for the ivory tower. Now it’s a good thing the topic’s pulled onto local streets,” Pawin said. “But we still have to see if it’s going to stop there in the streets or wander into the sois to people on the margins.”
“Fix Butch, Repair Femme: [I’m] a human, [not a car.]” Photo: Sexuality Studies AssociationTop: Activists Paisarn Likhitpreechakul and Pimsiri Petchnamrob on stage after a Tuesday screening of ‘The Times of Harvey Milk’ at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.
A policeman and another man try to break the windows of a burning tour bus on the side of a highway in Taoyuan, Taiwan, on Tuesday. Photo: Yan Cheng / Scoop Commune / Associated Press
TAIPEI — A tour bus carrying visitors from China burst into flames on a highway near Taiwan’s capital on Tuesday, killing all 26 people on board, officials said, in the deadliest incident involving Chinese tourism to the island.
The accident took place on the No. 2 national highway in Taoyuan county, south of Taipei, where Taiwan’s international airport is located, the county’s fire and rescue service said in a statement.
It said 24 of those on board were visitors from northeast China’s Liaoning province who had been scheduled to fly home on Tuesday afternoon. The others killed were the driver and a tour guide, both Taiwanese.
Taoyuan fire chief Lai Chi-chong said all of the victims died inside the bus. “There was not enough time for them to escape,” he told reporters.
Video from the scene showed both of the bus’s doors pressed up against the highway’s guard rail, making them impossible to open. Photos showed flames and thick black smoke pouring from the front of the bus.
Many of the bodies were badly charred, some of them piled in front of the unopened emergency exit, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency and other media reported.
There was no official word on the cause of the fire, although CNA and others said that the bus apparently burst into flames after spinning out of control and smashing into the guard rail.
CNA cited eyewitnesses as saying the bus had been giving off smoke and swerving from lane to lane prior to crashing and bursting into flames.
The drivers of other vehicles pulled over and attempted to put out the flames with fire extinguishers, but the fire had grown too large for them to put out, the news agency said.
Thirteen firefighting vehicles and 30 firefighters were sent to the scene, but the fire apparently spread too rapidly. By the time the flames were extinguished, the vehicle had been heavily blackened from one end to the other.
Three of the victims were children — two 13-year-olds and a 12-year-old, according to a passenger manifest distributed to media by the Taiwanese travel agency that organized the trip.
The accident was the deadliest involving Chinese visitors to Taiwan since the island opened up to Chinese tourism in 2008, according to Taiwanese government records and reports of previous incidents.
Since then, 83 Chinese have died while on trips to Taiwan, including Tuesday’s victims. Several of those deaths involved bus crashes, including a 2010 crash that killed 19, and the latest accident is likely to revive safety concerns surrounding the treatment of Chinese tourists, most of whom come on cheap group tours.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said it would send representatives to help deal with legal issues surrounding the crash. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and the sides have no formal ties, although contacts have been growing in recent years to handle trade, travel and other practical, nonpolitical matters.
However, relations have deteriorated since the January election of independence-leaning Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and Chinese tourist numbers have declined steadily in recent months, dealing a major blow to the island’s travel industry.
A fan holds a scarf that says 'Portugal European Champion Euro 2016' while waiting for the arrival of Portugal's national soccer team July 11 in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo: Paulo Duarte / Associated Press
BANGKOK — Interpol says a crackdown on Asian gambling dens and websites during football’s European Championship led to more than 4,100 people arrested and USD$13.6 million (476 million baht) seized.
Police raided nearly 4,000 illegal dens across Asia and Europe, including in China, Singapore, France, and Italy.
Two operations coordinated in Thailand targeted organized crime networks and transnational networks in Asia “behind illicit websites and call-center type operations running online scams,” Interpol says.
Three Thai offices of illegal online gambling sites were shut down, and 15 people were arrested in Malaysia linked to payment card fraud.
Interpol’s head of anti-corruption and financial crimes unit, Jim Anderson, says “illegal gambling generates massive profits for organized crime networks which are often linked to corruption, human trafficking, and money laundering.”
A knife found under the driver’s seat of Jeerasak Kingpromphoo’s tuk-tuk Monday night in Chiang Mai.
CHIANG MAI — A drunk tuk-tuk driver crashed his vehicle and then attacked the rescue workers who came to his aid in Chiang Mai province Monday night.
Jeerasak Kingpromphoo, 34, was charged with driving under the influence, property damage and, for the blade found under his seat, carrying a weapon illegally.
“We have already sent him to court,” Chiang Mai police chief Apiwat Chaisrisut said by telephone Tuesday.
According to the police colonel, Jeerasak crashed his tuk-tuk at around midnight on Loy Kroh Road, overturning the vehicle. When rescue workers stationed at a nearby shopping mall came to help, Jeerasak attacked them and damaged their gear.
“He just went berserk,” Apiwat said.
Police and rescue workers eventually subdued Jeerasak and brought him to a police station where a test revealed he was heavily intoxicated. Police also found a knife in the tuk-tuk, though Apiwat said Jeerasak didn’t use the weapon during the altercation.
Jeerasak wasn’t carrying any passengers at the time, and no tourists were hurt in the incident, he added.
Rapeepat Sirisitthidamrongkit, 28, turns himself Monday night at a police station in Ayutthaya province and admitted to stealing 1.2 million baht from his mother.
AYUTTHAYA — A woman filed theft charges against her own son Monday for allegedly stealing 1.2 million baht and giving it all to a woman he met online.
The charge led to a brief criminal investigation that ended the same night with Rapeepat Sirisitthidamrongkit, 28, surrendering to police and apologizing to his mother, who then forgave him and withdrew the complaint.
Sirikan Sirisitthidamrongkit said she recently found 1.2 million baht missing from her account, she said in her complaint. She suspected her son Rapeepat was behind it because he often withdraws money on her behalf yet never produces any ATM slips.
By the time she found out, Sirikan told police Monday, Rapeepat had not been seen at their family home since July 13.
She believed Rapeepat gave the money to a net idol named VJ Four that he met in an online chatroom that he brought home July 12. She spent the night there, met the family, and then both were gone along with the money the next day. Rapeepat had also mentioned wanting to buy her a diamond ring, Sirikan said.
Upon receiving the complaint, an officer at Sena Police Station told reporters they would track down Rapeepat and see whether he was coerced into stealing the money.
But after word spread, Rapeepat preemptively turned himself at the station at around 11pm. He admitted to the crime, saying he needed the money to buy a new car for VJ Four. He also apologized to his mother. The money was gone.
With the apology, Sirikan said she forgave her prodigal son and withdrew the criminal complaint on the condition he never speaks to VJ Four again.
Sirikan Sirisitthidamrongkit signs a paper to withdraw charge against her son.
The Intel E-Sports Arena in a July 9 iamge. Photo: E-Sports Arena Powered by Intel / Facebook
BANGKOK— Those who liked Bangkok’s original IT mall for its run-down, Blade Runner feels may be surprised next month when Pantip Plaza finishes rebooting into the 21st Century.
Expect more contemporary tech amenities, from a hi-so co-working space offering panoramic views to a 600sqm esports arena for cheering on the kingdom’s top LoL, DOTA and HoN cyberathletes.
After a two-year, 300 million baht do-over, the famous IT shopping mall Pantip Plaza (actually Pantip Pratunam), will reopen in entirety next month, billed as the nation’s first “Tech-Life Mall.”
What does that mean? Zones! Instead of stall after shady stall of pirated software, component hardware and porn pitchmen, the new five-story mall will have one area focused on gaming wares in the Gaming Zone, the Intel-sponsored esports arena, the “Syn Hub” coworking space, and for audiophiles, the Home Audio & Music Plugin Zone.
Wandering around the retro mall to find qualified technicians should be easier as they’re about to set up in the Handy Man Zone, where trusted tech-savvy mechanics can be found.
The Intel E-Sports Arena located on the ground floor opened in June. The other zones will officially open Aug. 8.
Pantip Plaza is located on Petchaburi Road. The nearest skytrain is BTS Ratchathewi. The IT shopping mall opens daily from 10am to 9pm.
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