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Die Gasspeicher leerten sich zuletzt rasant, viel schneller als zur Gaskrise 2022. Den Gaspreis beeinflusst das kaum – warum eigentlich?

Since the US War on Vietnam, Bangkok has been a key hub for international journalists and academics in Southeast Asia. It offers modern infrastructure, easy travel, and a high quality of life, allowing them to chopper into the periphery and return home for drinks. These advantages foster a professional environment removed from the region it purports to cover. Western expatriates operate engulfed within a certain elite social and informational milieu, often resulting in confused, racially essentialist coverage aligning with the interests of the moneyed Bangkok elite.

This was clear during the past six months since the outbreak of the border war with Cambodia last year. This triggered a judicial coup against left-populist PM Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the installation of ultra-right leader Anutin Charnvirakul, the dissolution of parliament, and elections scheduled for February 8. Foreign correspondents have seemed bemused, writing contradictory pieces. Analysis like BBC’s Jonathan Head’s, citing how much “we just don’t know,” boils mass class-struggle in a country of over 70 million down to simple elite factional rivalries (as is the case with the conflict with Cambodia) and often parrots the Thai elite line.

If ignorance is one component, another is racial essentialism. The BBC even published a guide of essential racial generalizations in the region. Such analysis is chauvinistic, imperialist, and fundamentally racist. Chief BBC Correspondent Jonathan Head, based in Bangkok for 20 years, exemplifies this; of course he “just doesn’t know” what’s going on, he can’t even speak the language. Meanwhile, any Thai person somewhat versed in socio-political history knows how much we indeed do know.

Unlike cleaner Singapore or more tightly regulated Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok has an aesthetic grit; a few slums, open sex work, and street vendors remain. Said vendors often speak basic English, while the elites they rely on are fluent. This allows the foreign correspondent the thrill of an edgy, orientalized posting without learning the language or developing a non-Bangkok-centric critique. This network becomes a closed informational loop, dependent on interpreters and fixers from the same consensus, unable to seek dissenting viewpoints outside this circuit.

The GI Era

Since the 1950s, Thailand has been a safe Western ally, developed into an anti-communist bulwark for attacks on revolutionary movements in China and Indochina. During America’s war on Vietnam, academics were also shipped to Bangkok to develop experimental counterinsurgency projects. As detailed in “Anthropology Goes to War”, one academic said, “Working in Thailand is like working in Vietnam, except no one is shooting at us.”

GI-Era Bangkok was a hub from which the region was pimped out to grotesque paternalist Western interests and desires: Political capital, bars, drugs, and women. It was a place of both soft and hard power. As researcher Cynthia Enloe chronicled, a place where the use of Asian women by Western men as objects of political and economic capital. Today it still functionally exists, as Western journalists do overpriced cocaine in Ari district bars with their local girlfriends patiently waiting out front.

Long after the anti-communist wars, this dynamic remained. Institutions like The Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok (which Jonathan Head chaired) still play a vital soft power role for the Bangkok elite and Western powers. Within these walls, Western and elite Thai journalists rub shoulders, speak English, and amplify their echo chamber.

Censorship

Without learning the language and history, Thailand is a difficult country to cover. State censorship has been constant since the 1950s; books have been burnt and writers of critical histories disappeared. English sources on anti-communist state mass-killings during the 1960s-70s are predominantly written by the American academics who took part in the acts. Basic sources like Wikipedia are compromised by Thai state agencies like the Cyberscouts, who promote pro-monarchy content and censor critiques, bleeding into both academia and journalism. Critique of the monarchy is banned and punishable by lengthy jail sentences; critical international publications find staff work visas revoked.

This dynamic directly has consequences on the reporting. The country’s deep economic disparities, felt most acutely outside the capital, are covered sporadically, if at all. Chronic oppression and struggle are reduced to simplified narratives of protest and crackdown, missing the underlying social and economic conflicts or political agency -particularly as it pertains to the peasant classes. This is how English-language narratives of class conflict are flattened into interpersonal elite disputes.

Even speaking some Thai, the censorship applies. Critical records are hard to come by. One must be embedded in communities outside Bangkok to hear histories first or second hand. This is why someone like Jit Phumisak, the radical historian killed in the 1960s, is so celebrated for breaking the elite consensus. Despite his popularity domestically, little of his work is translated or accessible. The few Thai writers who have left, outside the reach of censors, have inevitably passed through Western academia, further compromising their critique.

A flat narrative

This insulated model benefits Thailand’s elite power holders; the political, monarchic, military, and business elite in Bangkok. They provide reliable access in English, framing events to emphasize simplicity, stability and legitimacy. By interacting only with this group, the media adopts its framing. A political crisis is presented as a temporary disturbance, whilst deeply rooted structural class antagonisms are downplayed as routine challenges of development. English-language reportage of the country and the wider region thus has a persistent pro-Bangkok bias, whether the writers know it or not.

The outcome is a soft power advantage for the status quo. The elite secures favorable international portrayal, while journalism’s critical function is inverted. The press, focused on maintaining access and visas, fails to interrogate the forces shaping the nation. The number of English language writers who critically cover the Kingdom is countable on one hand; the names Tyrell Haberkorn and Claudio Sopranzetti come to mind.

So much of Thai history is open-secrets known by the majority, the rural poor, but remains inaccessible to the Foreign Correspondents Club. To learn them, you must speak Thai, leave Bangkok, be in the villages, learn the meta-language of state repression, learn to read the room and gain confidence. Even then, censorship remains, and a small clutch of Western journalists like Andrew MacGregor Marshall and academics have faced severe backlash for their reporting. Largely, this is a risk most would rather not run, when they could instead wake up in their Ari condo, attend a Correspondents Club talk, eat street food with their local girlfriend, go to a Sukhumvit bar, and order pizza delivery, feeling very worldly in the process. Bangkok’s allure is undeniable, so too is the outcome: a flat, muddled image of the country rife with generalization where class struggle and the aspirations of the poor do not exist.

Kay Young is a writer and editor at DinDeng journal (Thailand). He has a forthcoming book on Thai revolutionary history with LeftWord Books (India).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post The Bangkok bubble: soft power in international media appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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A new report confirms that unchained economic growth driven by corporations seeking profits with too little concern for downside harm is having devastating impacts on biodiversity and natural systems across the planet while also undermining the health of the global economy in the long run.

The landmark new report published Monday by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was backed by over 150 nations after three years of research and analyses by 79 leading experts from 35 countries across all regions of the world.

What the research found is that "the current conditions in which businesses operate are not always compatible with achieving a just and sustainable future, and that these conditions also perpetuate systemic risks" with far-reaching implications.

"The growth of the global economy has been at the cost of immense biodiversity loss, which now poses a critical and pervasive systemic risk to the economy, financial stability and human wellbeing," warned the IPBES in a statement.

“We must place true value on the environment and go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of human progress and wellbeing. Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP.” —António Guterres, UN Secretary-General

With natural resources "being depleted and degraded faster now than any period in human history," the report is designed to warn humanity, equip policymakers with knowledge, and provide solutions that could mitigate the crisis of biodiversity loss.

The report notes that "unsustainable economic activity and a focus on growth as measured by the gross domestic product, has been a driver of the decline of biodiversity... and stands in the way of transformative change."

According to Alexander De Croo, an administrator with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), an IPBES partner organization, "Businesses are inseparable from the ecosystems they operate in: they both depend on them and profoundly impact them. As significant drivers of today’s planetary crises, businesses have contributed to climate change, biodiversity loss and cultural erosion."

At the same time, he added, these companies "have a critical role to play in advancing more sustainable solutions, a role already reflected in a growing number of initiatives." The real problem, the report finds, is how intractable the business-as-usual approach has been, with corporations resistant to changing their operations to put them more in line with nature and too little pressure coming from governments to force through more sustainable practices.

According to the report:

Current conditions perpetuate business-as-usual and do not support the transformative change necessary to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. For example, large subsidies that drive losses of biodiversity are directed to business activities with the support of lobbying by businesses and trade associations. In 2023, global public and private finance flows with directly negative impacts on nature, were estimated at $7.3 trillion, of which private finance accounted for $4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies of about $2.4 trillion.

In contrast, $220 billion in public and private finance flows were directed in 2023 to activities contributing to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity, representing just 3% of the public funds and incentives that encourage harmful business behaviour or prevent behaviour beneficial to biodiversity.

“The loss of biodiversity is among the most serious threats to business,” said Prof. Stephen Polasky, co-chair of the assessment. “Yet the twisted reality is that it often seems more profitable to businesses to degrade biodiversity than to protect it. Business as usual may once have seemed profitable in the short term, but impacts across multiple businesses can have cumulative effects, aggregating to global impacts, which can cross ecological tipping points."

But Polasky goes on to say that the report "shows that business as usual is not inevitable," and that with better policies, "as well as financial and cultural shifts, what is good for nature is also what is best for profitability."

The IPBES assessment arrived alongside fresh warnings about the disastrous results that have stemmed from obsessive allegiance to gross domestic product (GDP) as the key economic indicator by governments and businesses worldwide.

In an interview with the Guardian on Monday, UN secretary general António Guterres suggested that the obsession with GDP was driving humanity toward a cliff.

“We must place true value on the environment and go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of human progress and wellbeing," Guterres said. "Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP."

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50623268

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A day after being sentenced to 20 years in prison under Hong Kong’s national security law, the former newspaper magnate Jimmy Lai faces a painful dilemma [...] diplomats believe that Beijing is open to the possibility of releasing Lai early to avoid making him a political martyr if he were to die in prison.

[...]

China would almost certainly want a guarantee that Lai would not use liberty in Britain as a platform for criticism of the Hong Kong and Beijing authorities. How they could be reassured of this is not clear. But the key question is what Lai himself wants and whether he would really exchange freedom to speak out for freedom from prison.

[...]

Members of Congress were given a chance to scour unredacted versions of the Department of Justice's files on Jeffrey Epstein for the first time on Monday.

There are more than 3 million pages available for lawmakers to comb through following their release to the public with heavy redactions. Meanwhile, despite a law requiring all the files to be released in December, the DOJ is still sitting on another 3 million pages that have yet to be published.

Lawmakers have so far only scratched the surface of the information available. But what they've seen after just one day has even some of President Donald Trump's biggest defenders reevaluating their dismissal of the Epstein scandal.

“Initially, my reaction to all this was, I don’t care, I don’t know what the big deal is," Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) told independent journalist Pablo Manríquez on Monday. "But now I see what the big deal is and it was worth investigating. The members of Congress who were pushing this were not wrong!”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who have led the charge in Congress for the files to be released, said on Monday that six individuals who were “likely incriminated” in Epstein’s crimes had their identities blacked out by the DOJ in the files that were released publicly.

“In a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted, who are implicated in the way that the files are presented,” Massie told reporters outside the DOJ office where lawmakers viewed the files.

They did not initially specify the individuals' names, but Massie said at least one was a US citizen and some were “high‑up” foreign officials.

Massie later revealed that one of the men on this list was Les Wexner, the ex-CEO of L Brands, which owns Victoria's Secret. Wexner appears in the files thousands of times and was infamously one of Epstein's most intimate financial clients.

After Massie questioned why Wexner's name was blacked out, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced it had been unredacted and said the DOJ was "hiding nothing." The other five names remained redacted as of Tuesday morning.

The FBI closed its investigation into Epstein in July, concluding that while the financier himself abused several underage girls, along with his partner Ghislane Maxwell—who is currently serving 20 years in prison—he was not running a sex-trafficking ring that included other powerful figures.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said the files he and other lawmakers reviewed yesterday told a much different story.

“It’s disgusting," he said. "There are lots of names, lots of co-conspirators, and they’re trafficking girls all across the world."

Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) put it more succinctly when a Drop Site News reporter caught her on the way back from the DOJ office and asked what she learned from viewing the files.

"There's a bunch of sick fucks," she said.

Lawmakers also said the documents contradicted Trump’s claims that he booted Epstein from membership at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, and disassociated from him in the early 2000s because the predator was poaching young female workers from the resort. Trump has said that one of them was the late Virginia Giuffre, then a 17-year-old locker room employee, who’d go on to become one of Epstein’s victims and most prominent accusers.

According to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), "for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason,” the DOJ concealed a summary of statements allegedly made by Trump, provided by Epstein's lawyers, in which the president said he never asked Epstein to leave the club.

Balint confirmed she saw the same document.

"One [document] was related to whether or not Trump had ever kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, as he claimed," she said. "It's not true. It's a lie."

The law passed in November requiring the files' release mandates that victims of Epstein's abuse have their privacy protected, but forbids the DOJ from redacting information to protect prominent individuals, including government officials, from embarrassment.

“The broader issue is why so many of the files they’re getting are redacted in the first place,” Khanna said. “What Americans want to know is who the rich and powerful people are who went to [Epstein's] island? Did they rape underage girls? Did they know that underage girls were being paraded around?”

Massie and Khanna said they were disappointed to find that many of the files that were supposed to be available were still heavily redacted. Massie lamented that the DOJ had not yet provided access to the FBI’s 302 forms, which contain official summaries of interviews with witnesses and victims.

Raskin said viewing the files affirmed many of the concerns about the DOJ "over-redacting" files.

“We didn’t want there to be a cover-up, and yet, what I saw today was that there were lots of examples of people’s names being redacted when they were not victims,” Raskin told CNN. "There are thousands and thousands of pages replete with redactions. There are entire pages in memos where you can't see anything."

Lawmakers were given permission to view the files in a letter sent by the DOJ on Friday, following mounting criticism about the extensive number of redactions in the public release. They are required to sift through the files in a tightly-secured DOJ office and are barred from making copies available to the public, though they are allowed to take notes.

Raskin said that the office contains only four computers, making the process of sorting through more than 3 million files agonizingly slow.

"Working 40 hours a week on nothing else but this, it would take more than seven years for the 217 members who signed the House discharge petition to read just the documents they've decided to release," he wrote in a post on social media.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee about the handling of the files on Wednesday. Massie said he plans to grill her about why so many potential co-conspirators had their names redacted in the public release.

“I would like to give the DOJ a chance to say they made a mistake and over‑redacted and let them unredact those men’s names," he said. That would probably be the best way to do it.”

Blanche has responded to the criticism on social media, saying, "The DOJ is committed to transparency."

Khanna, who appeared on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday morning, said that based on what he saw in the public release, the opposite is true.

"Donald Trump had the FBI scrub those files in March," he said. "And the documents we saw already had the redactions of the FBI from March. So we still have not seen the vast majority of documents unredacted that have the survivor statements of the rich and powerful men who committed these crimes."

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• El PEPP Framework propone principios éticos y legales para investigar la comunicación animal, ante riesgos que van desde el estrés hasta la manipulación de las especies.
• El proyecto surge de académicos de la Universidad de Nueva York, quienes identificaron una brecha regulatoria frente al uso de tecnologías como IA, robótica o bioacústica.
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