The New York Times Co has settled a claim by leaders of Singapore’s government that they were smeared by an op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune, publishing an apology in the Herald Tribune on Wednesday and paying about US$114,000 to the leaders.
Last month, the Herald Tribune, wholly owned by the Times Co, published a column by Philip Bowring that referred to “dynastic politics” and listed the leaders of many countries, including Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and his father, Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀), a former prime minister.
The case stems from a similar one in 1994, when Bowring, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, wrote a column in the Herald Tribune that also referred to “dynastic politics” in East Asian countries, including Singapore.
In that case, three of the country’s leaders threatened legal action: The elder Lee, who was prime minister from 1959 to 1990; his son, who was a deputy prime minister at the time; and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), the prime minister at the time.
The Herald Tribune, then co-owned by the Times Co and the Washington Post Co, published an apology saying that it had implied that the younger Lee owed his job to nepotism, and the paper and Bowring promised not to do so again.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
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