If the shoe fits, Imelda!

Tan said he hoped this “Greta Thunberg effect” – referring to the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist who has made headlines worldwide – goes beyond a populist movement and yields concrete attempts to focus on government policies.

For Tan, from Singapore Management University, the prime minister’s speech was a demonstration of the long-term planning and vision of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). He said the country’s other parties would also have to offer ideas on how to tackle climate change, including how to finance their plans.

Many thousands of years ago, Kakaban Lake was a lagoon connected to the sea. But the island was elevated during a period of geologic uplift, creating a 92-acre lake that today is surrounded by a ridge more than 130 feet high.

The lake, a mix of salt water and rainwater and noticeably warmer than the surrounding sea, is still connected to the ocean through underground fissures, but the openings are too small for an exchange of any but the smallest life-forms.

CWRM emphasizes bottom-up, participatory mechanisms for water resources management that acknowledge the legitimate interests of competing stakeholders and help communities understand and manage their own water resources, waste management, and the local environment. The project in Xe Bang Fai focused on three principal areas—agriculture, waste management, and wetlands and fisheries. In the CWRM project area, the Napork wetland had been reduced to one-third of its original size by the expansion of rice paddies. The fish catch had declined drastically, and water quality had deteriorated due to agricultural run-off from nearby fields.

To address this unfolding tragedy of the commons, the CWRM project partnered with the affected villages and the government to create a participatory resource management framework. They trained village volunteers, local government staff, teachers, and students to become “citizen scientists,” who began monitoring wetland water quality using macroinvertebrates such as mayflies, midges, water boatmen, and freshwater shrimp.

“Gojek has a very unique structure that can allow it to survive major leadership change,” Willson Cuaca, co-founder and managing partner of VC firm East Ventures, told The Ken in an interview. “As long as they still align their vision.” East Ventures is a rare example of an investor that has portfolio exits to Grab and Gojek, having sold payment company Kudo and ticketing startup Loket, respectively.

The other unknown is what influence, if any, Makarim continues to wield on Gojek, and how he will fare in the political arena. He now sits at Jokowi’s table but was allowed to keep his stake in the company, with Gojek calling him a “passive shareholder”.

It’s like cheating her way through the congestion that’s crushing everyone else’s souls, she jokes. The licensed environmental planner sees biking more than just a sport. It is an alternative to overcome the severe traffic choking the Metro.

“I realized that it was so inhumane to spend two hours just getting home when it can be covered under less time,” she said. “So one day I started writing plans. My goal in life is to bring people home in under 30 minutes. And among those steps was to shift to biking.”

“This direct taking of control is something that we haven’t seen since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932,” said Tamara Loos, the chair of the history department at Cornell University and an expert on Thai monarchic traditions. “It’s a slide toward something that is very different from his father’s behind-the-scenes way of operating.”

Ruhana, the daughter of a civil servant in the Dutch colonial government, was born in Kota Gadang, West Sumatra in 1884. While never receiving any formal education, thanks to lessons from her father Moehammad Rasjad Maharadja Sutan and her neighbor Adiesa, Ruhana became fluent in reading and writing the Arabic, Jawi and Latin alphabets by the age of 8.

In 1908, Ruhana started writing for Poetri Indonesia, a women's newspaper published by Tirto Adhi Soerjo in Batavia, another national hero who is known as the father of Indonesian journalism. In 1912, together with Zubaedah Ratna Juwita, Rohana founded a weekly newspaper in Minangkabau for women and edited by women called Soenting Melajoe. She served as the newspaper's chief editor until 1920 and continued to write for a number of local publications until the 1940s.

They will hit us with it [party dissolution] or they won’t. The power does not reside with us. We cannot anticipate what will happen. But if we’re afraid, we’ll end up doing nothing at all — we may as well just stay home and sleep. Therefore, the very first step of military reform that society will accept, and which could happen, is to abolish military conscription. Conscription is left over from the feudal system: you pay tribute with your labour and time. Ending it is an economic issue, a social issue, an issue of inequality and an issue of political symbolism all in one. The Future Forward Party will propose the abolition of the Military Service Act in the fourth quarter of 2019, and I believe that other parties will support it.

Mi Maw and the other trafficking victims from Mingin Township spent their 12-hour working days cleaning fish. If their Chinese supervisors thought they were working too slowly, or if they asked to take a break, they were berated, kicked and had their ears pulled. After enduring this treatment for five days, Mi Maw became ill and asked to return home.

“A company car took me to an open field and dumped me there alone,” she said. “Because I did not speak Chinese, nobody helped me. I phoned the factory foreman and he told me that if I paid the cost of travel, he would send me to the border. I promised to repay the money after I returned home.”

Mi Maw’s sister sold her jewellery to raise the K1.2 million needed for the journey home. Mi Maw travelled to the border hidden in the toilet of a freight truck.

“For four days I wasn’t allowed to leave the toilet and I had nothing to eat,” Mi Maw said.

Anwar's intellectual powers seem undimmed, at least judged by the references that tumble out of him, from Avicenna and George Bernard Shaw to Egyptian economist Samir Amin. Yet for all the breadth of his learning, critics still see an ideological chameleon, a charge he brushes off.

"They say: 'You come to [Kuala Lumpur] and talk about Shakespeare. And then you go to the village and talk about the Quran," he says with a mischievous grin. "But I say: 'On the contrary, I can go to the village and talk about Shakespeare and then to KL to talk about the Quran!'" Does he have more work to do to win over heartland Malays? "Yes, yes, I do," he says. The grin grows wider. "But I have a slight advantage. I can still give a sermon."

I hired a motorbike driver for the day and rode around old haunts. The change was mind blowing. Almost three-quarters of the businesses we listed when we last visited two years ago were gone. Not changed hands, but gone, or in ruins. Where did those jobs go? Locals are paying severely in social and environmental costs. The racket from heavy construction is everywhere, just like the dust.

Yes, everywhere changes. Places develop over time and sometimes not in the best way. In the case of Sihanoukville, it feels like a decade of development has been jammed into two years and there is no end in sight. Active construction sites, many vast in size, mar almost every beach.

“Heartwrite Co has been thinking about a literary festival for a few years now… We see the industry of literature in Brunei as this kind of latticed community, and we want to be a part of fostering these connections and conversations.”

Huwaida Ishaaq, co-founder of the publishing company, adds that they wanted to create a space for industry players to network.

“Publishing falls within the creative industry and we are slowly growing. Having this platform, I hope that we can create opportunities for mutual support, collaboration, learning and information gathering.”

The captain told me how they moved the human remains to a new graveyard, beyond the city limits. Then he smiled. “After moving the graves,” he said, “the government hired trucks to move the ghosts. They employed a natsaya (a spirit master) to oversee and to direct the ghosts onto the trucks. There were 12 trucks, making three journeys a day for three days.”

The number, I suspected, was not accidental. It made a total of 108 journeys, an auspicious number in Buddhist numerology. The Buddha’s footprints, for example, are traditionally marked with 108 sacred symbols.

“There were well over 1,000 graves to move,” the captain said. “So, there were 10 ghosts or more per truck.”

"I did not have 3,000 pairs of shoes. I had 1,060," Imelda herself said in 1987, though we all know it’s wise not to believe everything their family says. And if that number were true, it still means not repeating a pair for nearly 3 years!!! That’s still one (thousand) too many, especially considering that many Filipinos were in poverty while her family was in power. Many still are.

Imelda’s shoes are also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Marcoses’ corruption. As of 2016, the PCGG has only recovered about PHP170 billion ($3.3 billion) of the wealth stolen by the family and their cronies, a fraction of the estimated $10 billion they amassed.

Over the following six years, more than 100,000 ethnic Chinese – Tan and Wu among them – fled the country, returning to their ancestral homeland in ships paid for by the government in Beijing. When they arrived, they were sent to work on farm settlements that had been created specially for them, many of them in Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan provinces.

Among these settlements was Kampung Bali Nansan, which took in around 500 ethnic Chinese men and women, mostly penniless and exhausted.

Angered by their treatment, when they turned 21 the twins successfully plotted to leave the Coffins and strike out on their own. Susan Coffin was outraged. She wrote to the twins repeatedly, pleading her love for them and threatening to take legal action against them. Chang and Eng were unmoved. Their response, taken as dictation by their former manager Charles Harris, was: ‘let Mrs C. look into her own heart and they feel confident she will discover that the great loving & liking was not for their own sakes – but for the sake of the said Dollars.’

The levels of dioxin found in that egg were second only to eggs collected near Bien Hoa, Vietnam, the former United States air base that was a Vietnam War staging area for the defoliant Agent Orange, which contains dioxin. The United States recently began a 10-year, $390 million cleanup at Bien Hoa, which remains heavily contaminated nearly five decades after the war ended.

An adult who eats just one egg like the one taken from Mr. Karnawi’s henhouse would exceed the United States daily safety threshold by nearly 25-fold and the stricter European Food Safety Authority standard by 70-fold.

Yet the opiates of our generation cannot conceal the drastic shrinking of personal space (and dignity). Hong Kong has some of the world’s smallest apartments. The record paid for one of these “nano units” was HK$34,315 (US$4378) per square foot for a 198 square foot place, or a total of HK$6.52 million (US$830,000) for a space smaller than a garage parking lot.

Ordinary Hong Kongers believe they are at the mercy of a triumvirate of real estate players—a land-owning oligarchy that controls many prime parcels, particularly in the verdant New Territories; developers unafraid to bid up prices; and a local government dependent on land sales revenues—that has benefited from the property bubble.

(One of the many delicious ironies surrounding this year’s events is that Hong Kong might be pining for the sort of land reform that market-oriented mainland China has long outgrown.)

Many Singaporeans, meanwhile, may come to believe that their own government—like in Hong Kong, the biggest landowner—has misled their investment decisions. Since independence in 1965 the government has sold public housing with restricted 99-year leases, repeatedly promising, in the words of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister, that their value “will never go down”. 

“Many will describe me as the Hunter S. of Southeast Asian media and maybe that’s true,” he wrote. “I guess that you could say that I am the last of the breed of publishers and I changed the mentality of the press in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam from the moment I moved to Asia in 1991… I trained hundreds of journalists and editors and my imprint is surely on many of them… sorry my pen just ran out.”

“I help translate from Karen into Thai and English, let the hospital know we’re coming, and work in the back. I deliver CPR, staunch wounds or whatever’s necessary. It’s exciting. I can be tired for school the next day, but I’m used to it,” Siriwan told me. She hopes to go on to a career in paramedics when her schooling is complete.

Siriwan’s peers at the Bamboo School attend full-time Thai government education, but many of them also volunteer to help run the only ambulance service in this isolated area. What’s more, the experience has led some pupils from destitution to careers as medical professionals.

This is the tragic irony of Vietnam, a country that’s developing so quickly and with such abundant opportunities that foreigners, including those from Europe and the UK, move here every day to realize their dreams and fortunes, yet so many young Vietnamese feel excluded. It’s painful and, if being honest, embarrassing when I meet people abroad and the first thing they associate with Vietnam is trafficking, cannabis, or prostitution. My parents, originally from Thai Binh and Hanoi, raised me to be a strong woman and proud of my Vietnamese roots. I know very well our Vietnamese culture of sacrificing for the family, and it’s because of the way my parents raised me that I’m so passionate about solving human trafficking and other development issues. 

I believe in Vietnam and the Vietnamese people, and want them to be the best that they can be. We can’t stop the trafficking and abuse of our people by ignoring it; we must confront it directly, together.  One parent’s anguish over their child dying in that lorry in Essex is an anguish that belongs to all of us.