The verdict is in - Thaksin and cronies are out

30 May 2007

Ex Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has been banned from politics for five years, along with 110 executives from the Thai Rak Thai party that Thaksin founded, after a top court dissolved the party over electoral fraud.

But in the end the saddest news is that most people really do not care that much either way.

From the Nation newspaper: 30 May 2007

"Apathy about ruling the result of a failed democracy"


"To begin with, we were a "democracy", or so we convinced ourselves. We had political parties, for better or worse. And for over a decade, governments rose and fell on their parliamentary merits. But then tanks came along and here we are - reading news reports about a military junta putting more than 10,000 troops on high alert as two major political camps supported by two-thirds of the country are on the verge of being dissolved.

The notion of two democratic and highly popular political parties about to be swept away under a military regime carries a very profound meaning, not least because Thailand has experienced three political bloodbaths for arguably lesser reasons. But now is a very strange time. In 1973, tanks were the demons and students were the angels in the eyes of the public. Three years later, the opposite happened as resurgent ultra-rightists wiped out the student movement. The military became villains again in 1992. It seemed clear which side the people were on in during those three upheavals. If only things were as simple at present.

Don't be too hard on yourself if you wake up this morning and don't really feel that bad. Don't feel guilty if you, while partially or very concerned, are feeling somewhat like you are watching a show. Forgive yourself if you are feeling more curious than disappointed, or if you don't cry for the Democrats or the Thai Rak Thai Party in the event one or both of them is disbanded today.

We have failed our hard-won democracy. Amid all the blurry conscience-testing events, that much is clear. And nothing exposes a failed democracy more than the sort of widespread apathy that is overshadowing much of the Thai population at the moment. In a failed democracy, you don't quite know what's right or wrong, or who the victims, saviours or opportunists are. Everyone is blaming everyone else for bringing the nation to this low point, where ideological battles have degenerated into wars of the ego, and fighting over principles has turned into a Catch-22 situation.

The situation is eerily similar to 2001 when the Constitution Court was about to judge whether Thaksin Shinawatra breached the will of the 1997 charter and should be banned from politics. He had just won a landslide election and the pragmatist in many of us said he should be forgiven for what his family had done in the past. In the most controversial manner, the judges acquitted him, deciding to turn a blind eye on shares in servants' account, Ample Rich and other fishy transactions.

Was that the point of no return in our democracy's decline, because we chose to save him at the expense of the spirit of the 1997 constitution?

Or did Thaksin, ungrateful and unrepentant, take advantage of the great escape, strengthen himself against democratic mechanisms and put the last nail in democracy's coffin by repeating the share concealment scandal in the form of a tax-free mega deal?

But what about the "sore losers" theory? Blinded by jealousy and burning with a desire to bring him down at all costs, they were hell-bent on dethroning him from day one and Thaksin's "forgivable" and "controllable" malice was blown out of proportion at democracy's expense. The tanks didn't take advantage of Thaksin's flaws, but it was his opponents who opened the door. Democracy was not Thaksin's shield that cracked under the weight of his sins, but his rivals' sacrificial lamb.

Whichever argument has more merit, our democracy was very ill, infected still with rage, lies and revenge. And the illness feeds on the national tendency to be accommodating on matters that require unyielding principles and stubborn when the situation cries out for a compromise. Lost and confused, we envied America for carrying on with firm democracy after that photo-finish election, and were wide-eyed at a Japanese minister's suicide following a tiny bid-rigging scandal and the resignation of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz after a trivial conflict of interest charge.

Regardless of whether the Democrat and Thai Rak Thai parties survive today, our democracy won't be any closer to a long-term cure. A drastic verdict could make things worse, whereas a soft, compromising ruling won't guarantee a way back either. Where do we go from today? What do we need as a nation?

To begin with, Thailand requires a political system that makes us care - not just when people's representatives are under threat, but also when key values are. A healthy democracy would make us want to fight when our front lines are breached; an ailing one makes us fight blindly with our backs against the wall."

Emirates Airline set to be world's largest long-haul carrier

27 May 2007: Source - Gulf News

Thaksin Shinawatra: The last chance Thai tycoon

Ex-prime ministers don't come more colourful than Thaksin Shinawatra. The billionaire politician was ousted in Thailand last year - but he can't stop making headlines.

By Peter Popham

Published: 26 May 2007 - The Independent

Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand, is not, by any standards, a conventional man. This is a man who, when he was prime minister, tried to deal with an Islamic insurgency by "bombing" the rebels with paper cranes.

When he went into politics he formed a new party and called it Thais Love Thais. Recently, he said he was thinking of starting another one, and calling it the Enjoy Life Party. Nobody was quite sure if he was joking. The ideology of this new party? "Playing golf, travelling, relaxing, meeting friends," he said with a laugh.

This is also the man who, while in Moscow this week to receive an honourary degree from the Prekanov Economic Institute, chose, despite being one of the richest men in South East Asia, to eat at McDonald's - where his briefcase, containing his passport and more than $8,000, (£4,030) was stolen. The headline in the Bangkok Post ran, "Thaksin gets Big Mac - and a takeaway".

Now an asylum-seeker in Britain, where he has a home, he is not only a billionaire (thanks to his mobile phone network) but also, simultaneously, the most popular and the most hated ex-prime minister that Thailand has ever had.

He is still adored by the poor in the country, on whom he lavished development money, debt moratoriums and free health care access. In 2005 they gave him the biggest parliamentary majority of any politician in Thai history - and they would probably vote him into power again if they got the chance.

Yet he is hated by the middle class, in Bangkok and elsewhere, who damn him as a corrupt populist who deserves a long spell in jail rather than another term in office. Dodging both possibilities, he has spent the eight months since his overthrow by the army, while he was playing golf in Beijing, attending to business in London, and teasing both his fans and those who loathe him about his intentions - which appear to include buying a Premiership football club (he is expected to become owner of Manchester City any day now).

He routinely dismisses with a chuckle suggestions that he might get back into Thai politics, or even return to Thailand - he has not been formally banned, but the provisional, army-appointed government has made it clear that his presence will not be welcomed.

But if he really has retired, as he insists - at the age of 58 - then why has he hired American lobbying and public relations firms to tend to his career?

But he is not all jokes. This is also the former lieutenant colonel in the Thai police who, as prime minister, did not bat an eyelid at the extra-judicial killing of 3,000 people during a campaign to stamp out the illegal methamphetamine trade. Throughout his career, Thaksin has been profoundly influenced by America and the American Dream, thanks to the five years he spent during his mid-twenties in the United States. He looks as much of a Thai as the next one, but in reality, he was always a Yankee at the court of King Bhumibol.

The son of a wealthy merchant in the northern Thai city of Chiangmai, Thaksin joined the Royal Thai Police then went straight overseas, to an obscure college in Kentucky, to do a master's degree in criminal justice. There followed a doctorate in criminal justice at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

During his time there, far from behaving like the pampered brat of wealthy foreigners, he rose at 3am (his biography claims) to deliver the Houston Chronicle, and flipped burgers at a Burger King. To the family business tradition he added the authoritative streak of police training, and a belief in the American Dream that would end up turning Thai politics upside down.

He first entered Thai politics in 1994, the same year as Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul to whom he has often been compared, entered Italian politics. Behind him was a decade in the police, during which he and his wife Pojaman had also launched a series of businesses, most of which flopped badly.

Not until they branched out into electronics did things finally start to go right, leasing computers to government agencies, getting into cable television and then, with huge success, into mobile phones. By the time he became a politician, his company was the biggest mobile phone operator in Thailand.

His first big political job came with the very Thai tag, "deputy prime minister in charge of Bangkok traffic". But his impact on Thai politics only began to be felt in 1998 when he launched "Thais Love Thais" - it sounds better in Thai - with a dramatic, populist programme: universal access to health care, debt moratorium for farmers and locally-managed development funds for Thai villages.

"Thaksinomics", as his economic programme began to be called, was the shrewd application of loads of cash to the poorest sector of the population, who also happened to constitute a majority: the farmers.

Call it socialism or call it pork, the programme did the trick, hauling Thailand out of the 1997 financial crisis and winning him the loyal devotion of the biggest constituency in the country.

The middle classes squealed, the monarchists snorted, the civil servants hated the way he forced them out of their hidebound ways, stripping away their powers and giving them to local politicians. It was the closest thing to a revolution that this deeply traditional country had seen for a very long time.

Where Thaksin suddenly showed a different face was in confronting problems that did not respond to economic measures. To tackle a surging problem with drug addiction, he discarded the ineffectual methods that had been used by his predecessors and instead launched a self-described "ruthless" policy of arrests and seizure, aiming to eradicate methamphetamine abuse in Thailand within just three months.

Police Lieutenant-Colonel Shinawatra was back in action, to the outrage of human rights organisations: it was reported that 3,000 people were killed without process during the campaign.

The bloody revival of a long-simmering insurgency in the Muslim south of the country again elicited the pitiless policeman in Thaksin, a series of bombing attacks being answered by the brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protesters, including the killing of 84 by the army at a mosque in Tak Baj.

Thaksin then tried a charm offensive, but that seemed equally ill-conceived. He appealed to the entire nation to make folded paper cranes - the famous symbol of peace at Hiroshima - which would then be dropped on the south's Muslim majority communities as a gesture of reconciliation and peace.

Neither Thaksin's brutality nor his whimsy appeared to do him any harm with the voters, and in February 2005 he won a second term as prime minister with a landslide victory.

Where he went wrong was in supposing that imported neo-liberal concepts about the freedom of movement of capital and foreign ownership of strategic industries would find ready acceptance in Bangkok.

When in January 2006 the Shinawatra family sold their stake in Shin corporation, which ran the mobile phone operator that had made them rich, to Singaporeans for a profit of nearly $1.9 billion, Thaksin paid no tax on the vast sum. He was cleared of breaking the law, but the already irritated middle class of Thailand's cities regarded the obscene sum as the last straw and marched and lobbied for months demanding his resignation.

They didn't get it, but in September, when the prime minister was far away at the General Assembly of the United Nations, he was ousted in Thailand's first coup for 14 years.

Today, Thaksin insists his life in politics is behind him. He told Time Magazine: "I've lost weight because I have time to do yoga ... I'm very relaxed. Thanks to the CNS" - the military's ruling Council for National Security - "I can retire. After being ousted, I had a very good excuse to quit politics."

The generals, however, do not believe a word of it. Mentions of Thaksin in the national press are rigorously censored and they are doing all in their power to expunge memory of his whirlwind years in power from the national memory. They are not helped by Thaksin's replacement, Surayud Chulanont, who is commonly described as "a hermit who raises turtles".

Is Thaksin gone for good? Despite a pile of corruption investigations against him which may yet result in criminal prosecutions, the generals are not betting on it; and millions in the countryside are nostalgic for the years of pork.

The man himself routinely denies he has any intentions of trying to regain high office, but, as Tony Blair can tell him, the "pull of power" is pretty strong. Manchester City's slogan may be "City till I die" - but it would be surprising if Thaksin sang along very heartily.

Thaksin robbed in Moscow!

25 May 2007

Ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has applied for a new passport after losing it along with other items worth about Bt1.2 million in Moscow recently.

If Thaksin was a regular reader of this web site he would have been a bit better prepared in Moscow and taken more care of his personal effects. Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Tharit Jarungwat yesterday confirmed that Thaksin had been dining at a McDonald's restaurant in Moscow when he found that his case had been stolen.

Inside was cash, his passport, documents and a camera. The value of the items was said to be about Bt1.2 million.

Thaksin was in Moscow to receive an honorary degree in science from the Prekanov Economic Institute. Thaksin went to the Thai Embassy in Moscow to apply for a new passport. The embassy issued a temporary travel document for him and said he would get his new passport from the Thai Embassy in London, where he is currently living in exile.

To make the story more entertaining Thaksin's legal adviser said that it was not Thaksin himself but his aide who had been carrying the case when it was stolen. He said there were no important documents in the case. Maybe he is now the ex-aide.

Just goes to show how careful everyone has to be in Moscow. My dear reader will remember when Tai was robbed in Moscow in January.

Emirates USA plans

24 May 2007

It may be the land of the paranoid but it may be the land of plenty for Emirates Airline. The middle east carrier is already filling three flights a day to New York; their growth plans for the US make it the most significant growth market for the airline.

Emirates has confirmed it would purchase 60-100 midsize widebody aircraft (B787s or A350s) later this year, which will be a “winner-takes-all” order, according to President, Tim Clark. The airline is reportedly pushing for a slightly larger version of the B787.

The carrier, which is destined to become the world’s biggest operator of B777s, as it takes delivery of one per month over the next five years, will add the first of ten 266-seat B777-200LRs to its fleet from August 2007, adding to its ultra-long range capability. Houston (a 17-hour non-stop journey) will be added to its route map first, followed progressively by Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Seattle - all non-stop.

The US is therefore a key expansion target and Boeing is expected to pull out all the stops to ensure locally manufactured aircraft are selected to operate there. Emirates currently has 101 aircraft in service, of which 46 are B777s.

The land of the paranoid

23 May 2007

The Americans are paranoid. Worse still they seem to both like and accept it. Five and a half years since 9/11 and the USA is still using security as an excuse to build fear and dread in its people sufficient for them to accept the huge reduction in their personal civil liberties.

The USA is portrayed as a nation under siege, beset by evil forces both within and without.

America was attacked on September 11, 2001 and on its own soil. There is still a huge hole where the Twin Towers of the WTC used to be. But the dreadful loss of innocent human life should be put into perspective. And the subsequent tangible cost in security and intangible loss of goodwill needs to be evaluated.

In reality the U.S. was attacked on a single day by extremist ideologues; crazed criminals. Is this enough to warrant a siege mentality.

Americans increasingly believe that theirs is the world's only free society. Yet there are no complaints about the fact that their emails can be scrutinised by the FBI or the CIA, and their phone calls monitored - all sanctioned by the Patriot Act.

Where were the street protests when the new TIPS scheme was announced? Anonymous phone calls about people (usually not white) behaving suspiciously?

Of course, the U.S. has every right and duty to protect itself from any further attack. But it goes too far when it scares its own citizens and expects them to believe that it is their mission to rid the world of nameless, faceless perpetrators of evil.

But is it right that a young child with his family going on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty automatically asks his parents if he needs to take his shoes off for security?

Is it right that the USA should insist on additional security measures for all flights into the USA, far exceeding those in place for other nations? Is it right that they should expect to receive passenger details in advance for all arriving flights including credit card details.

Is it right that the ferry to the Statue of Liberty requires full security scanning before you board? And yes, you do need to remove your belt and watches and in some cases your shoes as well. This caused a 40 minute queue simply to board the boat. There was a second wait of over one hour (due to security) if you wanted to climb to the viewing gallery on the Statue of Liberty....too long; not worth the wait.

New packing restrictions for flights from the UAE

23 May 2007

It is worth noting that all air passengers using UAE airports will, from 31 May 2007, be limited in the amount of liquids, aerosols and gels that they can carry into the aircraft cabin.

Permitted items include toiletries, perfume, shaving foam, deodorant and lip balm. These must be carried in containers (or their own packaging) no larger than 100ml, and be carried in a transparent, re-sealable bag no larger than 20cm x 20cm. Only one transparent plastic bag per passenger will be permitted, and must be presented separately to other baggage at security checkpoints.

There are exceptions for passengers traveling with infants and children, or those with with special medical or dietary needs.

Items purchased after the security screening checkpoint point or onboard are exempt. More profit for the duty free.

No restrictions apply to the amount of liquids placed in baggage to stowed in the aircraft hold, but these must be presented at security checkpoints.

A weekend in Bangkok

21 May 2007

Etihad dinner, River Bar, Silom, Centrepoint, Victory Monument, Lots of Thai Food and our usual bowl of Khao Man Gai.

How geography and innovation propel Emirates

21 May 2007 - from Aviation Week

Capacity constraints and aircraft shortages appear to be the only factors slowing the growth of Emirates, but the airline is still developing into a huge threat to European and Asian airlines.

Emirates has been the role model of a new breed of carriers taking advantage of two factors: geography and technology. From hubs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha, they can now reach any point on Earth nonstop and connect any two city pairs with only one stop in the Middle East. Recent enhancements in aircraft technology have made this possible, with the introduction of ultra-long-haul airplanes such as the Airbus A340-500 and Boeing 777-200LR.

Emirates now has an all-widebody fleet of 103 aircraft and has an additional 107 on firm order, among them 47 Airbus A380s. The company is evaluating further orders for around 100 Airbus A350s or Boeing 787s to ensure future expansion. It is hardest hit by the delay of the Airbus A380: By the time the first A380 is delivered in August 2008, Emirates should have already been operating 18.

The story of Emirates is intertwined with the development of Dubai into a commercial and financial center midway between Asia and Europe, strongly promoted by the ruling al-Makhtoum family. The al-Makhtoums have been trying to make Dubai less dependent on oil for years, and now oil revenues only account for about 6% of Dubai's GDP. The government continues to invest billions in infrastructure, tourism and industry projects to raise Dubai's profile. Others in the region, like Abu Dhabi and Qatar, are following suit, beginning to develop into trade and tourism destinations, too.

Fully state-owned Emirates is a key ingredient to the plan and its success can only be explained when the Dubai story as a whole is taken into account. The company has had just one loss-making year in its history and now is among the most profitable carriers worldwide. Emirates' rivals claim it benefits from state subsidies, but none of them has been able to prove the allegations yet. For several years, Emirates' results have been audited by an independent firm. Last year, the airline's profit rose 23% to $942 million on $8.5 billion in revenues, which are themselves up 28%.

Particularly its biggest European rivals Air France-KLM and Lufthansa are strongly lobbying against further traffic rights for Emirates and its peers. A recent study made by a consultancy affiliated with Lufthansa, the European Center for Aviation Development, pointed out that Emirates benefits from low user charges and handling fees at Dubai airport and the fact that there is no income tax in the emirate, among other things. However, another study recently completed by Boston Consulting came to a different conclusion: Emirates is enjoying the benefit of the geographic location of its hubs, which can operate 24 hr. a day with no curfews, providing it very high aircraft utilization.

The Boston Consulting analysis shows that Emirates' rivals have good reason to worry. The study finds Emirates enjoys a unit cost advantage of at least 18-21% over its European and North American competitors and is no more expensive than airlines based in Asian countries that have extremely low labor costs. "It is clear that European and Asian airlines are going to be facing large, new blocks of low-cost capacity in the Europe-Asia corridor," Boston Consulting says.

Emirates and its much smaller peers, Etihad and Qatar Airways, today supply around 9% of all long-haul seats globally, but they have 25% of the long-haul aircraft order backlog, according to Boston Consulting's analysis. Emirates alone plans to triple its capacity over the next eight years, not only through additional aircraft, but also by scaling up average aircraft size as a result of the A380 integration. "If it succeeds, Emirates will catapult itself ahead of a dozen bigger airlines to become the world's largest long-haul carrier by 2012," Boston Consulting predicts.

The consultancy's report concludes that "it would be risky for a competitor to assume that these airlines will not have the resolve to implement their aggressive plans." Boston Consulting's in-depth analysis of the network forecasts that "Emirates should be able to deploy its new fleet fully through its Dubai hub. . . . Emirates' new capacity will be very heavily concentrated on flights eastward out of Europe and back."

The cost advantage is biggest for Emirates when it can combine two long-haul flights from secondary cities in Europe to secondary cities in Asia, such as Barcelona, Spain, to Trivandrum, India. Its competitors would have to channel traffic on this route through two hubs and operate two relatively high-cost short-haul connecting flights. Boston Consulting cautions, though, that Emirates' unit cost advantage is partly eaten up in some markets by longer flying distances. Nonetheless, in 39% of all Europe-Asia markets, Emirates will still have a cost advantage, according to the study.

However, it will be difficult for Middle Eastern carriers to attract high-yield business traffic on the key trunk routes, the consultancy's analysis also shows. While they may offer lower fares and equal or better onboard service, the flying distance to Asian destinations north of the equator is typically longer when adding a stop in Dubai. And while leisure travelers may put up with the inconvenience, "it could be a significant issue for business travelers who may have to wake up during the journey to change aircraft," notes the study.

These days, Emirates is to a certain extent becoming the victim of its own success. The airline is facing an increasingly serious capacity shortage at its Dubai hub, and, set back by the A380 program delays, it can do little but watch its competitors play catch-up.

Dubai's airport should have opened its second terminal last year at the latest, but it is now not expected to open before mid-2008. A shortage of steel, concrete, workers and a lack of interest by the construction industry on the project appear to have been the main obstacles.

"When I ask seven construction companies to submit offers for a certain work share at the terminal, four of them don't even bother to answer," says Gary Chapman, president of Group Services and Dnata. In the huge construction boom in Dubai, companies in the sector focus on the really big projects, among which an airport terminal would be a small piece of work. The new facility is planned to be exclusively used by Emirates.

With 17.5 million passengers annually, the airline is severely pinched in the existing building. At peak times, it is difficult even to walk through the terminal because it is so crowded, and it is at times impossible to find an empty seat in one of the lounges. While Emirates is complaining about the two-year delay in the A380 program, it is hard to see how the carrier would have accommodated 18 aircraft in a hub-and-spoke operation at the current facilities.

The constraints have an impact on service quality, too. Aircraft often have to be parked at remote stands and sometimes different flights are simultaneously boarded from the same gate. The shortage of aircraft has forced Emirates to delay the opening of new routes and shift aircraft with different cabin layouts through the system, leading to a sometimes inconsistent product offering.

With the second terminal opening next year and the third building slated for usage in 2010, much of the crunch should be relieved and Emirates can start to build up its gigantic A380 fleet. But as far as the route network is concerned, "we have only seen the tip of the iceberg," says Emirates President Tim Clark. And so he has to hope that one of the largest construction projects underway in Dubai does not face similar delays: Djebel Ali airport--now promoted as Dubai World Central--is scheduled to open as a cargo airport initially next year. But in its final expansion phase, it is supposed to accommodate 120 million passengers annually through six runways.

Thai censors going too far

19 May 2007

Freedom of expression is truly under threat in Thailand - and if you are reading this site in Thailand you may soon be breaking the law.

A new cyber-crime law was passed by the military-appointed National Legislative Assembly last week by a vote of 119 to 1. It must receive royal endorsement before it takes effect.

Lawmakers pushed the bill through Parliament to make way for a lese-majeste lawsuit against Google for refusing to remove videos insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej from its video-sharing website, YouTube. But just as the law was approved, the government announced that Google retreated and offered to ban any videos deemed offensive to Thailand’s esteemed monarch.

The new cyber-crime law states that all websites anywhere in the world that “damage the country directly and indirectly” can be prosecuted in Thailand. The wording is deliberately broad and the courts will have to decide what is banned.

The proposed law also seeks to prosecute individual users who surf onto web pages that “damage the country.” This may go as far as potentially prosecuting anyone who so much as opens a pornographic website or pro-Thaksin (yes there are some!) site.

The law will make Internet service providers liable for any illegal content on their servers. If the newly formed cyber-police find any offensive content, the ISP must immediately close the website or face repercussions. Not unlike taking radio stations off the air after they interview ex Prime Minister Thaksin on the telephone.

ISPs are to keep records of every site a user visits for at least 90 days. Although police can only access the records through a court order, they are available as evidence to prosecute Internet users who upload illegal content.

I had better go back to looking at teletubby sites. Follow this link!
 

Alarmingly ICT Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom demanded last week that Google turn over the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of users who uploaded the offensive king videos to charge them with lese-majeste. No one would have known about this video if the government had not made such a fuss in the first place. The Internet search giant will refuse because such an action would prohibit free speech in the US and other countries. If Google were a Thai company, however, the government could force it to provide the information immediately or it would be shut down.

It is worth noting that Google has announced steps to increase the privacy of its users to guard against intrusive government requests. The company now plans to alter IP addresses so a search is linked to a cluster of 256 computers instead of just one.

Further complicating matters in Thailand is the enforcement of lese-majeste and other so-called national security laws. Anyone can petition police to launch a criminal lese-majeste case against anyone else, making it a convenient tool for politicians to attack their critics. And they are happy to use it.

The new law comes amid an overall deterioration in Internet and press freedoms in Thailand since the military seized power last September. This year, Thailand slipped to 127th out of 194 countries in Freedom House’s press freedom rankings, down from 29th place in 2000. Political discussion forums are blocked periodically, as well as all Muslim websites in the country’s restive southernmost provinces.

Leading the campaign is ICT Minister Sitthichai who told the national media that he is too old to get excited by the Internet, according to The Nation newspaper. He claims to visit only two websites: one for electrical engineers and pgatour.com to follow golf tournaments.

“I have an e-mail account but rarely check it; normally I use the telephone,” he was quoted as saying. “I once visited [political discussion website] pantip.com and was confused by its many rooms. I quit and never went back.”

At this time the language of the draft bill is apparently quite vague. It is not clear what the law will look like after the assembly puts the finishing touches on it, probably within the next few months. At the moment no one knows what is legal and what is not.

Mind you - talking of censors - I am reliably told that this web site is blocked in China!

A rant - the French consul in Dubai is a disgrace

14 May 2007

Here are the visa application instructions for the French Consul in Dubai. Taken from their web site.

WHEN TO APPLY ? :
From Sunday to Thursday from 8: 30 to 11:00 am.
From 2:30 to 3:30 pm : handling back of the passports only.
NOTE : The visa section takes a quota of files and might close before 11:00 am.

FEES : Equivalent in dirhams to 60 €.

WHERE TO APPLY FOR THE VISA ? :
The applicant must apply himself to the consulate of the country of his main destination (that is where he/she will stay the longest period during his stay in the Schengen states or, if the stay is equal in time in two different countries, in the consulate of the country of 1st entrance).

What they do not tell you is:

Only 30 applications are processed each day.

You need to arrive by 3am and be prepared to sleep in the elevator lobby to keep your place in a queue for the 30 applications that will be seen that day. You will be given a number between 8.15 and 8.30 that tells you your appointment number.

100% of the people in the queue and sleeping in the lobby are men. This is not somewhere that you would send a woman to wait.

We had been planning to spend my xx^th birthday (27 May in case you want to send lavish gifts!) ) in Provence and Paris. As cabin crew Tai may fly to Paris without a visa. As a tourist she requires a visa for entry.

We went to the consulate on 11 May at 8.30am. We were told we should return after 5am another day and queue for three hours simply to get an appointment for that day.

Tai arrived back in Dubai at 2am this morning so I went to the French consul for 6am to queue for her. I was told that I should have been there at 3am; people had slept overnight waiting in the elevator lobby. The scene was crowded and confused. The security guard was clear that the quota was complete.

Can you imagine Tai, or any other single female sleeping overnight in an elevator lobby where they are almost certain to be the only female. This would certainly have been the case this morning. It really is quite inappropriate. And of course the people queuing for visas are from those nations that the French do not grant visa free entry to.....

We were planning to leave for France on 22 May. But Tai has a flight to Bangkok and Hong Kong from 17-21 May.

All the necessary documentation is prepared. It was meant to be a special holiday for us. It would be unfortunate if I have wasted funds on tickets and accommodation; and I guess my birthday wont be in Paris.

What should have happened at the end of world war two is that Germany should have been left in charge of France. It would be a far more efficient nation than it is now.

Pay day for Reuters axe-man

13 May 2007

The Observer newspaper.

Chief executive Tom Glocer hits the jackpot if the firm is bought by rival Thomson, but his reputation as a hard-nosed cost-cutter means he faces opposition from unions, while the deal may attract the attention of regulators, writes Nick Mathiason

Tom Glocer has his eye on a multi-million-pound prize coming tantalisingly into view. Reuters, the 155-year-old news and financial information group, is poised to fall to an £8.77bn cash and shares bid from its Canadian rival Thomson Corp. This will see Reuters' chief executive - Glocer - enjoy a £30m windfall.

The negotiations, two years of them, were confirmed last Tuesday with a stock market announcement. It is expected the tie-up will be sealed in weeks, not months. But things could get messy.

Unions on both sides of the Atlantic are already spoiling for a fight. Industrial action has not been ruled out. Concern is mounting over Glocer's eagerness to seal a deal being somewhat influenced by the prospect of his gargantuan pay day. And there are tough regulatory hurdles to surmount. A combined Thomson-Reuters would hold 35 per cent of the financial data market, enough to alarm the merged companies' big clients - investment banks.

But it is one sentence that sent shudders through Reuters' 17,000 staff: 'This transaction would also create enhanced value for shareholders through the delivery of in excess of $500m of annual synergies expected to be achieved within three years.' In other words, swingeing job cuts, though the company says much of this will be derived from owning just one headquarters.

Reuters is protected by the Reuters Founders Share Company, established at the time of its 1984 flotation. Directors of the FSC have special voting rights that can block any takeover that they feel would compromise the integrity of the news service. It is understood that the FSC will not block a sale and could retain its role in the enlarged group.

Reuters these days is far more than a news-gathering service. In financial markets it is an indispensable supplier of electronic data used by traders.

Reuters journalists are not Glocer's biggest fans. They see him as a bean-counting cost-cutter. However, the company says that, unlike most media firms, Reuters is now actually in the business of hiring editorial staff.

That may be, but for the best part of the past five years the 47-year-old American has taken the axe to one of the world's most venerable brands, slashing nearly £1bn worth of costs and removing several thousand jobs.

'True he is not from Planet Charisma,' says one analyst. 'But he has performed fantastically for shareholders. The company was losing out badly to Bloomberg when he arrived. It is now clawing back market share and profits have increased immeasurably.'

His defenders, and there are several big hitters among them - from Ben Verwaayen, the BT chief executive, to John Studzinski, the former HSBC kingpin now at private equity firm Blackstone - regard him as a man ahead of his time for working out how technology and 'personalised' consumer tastes were altering the media landscape way before many of his contemporaries.

What has not helped Glocer's cause is coming to London, virtually unknown, as the first non-journalist head of a news organisation. All the media had to go on was Glocer's background as a mergers and acquisition lawyer - not exactly awe-inspiring. But friends say his geeky image is unfair. They view him as engaging, insightful and heroic for executing a spectacular turnaround.

In 2001 Glocer found a company on its knees. Markets, upon which Reuters relied, were in freefall as the dotcom equity bubble burst and 9/11 reinforced a global economic slowdown. This was bad enough, but industry rival Bloomberg came from nowhere to become the world's biggest financial news and data organisation, leap-frogging Reuters in the process.

Reuters had become sleepy. Critics said the firm's products were tailored to local needs rather than the global marketplace. The effect sent its share price tumbling, with the City doubting whether a hybrid news and financial data firm could ever make money.

Glocer thought otherwise. His first weapon was the axe. Out went £900m of costs. Biggest among those were people - a quarter of the workforce went. Product ranges were trimmed from 2,000 to just 50. Its mainly London-based journalists scattered around the capital were consolidated under one roof in Canary Wharf.

From a company at death's door Glocer has achieved first-quarter underlying revenue growth of 6.5 per cent with margins of 13 per cent. 'Reuters is a vastly better business after five years of Tom Glocer,' says an analyst at JP Morgan.

His friends' claim that he is engaging is harder to find evidence for. A dip into his homespun platitudinous blog makes The Simpsons' Ned Flanders seem like Hunter S Thompson. Check his latest speech transferred to the web, in which he maintains globalisation and free trade can save the developing world. Hardly original, and very widely disputed.

Still, four years ago, Reuters shares languished below 100p. Anyone investing then would have made a cool 600 per cent profit.

In fact, the king of management-speak did just that, snapping up 100,000 of Reuters shares at 120p. He has periodically dipped into the market since and now owns almost 10 million share options and a further 401,345 shares outright. That is why if the deal manages to skip over the various hurdles - industrial action, shareholder approval and regulatory scrutiny - Glocer is in line to pick up over £30m.

We now know that Reuters' executives and counterparts at Thomson began discussing a tie-up two years ago. Tellingly, in an interview at that time, Glocer hesitated for 10 seconds when posed a question about Reuters' future ownership.

Given the stakes are so high for Glocer personally, it is unsurprising that there is concern his judgment in balancing the pros and cons of such a deal might not be all it should be. Reuters say this is not an issue because detailed talks are being handled at chairman level.

But as one man's windfall gets closer, another American is rubbing his hands.New York mayor Michael Bloomberg holds 68 per cent of the £10bn financial news and data firm he founded. There has been persistent speculation that he will sell down his stake to fund a run for the US presidency as an independent.

Whether this is true or not, Bloomberg's business is set to enjoy a clear run for two years while the potential Reuters and Thomson merger attempts to clear regulatory hurdles. Should it gain approval, the subsequent bedding down of a new entity will be a management drag.

Glocer may be about to hit the jackpot, but the real winner is sitting in New York's City Hall.

More on Blair's departure

13 May 2007

A balanced international view of the departure of Tony Blair from Canada's Globe and Mail

Tony Blair - Pushed out of the World he made

"For a long time in the early 1990s, the most politically important restaurant in Britain was a little place called Granita, on a busy street not far from my house in Islington. It was on its bleached pine floors that, in 1993 and 1994, a group of shockingly young men and women whose party had been in opposition for a decade and a half plotted out a new sort of politics they called New Labour.

And it was there, on the evening of May 31, 1994, that two of those young people, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, had dinner together and decided that they would stop competing for the top position and that Mr. Blair would stand, two years later, for prime minister.

This week – as Mr. Blair, who turned 54 last weekend, announced his plans to step down after a full decade in office and on June 27 hand the baton to Mr. Brown – I decided to revisit the Granita crowd. These were the people who helped to invent Tony Blair, and the potent political formula now known as Blairism, those long years ago.

Behind Mr. Blair, whose electoral genius and startling communication abilities were already recognized in those days, were teams of unelected engineers who came up with a set of ideas that he turned into a powerful and controversial new political vocabulary.

What had they intended in those heady years? How did they achieve the precarious balance that kept them aloft? Could they be happy with the end result?

The choice of Granita says a lot about the kind of world that Mr. Blair and his colleagues were dreaming up in the dreary London of the late Tory era. Granita was a loud, over-lit place, with a stainless-steel bar, white walls and wooden chairs that radiated both authenticity and attention-getting visibility – its decor has been described as “Swedish gymnasium.”

Its food was healthy, extremely well-executed and exotic in a spare and globalized fashion, the sort of stuff that was new to Britain in those days: seared salmon, goat-cheese salad, Chilean wine.

Earlier, there had been plush restaurants for the Thatcher-era bourgeoisie and grim chippies and workers' cafés for the Labour Party initiates.

Here was something better for the millions who wanted to enter the middle class, wholesome and pricey and perhaps a bit over-ambitious. It was aspirational food for a nation just beginning to have dreams.

“If you look back to when we got started, it was a really exciting period, but the extraordinary thing is how low our expectations really were,” says Geoff Mulgan, who was a key architect of New Labour and Mr. Blair's director of policy in the early years.

He was one of the dreamers who imagined that the sort of social equality long promised but never delivered by the left could be fuelled by the kind of economic success that had always been the purview of conservatives.

But the idea's potential was not realized at first.

“The damage done by the market fundamentalism of the Thatcher years meant that any ideas of social progress were really very limited,” he said. “Later, after the first term, we developed some more ambitious plans, and some of those were disappointments and some were successes.

“But the diminished state of the left's ability to envision change meant that we were almost bound to exceed our expectations.”

Now, Granita is gone. The narrow space is occupied by a place that may better reflect Mr. Blair's public image in Britain today.

Called Desperado's, it serves a very Americanized brand of Mexican food, with bottles of ketchup where salsa ought to be, not very well-cooked but not terribly expensive, and dished out by enthusiastic young Poles who've come from Silesia to take advantage of the vast labour shortages in a country whose economy hasn't stopped growing for a decade. As you leave, you see no less than three public-security CCTV cameras staring at you from lamp posts outside.

The place is busy, international and open to anyone, but its food is almost guaranteed to give you heartburn.

Man of action In the minds of many people in Britain, that's the story of Tony Blair – from Granita chic to Desperado vulgarity in a decade. As he makes his long exit, the public mood is weary. While a poll this week showed that 60 per cent of Britons think he has been a good Prime Minister – a good ranking for anyone in the midst of a third elected term – there is a sense of mass pessimism and mild disgust in the air.

Some of it has to do with the Iraq war and Mr. Blair's insistence on siding with President George W. Bush. But people also seem to have lost track of the plot: What was the point of all this, beyond his strange, marketing-minded language? While there's a strong belief among informed observers that he could have won a fourth election, no one doubts that it was time for him, still very young by world-leader standards, to stand aside in favour of Gordon Brown, two years his senior.

Somehow, Mr. Blair, who showed with his calibrated resignation on Thursday that he remains one of the age's great communicators, has fallen afoul of Blairism.

The Blair idea remains in ascendance: In France last week, both Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned for president explicitly as Blairites. David Cameron, the British Conservative leader who will likely succeed Mr. Brown in the next election, has reinvigorated his party by positioning himself as a Blairite.

In Chile, Brazil, Italy and Spain, the Blair idea dominates politics. Chinese and Indian leaders talk endlessly of appropriating its principles. Yet it seems to have fallen out of Mr. Blair's own hands.

“It's the nature of modern politics that you don't get credit for your achievements, by and large,” says Anthony Giddens, the London School of Economics professor whose social-democratic ideas, in books such as The Third Way, made him a key ideologue in the Blair revolution.

“People want something more and they look around the edges, and fail to see how the thing itself has actually improved. It takes some effort to step back and realize that, with Blair, it's a pretty decent record. Any reasonable person knows well that it's hard to change a country.”

For others, there was something about Mr. Blair's own approach to politics that undermined the idea of Blairism.

“We felt that with such a massive majority in ‘97, we were pretty much certain of winning the election and we'd probably get three terms,” says Lance Price, who was a top communications aide at 10 Downing Street in the first term. “And, looking back on that period, we wasted too much time at the beginning, and I think Blair himself would probably admit that.

“We spent too many years concentrating too much on getting good headlines, on trying to make high-profile, rather glitzy announcements, rather than the policy grind, the less sexy hard work of government, which would have improved things more.

“Tony Blair had a fear that the left might go back to its bad old ways and we could lose. So instead of making the most of the power and opportunities that that election victory gave him, he was very cautious.”

This created an image of Mr. Blair as an unprincipled pragmatist, driven only by a desire to win chipper headlines in the media – especially the conservative media owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose tens of millions of readers were seen as the core constituency of government. One rule was held sacred: Don't let them know how progressive we really are.

“I think we did sometimes go too far in trying to avoid offending the voters of Middle England, as I would like to believe that Britain has a greater tolerance for progressive ideas than we had credited the country with,” says Mr. Mulgan, who now runs a think tank and advises governments around the world.

“There was often too much attention paid to focus groups, to ensuring that our policies were electable, and there were times when this forced us to abandon our principles or to move too slowly.”

This leads to the first deep secret of Tony Blair, the thing neither he nor his advisers wanted to say, lest it destroy their electoral success — that theirs was a left-wing administration, one that redistributed striking amounts of wealth from the well-off to the poor.

He and his advisers were deeply committed to keeping the loyalty of the readers of Mr. Murdoch's Sun and Daily Mail tabloids, with their deep obsessions with crime and immigration. The phrases “social justice” and “progressive change” were banished from the lexicon of New Labour, replaced with talk of “customer choice.”

Yet historians, looking at the effects of the 10 Blair years, will probably list these changes: The reduction of poverty: Six million people have been lifted above the poverty line; 700,000 children are no longer poor, and the eradication of child poverty seems a realistic goal in the next few years.

This was partly due to massive (and unpublicized) increases in state spending on welfare programs by the Blair administration – and partly due to Mr. Brown's introduction of a minimum wage, which now stands at $11.77 an hour, one of the highest in the world.

Britain's health system, which in 1997 was compared to that of Eastern Europe and parts of the developing world, saw its public investment triple to $207-billion a year, on par with the best in Europe. Waiting lists were almost eliminated, 118 public hospitals and 90,000 public doctors and nurses were added, and the private hospitals in Britain's two-tier system lost tens of thousands of patients who decided that public medicine offered better service.

Its schools, which had been an embarrassment, saw spending double to $11,000 a year per pupil, and learning standards increased dramatically. University attendance increased to 43 per cent of the population, even as tuition fees were introduced for the first time. And the number of state-subsidized child-care places doubled to 1.28 million.

The crime rate fell by 35 per cent, with violent crime dropping by 34 per cent, burglaries by 55 per cent and car theft by 51 per cent. Public arts spending has more than doubled to $907-billion. Sports funding has almost tripled. Importantly, foreign-aid spending has doubled to almost Scandinavian levels.

And the economic story is well known: For the entire decade, Britain has been one of the world's top-performing economies, seeing solid growth in every quarter. It has one of the lowest jobless rates in the world. Government debt has stayed low, below 40 per cent of GDP.

Much of this has been done almost by stealth: Focus groups showed Mr. Blair early on that voters want to hear about crime and social order. Helping the poor was to be done, for moral reasons, but it wasn't to be said, lest the voters of Middle England hear it.

“There were certainly those who felt that we should boast more loudly of the successes on the social agenda, the poverty reduction and so on,” Mr. Mulgan says. “But the fact is that the mainstream of voters will only tolerate that so much.

“We realized that the crucial swing group of voters will only put up with taxation and a socially active government if they are seeing the benefits as accruing to their own group, to the middle class, and that they will have little patience for a government that is seen to be working for others. If we were to start talking about redistribution and our benefits to disadvantaged groups, we would likely lose that voting coalition.

“Certainly,” Mr. Mulgan adds, “I am among those who wished that we had been more bold in talking about our progressive successes, and I am with Gordon Brown in wanting to put social progress at the forefront. But we realized that you have to have those voters on side to achieve social democracy.”

The secrecy of this agenda bothers many of Mr. Blair's advisers. Mr. Giddens (who became Baron Giddens in 2004) feels the Blairites have done too much to appease conservative voters, without selling the benefits of the improved society they have built.

“On the level of ideas, I would like them to say, ‘We stand for a robust public sphere,' “ he says. “I want them to be more up-front about wanting a more egalitarian society.”

Man of faith That's half of the story.

But there is another side to Tony Blair that he and his advisers were equally eager to keep quiet.

On one hand, he is described as the ultimate pragmatist, a man who is guided by contingency and a desire to win elections at any cost. Yet he is also clearly a man of unbending principle, who on issues like the Iraq war has refused to change his stance in the interests of pragmatism, no matter what the political price.

At the core of this paradox is the second secret that New Labourites avoided mentioning: Even as his left-wing principles were to be avoided, so too was his deep and basically conservative religious beliefs.

This combination wouldn't be so odd in Canada, where the NDP sprang from the same sort of Christian-socialist movements that produced Mr. Blair's beliefs. The combination of faith and left-wing politics is familiar to us.

But in Britain, where the relatively few voters with serious religious beliefs are more socially conservative, Mr. Blair's guiding faith was kept well hidden.

“I probably shouldn't say this, but he is a profoundly religious man. He is a man of great sensitivity who cares about these things a lot,” says Philip Gould, the pollster (also made a baron in 2004) who created those focus groups that so heavily dominated the early Blair years.

“With Iraq, it is not true – it is simply not true – that he acted at any time in bad faith, or because he was weak. What motivated him, what drove him, was the question of what is right and what is wrong. It wasn't a legacy he was looking for, it was to do the right thing.”

Mr. Blair's colleagues say that his sense of religious morality guided him to foreign affairs rather than the messy and amoral world of domestic policy, which he left in his early years to Mr. Brown (who is the son of a preacher, but is not religious himself).

In the international arena, Mr. Blair's vision of absolute evil stood him well at first. He played a leading role in the fight to stop Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in the Kosovo war of 1999, in the UN action in Sierra Leone and in the early coalition-building days of the Afghanistan campaign.

But in Iraq, his judgment failed him badly, even as he stuck to the principles that had succeeded for the better part of a decade.

“You can see tactical reasons why Blair did some of those things,” Mr. Giddens says. “But I do think it's an odd collection of bedfellows. And even though I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Blair's foreign policy, and still do, I don't quite understand why he remains so close to Mr. Bush.”

Many members of the Granita crowd, clearly put off by the places Mr. Blair has taken their ideas, now put their hopes in Gordon Brown, whose dinner with Mr. Blair 12 years ago may or may not have included an offer to succeed Mr. Blair as Prime Minister, depending whom you ask.

Many of those early advisers believe strongly in Mr. Brown, who was the architect of most of New Labour's social policies and institutional transformations. Mr. Giddens has gone so far as to publish a book titled Over to You, Mr. Brown.

The heir apparent, meanwhile, is dropping much of the now-tainted language of New Labour in hopes of renewing his party yet again.

But even if he falters or the economy drags him down, the men and women of the Granita retain a sense of victory: Today, the language of Blairism has become the language of modern politics – no matter how far its practitioners are removed from Tony Blair."

Blair to step down on June 27th

10 May 2007

Bowing to the inevitable, Tony Blair today announced he was stepping down after 10 years as prime minister and 13 years as Labour leader. I have said it before; people will miss him more than they realise.

In an emotional 17-minute speech earlier today, he said the judgment on his 10-year administration was "for you, the people, to make". Mr Blair paid special tribute to his wife and children "who never let me forget my failings".

He concluded: "Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong - that's your call. But I did what I thought was right for our country. I think that is true. He is one leader who consistently put his values before himself and his party. But that also means that he has ruled rather than consulted.

Iraq will for many people be the Blair legacy; he said of the war that: "The blowback since ... has been fierce, unrelenting and costly."

But he insisted: "The terrorists will never give up if we give up."

But he added: "I would not want it any other way. I was, and remain, an optimist."

Pointing to Africa, climate change and globalisation, he declared Britain had changed under his 10-year leadership, saying: "Britain is not a follower, Britain is a leader." This may well be an overly optimistic claim. Frankly in all three areas more should have been done in the last 10 years than has been. 

He made no reference as to whether he would stay on as backbench MP for Sedgefield.

The two leftwing challengers for the Labour leadership, John McDonnell and Michael Meacher, will announce this afternoon which, if either, of them has the required 44 nominations to mount a challenge.

Tributes have already started flowing in to the departing 54-year old prime minister, whose future plans are not yet clear.

Former US secretary of state Colin Powell said Mr Blair had "an enormous impact on world politics, and he certainly has had an enormous impact on the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain.

"He has been a friend, he has been steadfast in the face of negative public opinion, and in the face of crises he's stood steady. And we could always count on him."

The Liberal Democrats, ever the lame opportunists, demanded an immediate snap election to legitimise Mr Blair's successor. That will not happen.

Thomson in Reuters bid - value US$17.6 billion

8 May 2007 Source Reuters news

Canada's Thomson Corp (Toronto:TOC.TO - News) is in talks to buy Reuters Group Plc (LSE:RTR.L - News) for about 8.8 billion pounds ($17.6 billion) to create the world's biggest news and financial data company, the two firms said on Tuesday.

Reuters CEO Tom Glocer would become chief executive of the combined group under the terms of the proposed deal, they said in a joint statement. Reuters investors would get 352-1/2 pence in cash and 0.16 Thomson stock for each share, equivalent to 697 pence a share at Monday's closing prices.

That would be 42 percent above Reuters closing share price on Thursday, the day before it announced a bid approach. The deal value is based on the number of outstanding Reuters shares.

Reuters shares rose as much as 7 percent to a 5-year high of 659 pence in early trade. They stood 3.5 percent up at 0835 GMT. Thomson closed on Monday at 47.23 Canadian dollars, valuing the business at about C$30.8 billion ($27.9 billion).

Thomson, whose publishing interests span law, tax and scientific research, has been building up its financial data business as it looks to tap into booming global markets.

Currently third with 11 percent of the world's $12.5 billion market data business, Thomson would jump to 34 percent with Reuters, putting it just ahead of privately-owned Bloomberg on 33 percent, according to Inside Market Data.

The talks come amid a frenzy of dealmaking in the media sector. Last week Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (Other OTC:NWSAF.PK - News) made a $5 billion bid for Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones & Co Inc. (NYSE:DJ - News), which was rebuffed by Dow Jones' controlling investors.

"Although a rival bid cannot be ruled out, given the scale of synergies on offer (and therefore healthy premium offered) ... we view Thomson as the bidder best placed to secure Reuters," Numis Securities analysts wrote in a research note.

Thomson (NYSE:TOC - News) and Reuters (NasdaqGS:RTRSY - News) said they expected to make over $500 million of annual synergies within three years of completion of a deal.

The dual-listed group would be called Thomson-Reuters and the combined Thomson Financial unit and Reuters financial and media businesses would be called Reuters.

The combined group would adopt the Reuters trust principles aimed at safeguarding the independence of Reuters news, the companies said. The Reuters Founders Share Co, run by 15 trustees, has a "golden share" and could block a takeover.

"It should be emphasized that discussions are at a stage where there can be no assurance that agreement will be reached. No transaction will be announced without the support of the Reuters Founders Share Company," the companies said.

The Thomson family bought its first newspaper in 1934 and built a publishing empire which for a time included the Times newspaper and Scottish Television.

It branched into other fields, including creating a travel business that still bears its name, before focusing more recently on electronic publishing. It is in talks to sell its education unit, which analysts say could raise about $5 billion.

Reuters was founded by German-born immigrant Paul Julius Reuter in 1851 when he opened an office to transmit stock market quotes between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable.

The Thomson family, which owns about 70 percent of the Canadian group, would vote in favor of a deal with Reuters, the companies said. The family, through its Woodbridge vehicle, would own 53 percent of Thomson-Reuters.

Other Thomson shareholders would own 23 percent of the combined business and Reuters shareholders would own 24 percent. The deal is subject to approval by both sets of shareholders.

Under the proposed deal, a so-called equalization agreement would mean that both companies' primary listings would be maintained. This should allow the two companies to remain in their existing equity indexes, the companies said.

Thomson President and CEO Richard Harrington would retire on completion of the deal, at which point Reuters' Glocer would become chief executive of the combined company.

The two firms said the deal could close this year, but might not complete until 2008.

The OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE

The boards of The Thomson Corporation (“Thomson”) and Reuters Group PLC (“Reuters”) confirm that they are in discussions for the combination of their two businesses.  Both boards believe there is a powerful and compelling logic for the combination which would create a global leader in the business-to-business information markets.  This transaction would also create enhanced value for shareholders through the delivery of in excess of US$500 million of annual synergies expected to be achieved within three years.  The market activity from last Friday and attendant speculation occurred prior to discussions being completed and, as this is a large and complex transaction, much has still to be resolved and there can be no assurance that agreement will be reached. 

Under these circumstances, both boards thought that it was in the shareholders’ interests to clarify the status of the discussions as they related to a number of the material aspects of the potential transaction.  These are as follows:

The enlarged Group would be called Thomson-Reuters and the combined Thomson Financial unit and Reuters financial and media businesses would be called Reuters.

Key proposed terms:

Combination to be effected by the creation of a Dual Listed Company structure by means of an equalisation agreement with both companies’ primary listings being maintained.  The structure is expected to facilitate retention of the existing equity index inclusions of the two companies.

·      Each Reuters share would be entitled to 352.5 pence per share in cash and an equity participation based on an equalisation ratio of 0.1600 Thomson shares for each Reuters share.

·      Based on the closing Thomson share price of C$48.46 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Thursday, 3 May 2007, the day before the announcement by Reuters (and at an exchange rate of C$/£2.19795), this would value each Reuters share at 705 pence representing a premium of 43% to the closing share price of Reuters on Thursday, 3 May 2007.

·      Based on the closing Thomson share price and exchange rate on Monday, 7 May 2007 the day before this announcement, this would value each Reuters share at 697 pence per share.

·      In addition, Reuters will declare a dividend of 12p for 2007, with 5p payable as an interim dividend and 7p payable as a final dividend subject to proportionate adjustment if closing occurs before year end.  If closing occurs after the year end a proportionate 2008 dividend will also be paid.  Thomson will also pay dividends in the ordinary course pending closing, including a proportionate adjustment to the date of closing.

·      Based on the current issued share capital of Thomson and Reuters, Woodbridge, the Thomson family holding company, would own approximately 53 per cent. of Thomson-Reuters, other Thomson shareholders approximately 23 per cent. and Reuters shareholders approximately 24 per cent.

·      Thomson-Reuters to adopt the Reuters Trust Principles and Reuters Founders Share Company structure.  Thomson-Reuters and Woodbridge would support the Reuters Trust Principles and Woodbridge has further agreed that it would use its voting control to give effect to this support.

·      The boards of the Dual Listed Companies to be identical and consisting of 15 Directors, five of whom are to be current Directors of Reuters (including a Deputy Chairman) and an additional one of whom to be the CEO. Of the remaining nine, not more than four to be from Woodbridge. Woodbridge to be entitled to nominate the Chairman.

·      Woodbridge to use its voting control of Thomson to support the transaction.

Thomson President and CEO, Richard J. Harrington, 60, who led the transformation of the company from traditional publishing to electronic solutions, software and services, would retire at the successful completion of the transaction.  Reuters CEO, Tom Glocer, 47, would become CEO of the combined company at that time.

It should be emphasised that discussions are at a stage where there can be no assurance that agreement will be reached.  No transaction will be announced without the support of the Reuters Founders Share Company.  This is a non-waivable pre-condition.  Any announcement of a transaction pursuant to rule 2.5 of the Takeover Code would be subject to conditions including antitrust, regulatory and tax clearances and would require approval by both companies’ shareholders (including amendments to both companies’ constitutions).

A further announcement will be made in due course.

The Directors of each of Thomson and Reuters accept responsibility for the information contained in this document.  To the best of the knowledge and belief of the respective Directors (who have taken all reasonable care to ensure that such is the case), the information contained in this document is in accordance with the facts and does not omit anything likely to affect the import of such information.

Izmir at last

8 May 2007

My younger sister has lived in Izmir, Turkey for 23 years. In all that time I have never been to see her. There has always been either some excuse, or too much distance, or too little time or simply not enough motivation to go.

But Tai is a good influence on me. Family is so important to her. It should be to all of us. And I want her to know that she is part of my family and has all of our love and support.

It is not a difficult flight from Dubai. Four hours to Istanbul and then a domestic connection for a 50 minute flight to Izmir.

And I am happy that we have now been there. My sister has a lovely home and a happy and welcoming family. It was only a two night stay in Izmir but we met some great people, we took the family boat out on the Aegean; Tai went shopping in the market and went horse riding.

The weather was hot and fine. We ate far too much fresh healthy food. The craving for meat was solved on Sunday night in Istanbul.

There are some pictures from Izmir here and from Istanbul here.

Your good interview guide

1 May 2007

Since I am getting plenty of practice at this here is a guide to the top 10 mistakes that you can make at an interview and how best to avoid them.

Poor handshake.

The three-second handshake that starts the interview is an early opportunity to create a great impression. But all too often an interview is blown right from the start by an ineffective handshake. Once you've delivered a poor handshake, it's nearly impossible to recover your efforts to build rapport.

Even if you're a seasoned professional, don't assume you have avoided these pitfalls. Your handshake may be telling more about you than you know.

This is something that you cab practice with your friends; and ask for their honest feedback.

Talking too much.

Do not be over-talkative. Over-talking takes several forms:

• Taking too long to answer direct questions. The impression: This candidate just can't get to the point.
   

• Nervous talkers. The impression: This candidate is covering up something or is outright lying.

• If the interviewer seems all business, don't attempt to loosen him/her up with a joke or story. Be succinct and businesslike.
   

• If the interviewer is personable, try discussing his/her interests. Often the items on display in the office can be a clue.
   

• If asked a direct question, answer directly. Then follow up by asking if more information is needed.

10 Years of Tony Blair; a case of what might have been

1 May 2007

It is 10 years since Tony Blair led his reformed Labour party to a massive election win in 1997.

Blair's legacy will be Iraq; compounded by his misguided close relationship with the Bush administration. How different things might have been if Bush had not been elected.

Even his critics seem to accept that he was sincere, if misguided, about the invasion of Iraq. But since then he has singularly failed to distance himself from the US neocons.

Tony Blair hopes that history will judge him kindly. Most Britons are enjoying unprecedented prosperity so their impatience to punish both Blair and his government is strange. IN may simply be that 10 years at the top is just too long. 

Only two years ago Labour won a third successive general election. It was a comfortable victory, although turnout was poor. Britain, it seemed, liked having Mr Blair in charge. But Blair is due to step down as Prime Minsister; and confirmation of his departure date may well be as early as this week.

His successor as Prime Minsister, whether Labour or Tory (forget the Lib Dems) will claim the middle ground. They will claim the territory that Blair has made his own. They will promise to combine economic efficiency with a commitment to social justice. They will pledge empowerment to the individual. They will embrace globalisation but warn of its challenges - how it requires reform of the state; how it makes obsolete the old dogmas of left and right.

Labour was banished from office from 1979 until 1997 and came close to extinction. Tony Blair turned it into a natural party of government. He drove the Tories into the wilderness, forcing them to accept a new consensus.

Modern Britain is richer, more comfortable with diversity, more tolerant, more confident and in better health than it was in 1997. People no longer wait days for a doctor's appointment and months for an operation. Children get better results at school, more of them go to university and go on to find a job. There has never been a recession under New Labour.

Yet these benefits are taken for granted or are insufficient to earn the government any credit. In part because riches have not flowed very evenly. At the top of the income scale grotesque sums are earned and splashed around. At the bottom there is still an underclass, unresponsive to state intervention. That inequality is more visible than the discreet but more widespread increase in average household wealth. But that is not just a UK phenomenon; it is global.

Blair has also not delivered on expectations. He has said how inadequate public services are, and how radically they need to change. But reforms have been gradual.

That problem is often attributed to New Labour's love of 'spin' - of managing the news. But it is fair to argue that Blair's government is responding to new needs. He is the first Prime Minister to have to deal with 24-hour rolling news with its insatiable appetite for novelty and fixation on personality. He is the first to govern in the internet age. Had Mr Blair not been a master of information control, he would only have lost power to someone who was.

Another criticism of Mr Blair, often joined to the accusation of spin, is that he lacks ideology. Yet his disregard for sacred party positions is what made him a successful peace broker in Northern Ireland. Ulster was a problem that, less than a generation ago, looked intractable. Mr Blair's dogged diplomacy, charm offensive and lack of ideological baggage made the difference. He is a pragmatist who seeks workable solutions. 

It is foreign policy that has caused him political harm. He was quick to understand the threat posed by al-Qaeda. He recognised in Islamist terrorism a movement of global proportions that recruited people, including British citizens, and taught them to crave death with the destruction of innocent lives. He rallied the world against the Taliban.

But success in foreign affairs has been limited by his partnership with George Bush, the most ideologically driven US President in recent history. The choice to join the war in Iraq was defensible on many grounds: based upon the genuine belief, at the time, that Saddam was a threat and the moral case for unseating a brutal dictator. This web site saw the invasion as inevitable and necessary based on the information we had at the time.

Bush (and to some extent Blair) see the Middle East as a global struggle between Western Civilisation and the evil of apocalyptic terrorism. But stabilisation in Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions, Israel's war with Hizbollah and its occupation of Palestine are problems that require separate treatment. They are not all part of a common 'war on terror.' That is simplistic.

At home his rivalry with the Chancellor has poisoned relations in the cabinet. It also led to the unseemly manner of his departure - an ugly coup and a nudge into early retirement. The same happened to Thatcher after too long in power. You cannot be at the top for too long. It thwarts the ambitions of others. Maybe a two term limit as PM would be a force for change in UK politics. Perhaps 10 years is just too long. Perhaps it is simply time for a change. .

Blair has change Britain.The minimum wage; free nursery care; tens of thousands more teachers, doctors and nurses - with higher wages; the working families' tax credit; the right to six months' maternity leave and two weeks' paternity leave; a statutory right to flexible working hours; the disability rights commission; the Freedom of Information Act; civil partnerships and the repeal of Section 28; restoring self-government for London; devolution for Scotland and Wales; the Human Rights Act; peace in Northern Ireland.

Britain is better off after a decade with Tony Blair in charge. Wealth has been created, and wealth has been redistributed. That is what Labour governments have always hoped to do. It has happened without a brake on global competitiveness. That is what New Labour hoped to do: build a vibrant market economy with a generous welfare state; economic freedom and social protection. That is Blairism.

It is sad that people will forget this legacy and remember Iraq.