PHNOM PENH – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said on Tuesday he has ordered help for those hit by the worst drought in half a century, including bringing in water by truck to the worst-affected regions.

Cambodia, like its neighbour Thailand, is grappling with its worst drought in decades but there have been do deaths reported and no information on damage to crops. “Today, I launch a large-scale campaign to distribute water,” Hun Sen said at a ceremony to inaugurate a new road in Banteay Meanchey province, 386 km (240 miles) from the capital Phnom Penh.

On Friday, Hun Sen took to Facebook to call on people not to waste water and said that the government would fund the transportation of water.

Cambodia is grappling with soaring temperatures which have hit as high as 41 degrees Celsius (105.8 Fahrenheit).

The country is experiencing water shortages in 18 out of 25 provinces, said Keo Vy, a spokesman for the National Center for Disaster Management. “We have had drought before but it has never been at this level,” he said, adding that authorities have also dug wells to try to ease the crisis.

SUBIC BAY, Philippines – A Japanese warship sailed into a Philippine port near disputed South China Sea waters on Tuesday in another sign of deepening security ties between the World War II foes to counter Beijing.

Tensions in the South China Sea – through which one-third of the world’s oil passes – have mounted in recent years since China transformed contested reefs into artificial islands capable of supporting military facilities.

The Japanese destroyer Ise docked in Subic Bay while on a “navigational training” mission, the ship’s captain said.

It marked the second time in just over three weeks that Japanese naval vessels visited Subic, a former major US naval base that lies around 200 kilometres (125 miles) from a Chinese-controlled shoal.

“We want to deepen the relationship with the Philippines,” Ise Captain Masaki Takada told reporters, who were given a tour of the vessel.

Takada declined to say whether the Ise had been in contact with Chinese naval vessels during its voyage.

The Philippines, a US security ally with a severely under-equipped military has been seeking to strengthen ties with Japan as tensions mount over the disputed waterway, almost all of which is claimed by China.

Aside from the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have overlapping claims.

Japan has its own dispute with China in the East China Sea over uninhabited islands that it administers but that are also claimed by Beijing.

In February, Japan agreed to supply the Philippines with military hardware, which officials said may include anti-submarine reconnaissance aircraft and radar technology.

Ise’s Philippine visit was the third by Japanese military vessels this year.

“This visit will further strengthen our relationship with them. We have a strong relationship with them already but we want to enhance that,” Filipino Navy Captain Samuel Felix told reporters.

A bear which was held captive in an animal farm was finally able to splash around in a rescue centre’s pool after seven months of intensive care and treatment.

According to a video uploaded by Hong Kong group Animals Asia, a black bear by the name of Tuffy was taken to Animals Asia’s Tam Dao rescue centre in Vietnam for rehabilitation in September last year.

Tuffy had been rescued from a bile farm where they had been extracting bile from him for years. 

The bile was then sold as an ingredient to be used in traditional Chinese medicines.

During examination, the veterinary team found Tuffy’s gall bladder in such a horrid state that they had to remove it altogether.

He was also found with a number of gallstones in his bladder – suggesting that he had been living in pain for several years.

On top of all that, Tuffy had fractured teeth and cracked paws as a result of being caged at the bile farm.

Bear jumps for joy months after being rescued from bile farm

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

Video screengrabs

With his treatment complete, Tuffy is now able to fully explore his new surroundings at the rescue centre.

And as the video shows, he seems to love his new life so much that he wildly splashes and jumps around his pool.

mldas@sph.com.sg

BANGKOK – A gay couple from the United States won an appeal on Tuesday for parental rights over a baby born through a Thai surrogate mother in a high-profile case that came to light before Thailand banned commercial surrogacy last year.

The law came into effect in July in a bid to end”rent-a-womb” tourism in Thailand following a series of high-profile surrogacy cases involving foreigners, including accusations in 2014 that an Australian couple had abandoned their Down syndrome baby with his Thai birth mother.

Thailand had been a popular destination for foreigners seeking surrogacy services, in part because of lower prices but also because of the country’s lax legislation.

American Gordon Lake and his Spanish husband, Manuel Santos, had a baby called Carmen through a Thai mother before the Thai ban on commercial surrogacy came into effect.

A bitter battled ensued when surrogate mother Patidta Kusolsand refused to cede parental rights to the couple leaving them trapped in Thailand with Carmen.

Manuel, speaking to reporters outside a Bangkok family court after the verdict, said the couple would take Carmen to Spain first to meet her family there. “This nightmare is going to end soon,” Santos said through tears. “Carmen will be with us in our home.” Patidta had said she did not know the couple were gay and was unsure about their abilities as parents.

The pair have another child, son Alvaro, who was born through surrogacy in India three years ago, and have said they chose Thailand because regulations in India had changed.

Santos said he could not confirm when the pair would leave Thailand with their two children.

Abandoned baby Gammy left with Thai surrogate

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

Hope for Gammy’s Facebook page, Reuters, The Nation/ANN

TOKYO – Desperately seeking an antidote to a rapidly aging population, Japanese policymakers are exploring ways to bring in more foreign workers without calling it an “immigration policy”.

Immigration is a touchy subject in a land where conservatives prize cultural homogeneity and politicians fear losing votes from workers worried about losing jobs.

But a tight labour market and ever-shrinking work force are making Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policy team and lawmakers consider the politically controversial option.

Signalling the shift, leading members of a ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) panel on Tuesday proposed expanding the the types of jobs open to foreign workers, and double their numbers from current levels of close to 1 million. “Domestically, there is a big allergy. As a politician, one must be aware of that,” Takeshi Noda, an adviser to the LDP panel, told Reuters in an interview.

Unlike the United States, where Donald Trump has made immigration an election issue, Japan has little history of immigration. But, that makes ethnic and cultural diversity seem more of a threat in Japan than it may seem elsewhere.

And while Japan is not caught up in the mass migration crisis afflicting Europe, the controversies in other regions do colour the way Japanese think about immigration.

LDP lawmakers floated immigration proposals almost a decade ago, but those came to naught. Since then, however, labour shortages have worsened and demographic forecasts have become more dire.

BY ANY OTHER NAME

An economic uptick since Abe took office in December 2012, rebuilding after the 2011 tsunami and a construction boom ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have pushed labour demand to its highest in 24 years.

That has helped boost foreign worker numbers by 40 percent since 2013, with Chinese accounting for more than one-third followed by Vietnamese, Filipinos and Brazilians.

But visa conditions largely barring unskilled workers mean foreigners still make up only about 1.4 percent of the workforce, compared with the 5 percent or more found – according to IMF estimates – in most advanced economies.

So far, measures to attract more foreign workers have focused on easing entry for highly skilled professionals and expanding a “trainee” system that was designed to share technology with developing countries, but which critics say has become a backdoor source of cheap labour.

This time, the LDP panel leaders’ proposal went further, suggesting foreigners be accepted in other sectors facing shortages, such as nursing and farming – initially for five years with visa renewal possible.

They also proposed creating a framework whereby the number of foreign workers would be doubled from around 908,000 currently, and the term “unskilled labour” would be abandoned.

In a sign of the sensitivies, however – especially ahead of a July upper house election – panel chief Yoshio Kimura stressed the proposal should not be misconstrued as an “immigration policy” and said steps were needed to offset any negative impact on jobs and public safety.

After a heated debate in which one lawmaker said the plan would “leave Japan in tatters”, members agreed to let the panel organisers decide whether to make any revisions to the proposal.

Experts, however, say changes are afoot regardless of the semantics. “The government insists it is not adopting an immigration policy, but whatever the word, faced with a shrinking population, it is changing its former stance and has begun to move toward a real immigration policy,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, a former Tokyo Immigration Bureau chief.

Two cabinet members have already advocated adopting an immigration policy, as have some LDP panel members. “The fundamental problem of the Japanese economy is that the potential growth rate is low,” LDP panel adviser Seiichiro Murakami told Reuters. “To raise that, big structural reforms including … immigration policy are necessary.” The influential Nikkei Business weekly has dubbed a foreign worker-driven growth strategy “imin-omics”, a pun on the premier’s “Abenomics” revival plan and “imin”, the Japanese word for “immigrants”.

Abe, however, has made drawing more women and elderly into the work force while boosting the birth rate priorities, and publicly the government rules out any “immigration policy”.

Still, Abe’s right-hand man, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, said debate on more foreign workers lay ahead. “We are seeking to mobilise the power of women and the elderly as much as possible, but at the same time we recognise that the acceptance of foreigners is a major issue,” Suga told Reuters.

He said the future debate would also consider the longer term issue of permanent residence for less skilled foreigners, but added caution was needed.

Conservatives are likely to resist major change.

For example, an ex-labour minister commenting at the LDP panel earlier on a proposal to let in foreign beauticians said the idea was fine, as long as their customers were foreign, too.

But hairdresser Mitsuo Igarashi, who has four barber chairs in his downtown Tokyo barbershop but only himself to clip and shave, wants to hire other barbers and doesn’t care where they come from. “We’ve got to let in more foreigners,” said Igarashi.

TOKYO – Japan wants Australia to explain why it decided not to pick a Japanese design for a new fleet of submarines choosing instead a proposal from France’s DCNS.

“The decision was deeply regrettable,” said Japan’s Minister of Defense Gen Nakatani. “We will ask Australia to explain why they didn’t pick our design,” he added.

Australian officials informed Japan of its choice on Monday, explaining that the French design best fitted its unique needs, Nakatani said.