Cambodia: rumours on the interwebs

Primate farms exporting monkeys to hell [OlyBlog]

Travel blogger discovers Kingdom’s sole chair lift: closed [Andy Brouwer]

Cambodia fashion sucks spider webs [Fuschia Boy]

Dirty cops do it in polyester [The Loisaida Times]

Council of Ministers latest victim of run-away evictions [Phnom Tom]

Children’s Mercy Fund founder says ECCC defendants should be executed — on television! [Phnom Penh Post]

The new face of terror

As if crappy hot dogs and saccharine jingles weren’t enough unholiness to unleash on the world, the first name in bologna has now made a new deal with the devil:

The Oscar Mayer® corporation originally created lobstermoose as a new form of luncheon meat, by fusing together the extracted DNA of mooses and lobsters in a vat of Dr Pepper. Indeed, the end result of this monstrous Frankensteinian experiment turned out to be quite delicious; however, it was not long before many of the mighty beasts had escaped from their factory farms and began rampaging the countryside.

Sweet Lord Jesus. What is that paragraph doing in a blog about Cambodia?

On Febuary 14 2006 a rampaging lobstermoose mutilated and consumed several babies in a orphanage in Cambodia. This marks the 16th lobstermoose related death in the last month. The first came in Xinhualongdongyaoming City, China.

An alert security guard sleeping in a hammock nearby managed to catch the animal before if could kill again.

“Yes. No problem,” the guard said. “Very delicious!”

Stop press!

From Agence Kampuchea Presse today comes this breaking news:

Phnom Penh, June 23, 2006 AKP — A Petanque match to selected 2006 national championship closed at the national stadium in Phnom Penh on June 20 in the presence Deputy Prime Minister HE Sok An, cabinet minister.

The five-day competition was attended by 241 men and 24 women athletes from 33 Petanque clubs across the country.

Thirty-three petanque clubs in Cambodia, betcha didn't know that.

UPDATE: The point is, there's a country to run, squatters to evict, prison riots to quell, World Bank money to, um, anyway, and in case HE DPM didn't notice, there's a bit of footie on (psst!, the Boss picked Germany). So what's with the petanque already?

Bargain hunting on eBay

Stars & Stripes reports that two United States airmen have been busted for stealing 14 bulletproof vests and selling them on eBay. The vest are valued at more than US$1,000, but the pair sold them on eBay for an average of US$300. And then there's this:

The U.S. Air Force has only been able to recover eight of the vests, according to the 100th Staff Judge Advocate’s office. The six at-large vests include two that were shipped to Cambodia.

Kinda makes you curious, don't it?

Cambodian Muslims

This item in the Nation is next to impossible to verify, at least any time soon.

Sa Kaew- A Cambodia newspaper has reported that Muslims from Cambodia were among unidentified bodies found in mass graves in southern border provinces of Thailand, a senior police office said Monday.

The Nation doesn't identify the Cambodian newspaper. Hopefully some definitive answers will follow.

UPDATE: This is actually an old item, which the Daily reported back on June 1. No follow up as yet.

Gratuitous Angelina Jolie blogging

Not only does she have a new baby, Angelina Jolie has a new tattoo (pictures).

N11º 33’ 0” E104º 51’ 00”
N09º 02’ 00” E038º 45’ 00”

That's what it says. The top line is the latitude and longitude for Phnom Penh, where Jolie adopted her first child Maddox. Below that are the coordinates of the place in Ethiopia where Jolie adopted her second child Zahara.

Ohmygodthatmorphineisgood!

Leading by example

Also from the Daily, file this one under "NGOs contemplate expanding conflict-resolution programmes among primary education teachers and their district officials".

A member of the Cambodian Independent Teachers' Association was injured Saturday in a fight with a district education official over the posting of fliers advertising a teachers’ strike on July 3, union members and human rights officials said Sunday. Em Bunthy, a teacher at Wat Mohamontrey primary school in Chamkar Mon district, suffered injuries to the head when she and Yin Sokha, the district's education deputy director, began fighting as Yin Sokha started tearing down the fliers Em Bunthy had posted at the school.

Give me liberty or give me death

According to this Reuters story, a group of inmates at Battambang prison Sunday overpowered a guard and snatched his gun and hand grenade. The group then barricaded themselves into a prison cell, with the guard as hostage.

Presumably, the group of nine convicts wanted to escape. But barring freedom, death by hand grenade sounded like a pretty solid second choice.

After negotiations failed, police fired tear gas into the cell and rushed the hostage takers.

"As police fired the gas, an inmate put the grenade under our guard and pulled the pin," police official Seng Hor told Reuters by telephone from Battambang.

"They said they decided to kill themselves instead of surrendering," he said.

Investigation no doubt to follow.

 

Silly foreigners

Those silly long-noses, always complaining about the dust and dirt and highly contagious, deadly pathogens in the air, don’t they know that stuff is good for you?

… Duke University researchers compared mice and rats living in laboratories to those captured in the wild. The team analyzed and compared the rodents' immune systems.

"Laboratory rodents live in a virtually germ- and parasite-free environment, and they receive extensive medical care — conditions that are comparable to what humans living in Westernized, hygienic societies experience," senior researcher William Parker, an assistant professor of experimental surgery, said in a prepared statement.

"On the other hand, rodents living in the wild are exposed to a wide variety of microbes and parasites, much like humans living in societies without modern health care, and where hygiene is harder to maintain," they said.

Scientists have studied this theory before, and hypothesize that people living in a "hygienic" environment are less protected against allergies and autoimmune diseases simply because their immune systems have never been exposed to such parasites.

Someone needs to pay closer attention

The Gloria Christie saga continues today with a story in The Age that appears to conflict with an earlier report in the Courier Mail. Says The Age:

The new clinic hung up its shingle yesterday. Time and internet chat rooms will soon tell if Dr Gloria picks up her stethoscope again.

Says the May 27 Courier Mail:

Earlier this month Christie slipped back into the country and this week opened a new medical clinic in Phnom Penh.

[... ]

Asked if she was treating patients again, Christie hung up the phone. But The Courier-Mail has confirmed that she has treated at least one patient in her clinic this week.

What idiot was that?

The cruel Cambodia winters

Also, and lastly, from the latest Post comes the harrowing tale of a Sambok Chab squatter who has just been evicted from her home and relocated, apparently, to Siberia.

“I am here with nothing; we will all die of starvation and cold.”

Cold? It's like a million degrees here every day, hotter in the summers.

Gettin’ the lead out

The latest edition of the Phnom Penh Post has an interesting story about petrol prices that begins "Cambodians must pay nearly 30 percent more for gasoline than Thais, Vietnamese, and Americans. Why?"

The story gives no definitive answer, but the implication is that, for whatever reasons, petrol prices in Cambodia are inflated.

But that’s not quite right. The United States and Thailand both tax gasoline at well below the global average, with the resultant effect on pump prices. In Vietnam, petrol prices stay artificially low because of government price caps.

So it’s not really that petrol prices here are high, but that prices there are low.

Friday Police Blotter blogging

Bizarre tales of wanton violence courtesy of the Phnom Penh Post Police Blotter.

JUNE 7: Mao Sothea, 24, a restaurant security guard, was shot twice by a drunken man when he told him to stop urinating in the restaurant garden. Sothea was taken from the New World restaurant to Preah Kettomealea hospital after being shot at 1:30pm in Srah Chak commune, Phnom Penh. A bystander told police Sothea was shot twice, in the shoulder and the thigh, with a handgun by a drunken man who was angry that Sothea stopped him urinating in the garden, across from Phnom Le Phnom karaoke shop where he had been drinking wine with associates. The offender escaped in his car.

JUNE 8: Khy Dean, 43, was sentenced to 19 years in a provincial prison after being convicted for a murder a year ago in Ta Chor village, Kampong Thom province. Judge Khlaut Pick said Dean was arrested after he killed Vaing Dai on August 3, 2005. The judge said Dai was chopped three times and his head cut off with a knife while he slept in a hammock beneath his house. Dean told the court he had chopped Dai because he thought he was a ghost while he was hunting a snake near his house.

JUNE 11: A four months pregnant woman, Yong Ron, 21, was taken to a provincial hospital after her boyfriend, Hoeun Sreang, 20, sliced open her stomach in an attempt to take out her baby for kaun krak magic at midnight in Achar Leak village, Kampong Thom province. Sreang escaped but was arrested when he entered the hospital and made another attempt. Ron said Sreang had asked her for the baby three times but she had refused.

We won’t get fooled again

Recent allegations of corruption in projects funded by the World Bank will shock no one, certainly not the Bank itself.

Having had to ask for their money back before, though, you might think that World Bank auditors would come armed with nothing less than a mountain of data documenting every major rip-off, minor scam and misspent reil uncovered during their year-long investigation.

You might also think that, still a bit embarrassed by the demobilization debacle in 2002, the Bank would work to resolve this matter quietly and diplomatically, hoping for minimal media focus on the inevitable finger-pointing, blame-shifting and self-righteous tirades.

No, you wouldn’t think that? Well neither, apparently, would the World Bank.

We don’t need no stinkin’ badges (or pants)

For those unfamiliar with the ways of Cambodia, stories like this tend only to reinforce the country’s reputation for wacky lawlessness.

Phnom Penh — Bursts of gunfire between two guest houses brought alarmed local police running so fast that they arrived wearing nothing but their boxer shorts, red-faced police admitted in local media Wednesday.

It's hard to know if that's the good news, or the bad.

The dispute turned out to be between two guest house managers after one allegedly became angry that another had thrown an empty bottle of water onto his property.

"It seems one guy pulled out a K-59 handgun and fired in the air to show he was strong, so the other went inside and found his AK-47 (assault rifle), which he fired too," said Noung Vanndy, police chief for Boeung Rang commune in the centre of the capital.

The parenthetical description must have been added during editing for the benefit of South African readers, because no one in Cambodia would need an explanation.

No chatting allowed

This kind of misunderstanding over at the Freebird, Phnom Penh's Republican stronghold, really is too bad. Being discriminated against is something of which most Caucasians have zero understanding, whereas most non-Caucasians seem to have lots, often to the point of hyper-sensitivity.

The short story: The bar staff thought the customer was “chatting”, an abuse of the bar’s Internet policy. The customer insists he wasn’t.

If somehow this simple truth could not out, then there’s plenty of blame for each side. After all, both the customer and staff member were native Khmer speakers, so it’s not exactly like language was a barrier. Furthermore, assuming George Bush supporters to know anything about the Internets seems unwise, as this case demonstrates.