ABOVE & BELOW: Joint Force Commander of the Royal Brunei Armed Forces Brigadier General (U) Dato Seri Pahlawan Haji Alirupendi bin Haji Perudin during the detachment of badges ceremony; and the 4th Independent Decommissioning Body, Verification, Monitoring and Assistance Team during the ceremony. PHOTOS: ADIB NOOR
Adib Noor
The 4th Independent Decommissioning Body, Verification, Monitoring and Assistance Team 4/2022, returned to the country on May 3 and was officially welcomed at the Bolkiah Garrison, Ministry of Defence (MinDef) yesterday.
Joint Force Commander of the Royal Brunei Armed Forces (RBAF)Brigadier General (U) Dato Seri Pahlawan Haji Alirupendi bin Haji Perudin was the guest of honour.
Also present were deputy services commanders, directors, commandants, the Defence Attaché of the Philippines Embassy in Brunei Darussalam and MinDef and RBAF officers and staff.
The team returned after successfully completing their tours of duty in Mindanao, Philippines.
Lieutenant Colonel Hairin bin Japar led the team.
The event started with the recitation of Surah Al-Fatihah and Doa Selamat, followed by the detachment of badges and a photo session.
ABOVE & BELOW: Joint Force Commander of the Royal Brunei Armed Forces Brigadier General (U) Dato Seri Pahlawan Haji Alirupendi bin Haji Perudin during the detachment of badges ceremony; and the 4th Independent Decommissioning Body, Verification, Monitoring and Assistance Team during the ceremony. PHOTOS: ADIB NOOR
ABOVE & BELOW: Makoto Shinkai; and a scene from ‘Suzume’. PHOTOS: AP
TOKYO (AP) – Makoto Shinkai doesn’t yet know the story he will tell in his next film, only that it will be about what he knows best.
For one, it will be set in Japan, filled with those breathtakingly gorgeous landscapes he draws on his animation storyboards.
If he were to set his film outside Japan, he would have to live in that city for at least several months.
The narrative will almost certainly star a young hero or heroine, or both, with hearts of gold, who fearlessly embark on their coming-of-age journeys.
All his recent films have those characteristics. It’s all he knows, Shinkai said, with a humble laugh.
“I am not the kind of person with varied interests or many skills. I can only do one thing. I can only make my animation,” he told The Associated Press in a recent online interview from Los Angeles.
He can’t even think of filmmakers or animators who have influenced him, except for being profoundly affected by Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, when he saw it as a youngster.
ABOVE & BELOW: Makoto Shinkai; and a scene from ‘Suzume’. PHOTOS: AP
In his latest work, Suzume, the heroine literally closes the door on a disaster.
It references a real-life disaster, the 2011 tsunami, quake and nuclear catastrophe in northeastern Japan, which killed thousands, left swaths of coastline covered in mud and debris, and contaminated homes and farmland with radiation near a damaged nuclear power plant.
Shinkai’s last two works focussed on imaginary disasters.
In his 2016 work Your Name, which juxtaposes a love story and gender identity switch, a comet smashes into earth.
His 2019 film, Weathering With You, focusses on the friendship between a boy who has run away from home and a mysterious girl who can control the weather; it features the city of Tokyo getting flooded.
“Several years ago, I don’t think I could have portrayed a real-life disaster in a story. Japanese society also was not ready several years ago to deal with entertainment about the disaster in northeastern Japan. Suzume is that movie we can make now, and that movie the audience is willing to watch now,” Shinkai said.
In Suzume, which had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, the title character, whose name means “sparrow”, fights hard to close the doors to destruction.
As usual, Shinkai’s imagery, more postcard-like than any postcard, spreads magic across the screen.
When the sun sets, or a raindrop lingers on a flower petal in a Shinkai film, the moments evoke splendour, almost the same way a museum masterpiece depicts a horizon or ocean waves with a sense of eternity.
“Animation, precisely because they are pictures drawn by a human hand, has the ability to teach us how to view reality. Paintings are like that. They show how the painter is looking at the world,” said Shinkai.
Shinkai acknowledged even horrific scenes have a strange beauty about them, including the devastation of northeastern Japan he has chosen to portray in his latest film.
“When I saw the city that had been swept by the tsunami, I couldn’t help but feel its beauty. There was nothing, and I felt it was beautiful. Of course, the scenery before me was also terribly cruel and horrifying. Just to imagine being there made my body tremble.
“But human beings are that kind of living creature who can’t help but feel beauty in every landscape with light from the sun, shining and creating shadows,” he said.
Since Suzume debuted in Japan in November, it has drawn more than 10 million people, earning JPY13.4 billion at the box office. It will now hit international markets, including the United States, Europe, South Korea and other parts of Asia, distributed by Crunchyroll, in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment and other companies.
Your Name broke Japanese box office records and catapulted Shinkai to stardom, amassing awards at the Japan Academy, including for his screenplay and the score by Radwimps, who also did the music in Suzume. Your Name also won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for best animated feature. Weathering With You became a social movement of sorts in India, with fans signing a petition demanding its theatrical release, resulting in its becoming the first Japanese original animation to get a commercial theatrical release in India.
Shinkai has gotten offers to make live-action films, instead of animation, but he has turned them down.
“I’m simply not interested. I enjoy watching films, but there is so much more that I can do with animation. That is how I honestly feel,” he said.
Shinkai is tickled he has fans around the world. There are various kinds of people in every country, he noted. But everyone who loves his films, no matter where they’re from, exude that same feeling.
They are “otaku”, he said, using the Japanese term that refers to animation fans, “nerds” or “geeks”, in English. They tend to be gentle loners, who talk in the same way, and probably think in the same way, he said quietly, fondness in his tone.
Like Shinkai, at 50, those people still remember their haunting nightmares from childhood.
“Aren’t those feelings you had as a teen still within you? Have they totally disappeared? At night, I still have those dreams when I am still a student. Those fears and those earnings never leave you,” he said.
Turkish citizens are seen in front of the Turkish consulate in Vienna, on the last day of the presidential elections. PHOTO: AFP
ISTANBUL (AFP) – Millions of Turks living abroad wrapped up voting yesterday, in a tense election that has turned into a referendum on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s polarising two-decade rule.
Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary ballot will pass judgement on Turkiye’s longest-serving leader and the social transformation spearheaded by his Islamic-rooted party.
The vote is Turkiye’s most consequential in generations and the toughest of the 69-year-old’s tectonic career. Polls show Erdogan locked in a tight battle with secular rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his powerful alliance of six parties that span Turkiye’s cultural and political divide.
The first votes were cast by Turks who moved from poorer provinces to Western Europe over the decades under job schemes aimed at combating the continent’s labour shortage in the wake of World War II.
Such voters comprise 3.4 million of Turkiye’s 64.1 million registered electorate and tend to support more conservative candidates.
Official turnout on the morning of the last day of overseas voting yesterday was reported at 51 per cent – a touch lower than in past elections and a possible sign of worry for Erdogan.
“I am here because Turkiye is in a quite terrible situation right now,” Berliner Kutay Yilmaz said on the first day of voting in Germany late last month.
Turkish citizens are seen in front of the Turkish consulate in Vienna, on the last day of the presidential elections. PHOTO: AFP
Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong meets with Indonesia's President Joko Widodo. PHOTO: CNA
CNA – Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will lead Singapore’s delegation to the 42nd Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit today until tomorrow in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia, his office said in a press statement. This will be the first of two summits hosted by Indonesia as this year’s chair of ASEAN.
The two summits are usually held separately, one earlier in the year and with a second meeting later in the year.
The 42nd summit – whose theme is ‘ASEAN Matters: Epicentrum of Growth’ – underlines a “substantive and forward-looking agenda”, especially in areas such as economic integration and community-building efforts to ensure ASEAN’s unity and growth, said the Prime Minister’s Office. Leaders will review ASEAN’s progress and discuss ways to boost collaboration in digital and green economies. They will also discuss the geopolitical situation, “with the view to maintain ASEAN’s central role in an open, inclusive and stable regional architecture”, it added. Discussions are expected to cover international and regional developments, including the situation in Myanmar.
At the previous summit in Cambodia in November 2022, ASEAN leaders had considered taking further steps to exclude Myanmar from its meetings, as the situation in the country continued to worsen. Last week, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said her country, as ASEAN chair, had for months been quietly engaging key stakeholders in Myanmar’s conflict in an effort to kickstart a peace process as violence intensifies. Lee previously hosted Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the Istana in March for the Singapore-Indonesia Leaders’ Retreat, where six new memorandums of understanding were signed between the two countries in areas like energy and sustainability.
Lee had also spoken about the progress in bilateral cooperation between Singapore and Indonesia, pointing to the ratification of the three agreements under the Expanded Framework, and said both countries were “ready to break new ground in fresh areas of cooperation”.
At the summit, Lee will be accompanied by Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan, as well as officials from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In Lee’s absence, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Lawrence Wong will be Acting Prime Minister from yesterday to today, and Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Teo Chee Hean tomorrow.
Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong meets with Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo. PHOTO: CNA
ABOVE & BELOW: The Sossego copper mine, explored by Brazilian mining company VALE, in Canaa dos Carajas, Para state, Brazil; and miner Valmir Souza Silva examines ore dug out of a mine
CANAÃ DOS CARAJÁS, BRAZIL (AFP) – Working under an improvised shed hidden in the rainforest, Webson Nunes hears a shout and flips on his winch, hauling a colleague up from deep inside a giant hole with a bucket full of riches.
Nunes, 28, and his four colleagues are garimpeiros, illegal miners who dig for precious minerals – in their case, at a wildcat copper mine outside Canaa dos Carajas, a small city at the edge of the Brazilian Amazon that has become a boom town in recent years thanks to mining.
Canaa – Portuguese for Canaan, the Biblical “Promised Land” – is a place of extremes: At one end of the spectrum sits mining giant Vale, which runs one of the world’s biggest open-air mines here.
Known as S11D, the iron-ore mine made the city the richest in Brazil in 2020 in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.
At the other end are an estimated 100 illegal mines like the one where Nunes is employed, bootstrap operations where garimpeiros – Portuguese for “prospectors” – make a living digging holes in the earth, living on constant alert in case of a raid.
“I work with one eye here (on the mine), and the other outside. The police could arrive at any moment,” said Nunes, inside the tarp-covered shack above the narrow, wet, 20-metre-deep hole into which he lowers his colleagues with a harness and steel cable to haul up big blue buckets of shiny, mineral-rich rocks.
ABOVE & BELOW: The Sossego copper mine, explored by Brazilian mining company VALE, in Canaa dos Carajas, Para state, Brazil; and miner Valmir Souza Silva examines ore dug out of a mine
ABOVE & BELOW: Photos show miners working at an illegal copper mine
But Nunes, who has been doing this for seven years, said he sees it as just another job – albeit a lucrative one. The mine owner pays him BRL150 (USD30) a day, a nice salary in these parts.
Illegal mines make around USD800 per metric tonne of copper they sell on the black market.
This one typically produces more than that in a day, the miners told AFP.
Authorities said the copper mined illegally in Canaa mainly gets exported to China. Police said they have also detected illegal gold mines in the area, which cause greater environmental damage because of the mercury used to separate gold from soil.
Canaa’s population has boomed along with its economy.
Since 2016, when Vale launched S11D, employing 9,000 people, the town has nearly tripled in size, from 26,000 inhabitants to 75,000.
The town, located in the northern state of Para, voted heavily in Brazil’s presidential elections last year for far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who narrowly lost to veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro, whose father was a garimpeiro, defended wildcat miners as president, pushing to allow mining on protected lands in the Amazon and drawing condemnation from environmentalists.
Since taking office in January, Lula has cracked down on illegal mining in the world’s biggest rainforest.
Police have staged six raids in the Canaa region since August 2022, unearthing what they called “severe environmental damage” in the form of “severely” discoloured rivers and forestland turned into giant pools of toxic mud.
Officers typically destroy miners’ operations, flooding their mine shafts and seizing or burning their equipment.
But it does little to stop them: The same miners can sometimes be seen back at work the next day, said garimpeiro leader Genivaldo Casadei.
Casadei, 51, is treasurer of a local small-scale miners’ cooperative trying to win legal status for their work.
Under Bolsonaro, miners were in advanced talks with the federal mining agency to do just that, he said. Lula’s victory put an end to that.
“In the cities, people see garimpeiros as criminals. But we’re just workers trying to feed our families,” said Casadei. “If (wildcat mining) were regulated, it would create jobs and tax revenue. Canaa could be the richest city in the world.”
Garimpeiros said it is unjust that Vale, the world’s biggest iron ore producer, has a monopoly on mining rights on local land, but uses just 13 percent of it.
Getting authorisation for small-scale mines is nearly impossible, they said.
Crouching over a pile of shiny rocks from a mining pit, Valmir Souza bangs at them with a hammer, separating the copper from the rest.
“It’s a hard, dangerous job,” said Souza, 33, who works in gloves, rubber boots and a white helmet.
He arrived here seven months ago from his northeastern home state, Maranhao, the poorest in Brazil, where he worked teaching capoeira, a Brazilian dance form and martial art.
There is more opportunity in Canaa, he said.
But “we have to work in secret”, he added. “What else can we do?”
According to a news report, the new smart metering solution combining water and electricity into a single account that will be rolled out at homes and commercial premises in the country will be conducted in phases over the next five years.
Although I look forward for the upgrade considering the convenience it may bring, reviews from friends and contacts have not been encouraging.
According to those who had their meters replaced, they actually had to pay more than what they used to although there is no change to their regular electric and water consumption.
Some had to fork an extra BND30 top up per month after installing the new smart metering system.
As a regular government employee with a family of six to feed, my current monthly earning is barely enough to keep us afloat and upon hearing claims of having to purchase extra credit top up once the new smart metering system is installed, I have my worries set on my financial future.
There should be more information disseminated on the use of the new smart metering system for the public to understand the consumption, credit top ups and track usage pattern. I am sure I am not the only one who remains clueless about the benefit of upgrading to the new smart metering system and even the website did not provide enough information for people wishing to learn more about it.
There should be roadshows and public briefings to educate the public on why is it necessary to install the new smart metering system, and not to hear it from word of mouth or unverified sources, especially through the social media.
CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA (AP) – The Australian government yesterday forecast the nation’s first balanced annual budget in 15 years but warned that economic pressures such as inflation would push the country into deeper debt in future years.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced a surplus was forecast for the fiscal year ending June 30 ahead of releasing the government’s economic blueprint for next year that aims to ease financial hardships of the most needy without stoking stubbornly high inflation.
High prices for commodities including iron ore, coal and gas plus income tax revenue buoyed by an extraordinarily low jobless rate of 3.5 per cent are expected to deliver the first surplus since the global financial crisis tipped the Australian economy into the red in 2008.
“We are now forecasting a surplus this year, smaller deficits after that, and less debt throughout the budget,” Chalmers told reporters. Australian annual budgets typically contain forecasts for the next four years.
Chalmers did not say how big the surplus would be, but several media outlets report a AUD4-billion surplus is expected.
A supermarket in Sydney, Australia. PHOTOS: APAustralian Treasurer Jim Chalmers
In an interim budget forecast released by the government in October last year, a AUD36.9-billion deficit was expected this year. That was less than half the AUD78 billion forecast by the previous government in March last year.
In October, Australia’s gross debt as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) was forecast to reach 37.3 per cent, or AUD927 billion, by the end of the current fiscal year and to continue to rise through the decade.
The government has already announced that next year’s budget, to be detailed soon, will contain AUD14.6 billion in measures to help low and middle-income earners cope with inflation that slowed to seven per cent in the year through March from a 7.8-per-cent peak in December.
Australia’s central bank said inflation remains too high and last week increased its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point to 3.85 per cent. It was the 11th hike since May last year when the cash rate was a record low 0.1 per cent.
Chalmers said government spending measures in his latest budget were designed to avoid fueling inflation.
“This is a responsible budget which helps people doing it tough and sets Australia up for the future,” Chalmers said.
“It’s carefully calibrated to address cost of living pressures in our communities, rather than add to them,” he added.
The budget will contain the initial costs of the so-called AUKUS agreement with the United States (US) and Britain that will deliver Australia a fleet of eight submarines powered by US nuclear technology.
The fleet, announced in March, is forecast to cost Australia between AUD268 billion and AUD368 billion by the mid-2050s. Chalmers said delivering surplus budgets would become more difficult from next year as economic pressures were expected to intensify.
His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam and His Royal Highness Prince 'Abdul Mateen bids farewell
His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Haji Omar ‘Ali Saifuddien Sa’adul Khairi Waddien, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam, left for Labuan Bajo, Indonesia yesterday to attend the 42nd ASEAN Summit that will be held today and tomorrow.
Accompanying His Majesty was His Royal Highness Prince ‘Abdul Mateen. Prior to leaving Istana Nurul Iman, a Doa Selamat was recited by Pehin Orang Kaya Paduka Seri Utama Dato Paduka Seri Setia Haji Awang Salim bin Haji Besar.
An Indonesian woman who had overstayed by over 3,000 days was sentenced to eight months’ jail and ordered to settle a BND1,000 fine by the Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday.
Karni, 47, is serving nine months’ jail as she confirmed not being able to pay the fine.
