<p>The Thai government has been scrambling to explain the use of nuclear weapons by its military on the contested border with Cambodia. Allegations by the Cambodians about some sort of nuclear shell first surfaced last February when they were categorically denied by the Royal Thai Army.</p>

<p>&nbsp;Police officers around the country expressed relief and satisfaction at the failure of the appeal of the so-called HARDCORE five against their conviction on charges of coercion and gang robbery.</p>

<p>Despite crippling explosions and fires in the Democrat nuclear government power plant, spokesmen insist that the nation is in safe hands.</p>

<p>&nbsp;&ldquo;For this no-confidence debate, don&rsquo;t blink! I will shift the blame. We will battle it out on the truth, but you will need to be patient. We didn&rsquo;t intend to kill protesters. We did not use the force of the police and soldiers to disperse the protest, but they died as they ran into [bullets],&rdquo;</p>

<p>The sudden reversal of the findings of the Department of Special Investigation in the killing of Reuters photographer Hiroyuki Muramoto while he was covering the violence on April 10 last year should not really come as a surprise. In fact it follows a pattern of unexpected fresh evidence, often discovered long after the event, which overturns all previous assumptions about the facts of a case.</p>

<p>&nbsp;A grim milestone was reached in the operations of Suvarnabhumi International Airport yesterday when a flight departed with no checked-in passengers on board. All the passengers for West Cambodia Airlines flight WC083 to Battambang, scheduled to depart at 9.15 yesterday morning, had been trapped in the immigration queues and failed to make the flight in time.</p>

<p>&nbsp;We all know Fairtrade. The Fairtrade bananas that have you feeling good about yourself and the Fairtrade coffee that has you washing your mouth out, it tastes so bad. But the range of fair-traded goods has tended to cluster on the semi-luxury fringe of the market &ndash; ethnic handicrafts and non-essential foodstuffs from parts of the world that the global middle-class might feel a bit guilty about.</p>

<p>&nbsp;As the international news agencies parachute even more, and more eminent correspondents into Cairo, the real story disappears under a deluge of platitudes, misinformed commentary and a perverse persistence in reporting the &lsquo;mood&rsquo; more than the events and reporting the events more than explaining the history and context.</p>

<p>The wheels appear to be coming off the micro-credit bandwagon. It was long touted by many, especially those on the by-your-own-bootstraps wing of development thinking, as the silver bullet that would end poverty, empower the powerless (especially women) and unleash a world of budding billionaires.</p>

<p>The claim by a 57-yr-old Ukrainian engineer that he had been held prisoner in a Pathum Thani gas factory seems to have provoked the emergence of a number of similar cases.</p>

<p>&nbsp;The tortured mind of Jared Lee Loughner, currently charged with the killing of 6 people and the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, appears to have had a fixation on grammar. On the internet, he posted &ldquo;The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar. You control your English grammar structure.&rdquo; And in a political meeting he is reported to have said &ldquo;What is government if words have no meaning?&rdquo;, a plaintive cry that makes one wonder if he was familiar with the speeches of Thai politicians.</p>

<p>&nbsp;Foreigners have been known to complain that there are no rules in Thai society. People just seem to do what they feel like, or at least what they think they can get away with.</p>