<p>The takeover of Leicester City football club in England by Thailand&rsquo;s King Power International Group has not gone completely according to plan.&nbsp; The Raksriasksorn family have been disappointed that since the beginning of the season, Leicester have won only two Championship games, drawn two and lost 6.&nbsp; This has left the team stranded in the relegation zone with the threat of dropping into the 3rd tier for only the second time in the club&rsquo;s illustrious 126-year history.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p>

<p>Col Sansern Kaewkamnerd, spokesperson for the CRES, has told a Sub-Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Thailand that unscrupulous persons are claiming that 91 people were killed during the red shirt demonstration in Bangkok in April and May.</p>

<p>It is musical chairs time in the Royal Thai Police and a keen new officer has been sent to a provincial police station where he is eager to join in the fight against crime in the service of justice.&nbsp; It is his first staff meeting and he wants to impress.</p> <p>The locker-room joshing is brought to a sudden end by the appearance of a clearly incandescent station superintendent.&nbsp; The assembled officers wait in fearful silence to find out what has gone so badly wrong.</p> <p>&lsquo;Have you seen the paper?&rsquo;</p>

<p>The logic doesn&rsquo;t work in quite the same way here.</p> <p>Certain verbs operate as logical sequences. So if I show you something, you can see it. If I lend you something (or you borrow from me) then you owe me.</p>

<p>There are these tricky problems with translating Thai to English. Take, for example, the common or garden words phi (falling tone, not the ghostly rising tone) or nong. Because, some say, Thais regard age as more important than sex, these words tell you whether you are dealing with an older or younger sibling. But not if it is a sister or brother. Which is what the English reader expects to be told.</p>

<p>The recent proposal which was endorsed by Education Minister Chinnaworn Boonyakiat, to send violent students to the troubled South to do community work, continues a long tradition in the thinking of the Thai mainstream.</p>

<p>The scale of the flooding in Pakistan is difficult to grasp. An area equal to that of the United Kingdom has disappeared under water. Mercifully the number of fatalities (estimated at over 200,000 and still rising, with the threat of epidemics and starvation on the horizon) is so far lower than other recent disasters. But the number of people made homeless, and consequently more or less resource-less, is already greater than that of the 2004 tsunami and the earthquakes in Kashmir in 2005 and Haiti earlier this year, combined. Estimates of the damage to infrastructure &ndash; bridges, roads, railways, schools, hospitals and other public services &ndash; run to over $4 billion. The cost in lost output, crucially including food crops, is still too large to count.</p>

<p>This week&rsquo;s prize for twisted logic goes to Nipon Poapongsakorn, President of the Thailand Development Research Institute think-tank and member of the Prawase Reform Committee. The committee, tasked with reducing injustice and inequity in the wake of the red shirt protests, is looking at the tax system.</p> <p>And that is a jolly good place to look.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Govt unveils new steps to ease poverty&rdquo; reads the Bangkok Post headline, with the kicker &ldquo;Democrats flesh out &lsquo;people&rsquo;s agenda&rsquo; with skills training, loans, debt relief&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Dramatis Personae<br /> Deputy Rector for Student Affairs<br /> Faculty Advisor to Student Drama Society<br /> Student Director</p> <p>Act One, Scene One<br /> Office of the Deputy Rector for Student Affairs</p>

<p>The National Reform Committee has made a dramatic start in its work toward national reconciliation by seeking to eliminate the problem of &lsquo;double standards&rsquo;. In a move that took most observers by complete surprise &ndash; and shocked the government to its core &ndash; it ordered Maj Gen Chamlong Srimuang, one of the five leaders of the People&rsquo;s Alliance for Democracy, to report for psychological testing.</p>

<p>They managed to cling on to their terraced house through the Great Depression and got through World War 2 with all their children surviving. They saw them all married off bar one, and at war&rsquo;s end, through the kind of thrift that borders on miserliness, they had scraped enough together to move two doors down into &lsquo;The Shop&rsquo;.</p>