<p><font face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2"><span class="body">Burma and Cambodia blocked leading activists from attending talks with Southeast Asian leaders Saturday in Thailand, where the regional bloc is trying to promote human rights as part of its charter.</span></font></p>

<p><font face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2">Dr Surin Pitsuwan, the Asean secretary-general, is a very smooth talker indeed. Listening to him too much about Asean leads one to have an almost inevitable rose-tinted view of the grouping of 10 nations and its future. The antidote to Surin&#39;s entertaining anecdotes would be to examine the ground reality of the member societies, Thailand included, and wake up.</font></p>

<p>Will the fiction of holding democracy hostage for &quot;national security&quot; fall with the information age? Last September, an old man died of heart failure in a Singapore local hospital, aged 82. While not many Thai people know him, he was Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, known universally as JBJ. He was a Singaporean politician, former leader of the Workers&#39; Party of Singapore and the first member of parliament who was not from the People&#39;s Action Party (PAP), the ruling party since the independence of Singapore in 1965. </p>

<p><span style="font-size: 10pt">Last Saturday&#39;s threat of violence against the Chiang Mai Gay Pride parade by the red-shirt pro-Thaksin Shinawatra &quot;Rak Chiang Mai 51&quot; group was not just deplorable but also a reminder that homosexuals have become silent victims to the on-going political conflict - and not just by red shirts but by the yellow shirt People&#39;s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) as well.</span></p>

<p>DON SAMBANDARAKSA, Bangkok Post: However, one of the country&#39;s top ISPs now blocks any XML request with the term &quot;lese majeste&quot; in it. This was uncovered by one of my programming friends who I shall not name who was experimenting with URL shortening and came across an error where bit.ly went quiet on certain requests. Upon some experimenting, it appeared that it was the ISP that was replacing any HTTP request, whether it was one for a web page or one calling for a web service, with a fake &quot;404 not found&quot; page.</p>

<p>Not so long ago, Thailand&rsquo;s representatives at United Nations meetings sat quietly while counterparts from nearby countries like Burma and Cambodia were grilled on their human rights records. </p>

<p>An Australian writer who was sentenced to three years in a Thai prison for insulting the monarchy in a book has been recommended for a royal pardon, according to the Thai Corrections Department.</p>

<p><strong>Nirmal Ghosh</strong>: Hours after Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva was voted into office, on the evening of Dec 15, I was at Bangkok&rsquo;s sprawling Sanam Luang grounds to assess the reaction of the pro-democracy &lsquo;red shirts&rsquo; who had been enraged by that morning&rsquo;s developments.</p> <p> When a Thai friend, a senior manager in a five-star hotel in Bangkok, found out where I was, she flew into a rage.</p> <p> &lsquo;Why are you encouraging the red shirts? I hate these people. It is you foreign journalists who are encouraging them,&rsquo; she said to me on the phone. </p>

<p><font face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2">Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva yesterday defended Thailand&#39;s harsh lese majeste law but acknowledged that it should not be abused.</font></p>

<p><strong>Grant Evans</strong>, Bangkok Post: It is not uncommon for some Thai intellectuals and politicians to claim that foreigners simply do not understand Thai attitudes towards their king. It is true that many foreigners do not comprehend the feelings of awe and respect of the overwhelming majority of the Thai people. But it is also true that many foreigners have experienced similar feelings towards their own monarchs - whether they are British, Australian, Swedish or Japanese, among others.</p>

<p>BANGKOK (AFP) &mdash; The Thai government on Wednesday chastised US actress Angelina Jolie and the United Nations refugee agency for commenting on boat people from Myanmar, whom the Thai army stands accused of abusing.</p>

<p><font face="tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2">One of the most controversial legacies from the 2006 coup and the military appointed Surayud Government was the Internal Security Act (ISA), giving legal status and more money for the military to play a key role in inter-nal-security related matters. </font></p>