Sunday, 1 May 2011
Sam Rainsy won lawsuit by Hor 5 Hong
By Tin Zakariya
Radio Free Asia
Translated from Khmer by Ossdey
Click here to read the original article in Khmer
Opposition Leader Sam Rainsy indicated on 30 April that he won the lawsuit brought up by Hor 5 Hong, the minister of Foreign Affairs. The lawsuit was dismissed by the French “Cour de Cassation” (the equivalent of the Supreme Court) after Sam Rainsy’s appealed his case against Hor 5 Hong’s 2008 lawsuit.
Sam Rainsy said over the phone from France that his French lawyer told him that the French Supreme Court decided that he won the case over Hor 5 Hong, after Sam Rainsy appealed his case to the French Supreme Court. Hor 5 Hong won the case in the first instance court and in the appeal court. He accused Sam Rainsy of defamation after Sam Rainsy accused him of being the former Boeng Trabek jail chief under the Khmer Rouge regime.
Kar Savuth, Hor 5 Hong’s lawyer, said on 30 April that he did not know about this issue yet.
From a life in rubbish to a life in rugby
Source: The ROAR (Australia)
18,500km into our 18 month bicycle journey, we stumbled across one of the most courageous and heartwrenching stories to date. It comes from a remarkable education and welfare centre in the heart of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
After the horrific suffering of the Cambodian people throughout the Pol Pot regime (Khmer Rouge), the country was brought to its knees and life for many millions became a daily struggle between life and death.
Thousands of children and families were left to live and feed off the scraps of food at huge rubbish dumps, and to scavange whatever reusables they could find amongst the broken glass, syringes and rotting waste. If there was ever any doubt as to the destruction caused by the regime, you might find suggestion in their radio broadcasts to the people “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss”.
Many of the estimated 2.5 million victims of the genocide were educated, city dwellers, the brains behind business, and often nutritionally the healthiest sector of society. Over 10 years of slaughter, the national average height dropped by a staggering 10 cm, a difference that takes around 100 years of human evolution to gain back.
We were unsure what rugby story could be found in a country that was effectively born in 1980, the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero”? The findings were nothing less than inspirational.
The rugby journey began in 1995 when a French couple visited Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Christian and Marie-France des Pallières witnessed children living and working through the rubbish dump and decided that something needed to be done. Starting only by feeding these children, they returned to France to raise awareness of the situation and began collecting donations to assist with their work.
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Video game teaches Cambodian children to avoid land mines
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| Chhoun Mina, 15, left, Chob Sopheak, 14, and Chamroeun Chanpisey, 11, test a new video game being unveiled in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, called Undercover UXO, designed to teach youths about the dangers of land mines. (Brendan Brady, For The Times / May 1, 2011) |
Undercover UXO, shorthand for unexploded ordnance, uses an engaging platform to educate youths about what to avoid in a nation where decades of fighting left the land filled with hidden explosives.
May 1, 2011
By Brendan Brady, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Phnom Penh, Cambodia—
"Turn left, turn right, go back!" her friends urge as she leads her avatar, a pet dog, into a lethal trap and the sound of an explosion rings out from the computer.
In the virtual game world, players can always hit restart, but 11-year-old Chamroeun Chanpisey gets the point. "The game is different from real life," she said. "People have only one life."
The video game, called Undercover UXO, shorthand for unexploded ordnance, is a new tool aimed at educating young Cambodians about the dangers of land mines and other explosives across the war-pocked Southeast Asian country.
It's a lesson that could save numerous lives each year in Cambodia and other post-conflict countries, where millions of land mines and unexploded ordnance — sometimes mistaken for toys — lie hidden under earth, rocks and wrecked vehicles, posing a threat to farmers and wandering children.
In Cambodia alone, such war remnants have killed or maimed nearly 64,000 people in the last three decades, including 286 last year, according to the Cambodian Mine/Explosives Remnants of War Victim Information System.
The video game, designed by a team of professors at Michigan State University with a $78,000 grant from the State Department, has been piloted in Cambodia by the Golden West Humanitarian Foundation, a Woodland-Hills nonprofit group. It tested the game on children such as Chanpisey in its Phnom Penh office before introducing it to rural communities.
Cambodia remains one of the world's most explosives-littered countries, a hangover of extensive bloodshed in the 1970s to the 1990s. This period included civil war, a genocidal communist regime and a secret American bombing campaign in the eastern part of the country to root out suspected Viet Cong fighters.
The United States dropped 2.75 million tons of bombs and warring factions placed millions of mines.
In 1992, a United Nations peacekeeping mission initiated a cleanup. But turning back such a deadly legacy is slow and costly; 4 million to 6 million explosive devices remain, according to the government-run Cambodian Mine Action Center. The government recently said it would need a dozen more years and tens of millions more aid dollars to complete the job.
Meanwhile, traditional efforts to warn to children about the danger involve dry presentations using printed materials, "which is of limited appeal to children, and most people, actually," said Allen Tan, who manages Golden West's work in Cambodia.
Tan, an American whose Cambodian father immigrated to the U.S. after surviving the Khmer Rouge's bloody rule in the late 1970s, said his own experience as an infantryman in Afghanistan and as a bomb-disposal technician in Iraq taught him how easily child's play can turn deadly.
"If you're a kid and you see something shiny in an environment where things are mostly wooden, you're going to want to pick it up," he said.
The video game uses an engaging platform to turn such mistakes into lessons, he said. Players instruct their pet dog to find food while dodging hidden dangers. They increase their scores by recognizing explicit cues, such as a skull-and-bones sign, or less obvious tip-offs, such as a barbed-wire fence, to save their avatar's life.
When an explosion is triggered, a mine specialist character appears onscreen to explain what happened and how to avoid repeating the mistake.
Corey Bohil, a visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University and part of the team that developed the game, said a digital template is being completed that could be tailored to other languages and imagery for a few thousand dollars. In Arab countries where many consider dogs to be unclean, for instance, the avatar could be a goat. And in Afghanistan, roadside bombs could be added to the repertoire of hazards, he said.
The project follows growing popular interest in "serious games" designed to develop life skills and inform players about real-world problems. Michigan State's addition is primitive, with very modest graphics. But its target audience — youngsters in post-conflict countries who are unlikely to have been spoiled by high-tech games — is likely to be forgiving
"I think it's fun, and it teaches me to be more careful," said Chob Sopheak, 14, a tester in Phnom Penh whose neighbor was left maimed and deaf by an exploding mine. Like the two other girls playing that day, Sopheak had never used a computer but quickly adapted to the controls.
Distribution is a significant hurdle for the project, however. The game was originally designed for the XO-1 computer, the "$100 laptop" that actually costs nearly $200 and hasn't really caught on globally. The version of the game that's just been released can be used on PCs and the XO-1. In coming months, plans call for making it available for Macs and Linux, and further down the road, for smartphones and the Web.
This first version benefits from an unlikely boost: narration in Khmer provided by the silky voiced Chhom Nimol, the Khmer lead singer of the popular Silver Lake-based Cambodian-style rock band Dengue Fever.
Brady is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Mark Magnier in New Delhi contributed to this report.
Cambodian New Year celebration enjoys some sun [in West Seattle]
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| Merchants offered a variety of clothing and other items at the Cambodian New Year Festival in White Center April 30. (Kimberly Robinson) |
By Patrick Robinson
2011-04-30
West Seattle Herald (Washington, USA)
The Cambodian New Year Festival came back to White Center on April 30 taking place on the block between 15th and 16th s.w. on 98th Street s.w.
Sopha Dahn with the White Center Community Development Association in charge of the event spoke and served as the host for the event. 22 booths offering food, information and neighborhood interaction and goods for sale plus cultural dances, music, poetry and performances and demonstrations rounded out the event.
Included in the program were traditional dances, a banana eating contest, and a kickboxing demonstration.
The festival is the work of the Cambodian Cultural Alliance of Washington (CCAW), a locally founded and locally based organization in White Center.
"Our mission is to create opportunities for diverse communities to understand and appreciate traditional Cambodian art through events and other cultural activities. Our goal is to provide learning opportunities for youths about traditional Cambodian arts and culture. Our vision is to foster unity and generate interest in showcasing traditional arts and culture of Cambodia."
In addition to grants, the festival is made possible with sponsorships and donations from local businesses and individuals.
This festival is a celebration of the Cambodian New Year and to showcases one of the many unique cultures in White Center.
