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His statement was released by the White House after U. Speaking in parliament, Erdogan said Turkey was protecting its economy against what he called attacks and had taken under control "foreign financial tools that can disrupt the financial system".
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the government will extend the repayment deadline for businesses that qualified for the CEBA program.
Canada markets open in 7 hours 43 minutes. DOW 36, CMC Crypto 1, FTSE 7, Read full article. More content below. December 15, , p. In this article:. Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram. Angelou, who died in at the age of 86, was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in by President Barack Obama.
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The White House sent the nominations to the Senate late on Thursday. Malaysia said on Thursday it has recovered enough funds linked to scandal-tainted state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad 1MDB to pay off only the principal amount of the debt still owed by the firm this year. Malaysia's finance ministry in a statement said a trust account set up to collect recovered 1MDB funds has received Von der Leyen said there was "overwhelming" evidence that companies with boardroom diversity were more successful and introducing legal requirements accelerated the pace of progress towards more gender-balanced representation.
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This was the vision of Asia that I think I had been waiting to see and it did not disappoint. Sat on the beach in the gorgeous sun, and splashing in the waves to escape the tenacious heat, my friend played this song to me. It felt appropriate given the circumstances to include it. For such a cynical and controversial artist to have penned such a jaunty, romantic pop song is no mean feat. Following our brief sojourn in Saigon, Charlotte and I spent a heady handful of days on the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, just off the coast of Cambodia.
Sold as a paradisal escape with white sand beaches and crystal blue water, the reality was in large parts sadly very different. The beaches that were not maintained and kept by charging resorts were swamped with rubbish and plastics of all kinds, even in the remote fishing village we managed to find there was plastic detritus and old fishing nets everywhere.
In spite of this Charlotte and I were still able to escape to a few little idylls, such as the white sands of Sao Beach where we got roasted in the sun and ran around red-faced and peeling for the next few days, or a special little Airbnb where the hut was built around the jungle and insects and geckos flitted in and out, or the view from the Happy Cafe out to the sun-setting west and the lovely little restaurant where we sat on rickety stilt platforms above the water to eat our food and then relaxed in hammocks afterwards enjoying the cool sea air.
We also found the time to eat a variety of funky foods from goat hotpot to beef bone soup through octopus and clams and of course more noodles than you could shake a chopstick at. Unfortunately Charlotte had to return to China to sit exams and I had a whole country to try and see so eventually we had to leave Phu Quoc behind, and so at in the morning we took a bus to the ferry and once on the mainland we hopped on a bus to Saigon. Over the next 8 hours or so we passed through the green and verdant lands of the Mekong Delta where little rivers, waterways and manmade irrigation dikes split from the main body of the Mekong river and threaded their way like so many thousands of snakes through the southernmost part of the country.
I even met a girl who made it her mission to feed all of the stray cats of Saigon at 3am and so found herself sat in her brand new dress on the dirty pavement of the city with cold chicken in her hand and a couple of wary cats near her feet. When he saw us dissolve into fits of laughter, his face brightened up and he ran around looking for it in the puddles on the pavement to repeat the feat.
While I was having a wonderful time, I knew that I had spent too long in Ho Chi Minh City and so I left the metropolis and made my way northwards to Da Lat in the central southern highlands. This should come as little surprise when one discovers that it was the French who had developed Da Lat into a temporary escape from the raging heat of the summer back in the early s.
While I was in Dalat, I was able to visit the much vaunted Crazy House, an edifice built by a soviet trained architect and opened in Stepping through the archway one encountered a garden of fantasy, with large mushrooms, tumbling blossoms, and hidden ponds. Staircases disappeared off in every direction before vanishing behind the what-were-tenuously-termed pillars and walls of the elaborate structure.
They led, if one dared to climb one, to delicately decorated rooms with pretty chandeliers and tea sets arranged on tables, or sometimes up and over rooftops on spindly walkways that split and diverged leaving you wondering if you would find your way back to try the other. One of the staircases was built like the inside of a grotto and at the bottom of the stairwell fish and other sea creatures were rendered upon the floor and the walls.
From there the space expanded into a full underwater sea cave in which there stood a pink tree with white flowers. A large shell served as a doorway to this submerged sanctuary. The rumble of thunder, and the tolling of temple bells. The rainy season had well and truly begun in Da Lat and the afternoons were now pockmarked with brief but torrential downpours frequently permeated by thunder. The time had come to leave Da Lat and in so doing I tried to be clever.
I had read online that the best way to get from Da Lat to Da Nang instead of taking the 16 hour night bus was to take the bus from Da Lat to Nha Trang, which was a four hour journey and then change on to a much comfier sleeper train which would allow you to arrive in Da Nang refreshed and well-rested so I booked the bus with the hostel and then the train online.
The first part of the journey went relatively smoothly. I was dropped off fairly unceremoniously in Nha Trang as the bus barely stopped instead letting me step off and depositing my luggage beside me before the steward hopped back inside the already moving vehicle and the door slammed shut.
I made my way to the train station in plenty of time and sat down on the platform to wait. My mind was envisioning a lovely sleeper carriage with white sheets and if not soft then at least not hard beds. However when the train eventually did arrive I was faced with a very unpleasant surprise.
I walked towards my carriage, number four, only to see to my horror that it was not divided into compartments at all but was instead a regular seated carriage. It had old leather seats, ancient and broken tray tables, and lurid brown curtains. It also had no air conditioning, at least until one of the passengers jumped up after about three and a half hours and complained to the steward who I think turned it on but it was hard to tell.
I did start to feel a little chilly though by 6am. People lay on the floor between the seats in a vain attempt to sleep, while the harsh LED lights continued to crow overhead making closing ones eyes a futile gesture. The only way one could hope to get some sleep was to not sleep long enough to become so tired that sleep became inevitable.
And so I sat on that train for ten virtually sleepless hours watching the night give way to day. This Vietnamese rap song slaps really hard. I heard some people playing it at the beach in Phu Quoc and had to go and ask them the name of the song. The initial bass-line is sick as hell. There I met Charlotte who has been one of my best friends since we met at university. It was so strange, I had not seen her since Edinburgh and yet here she was, exploring the streets of Saigon with me, wearing a long skirt or airy trousers, a huge wide-brimmed straw hat or her thin green scarf worn like a shawl on her small head, and large round sunglasses over her smiling face.
She was much the same as ever, running on coffee, eight cups of the free stuff at one of our hostels, her manner always friendly, always charming, an obsession with food, her strange little gleeful laugh, half cackle half chuckle, and her odd little drunken silences. She is after all a seasoned traveller of Asia having lived in China multiple times as well as having spent time in Cambodia, and as such she makes for a reliable guide.
Together we ventured far and wide to tourist-free backwaters where we were barked at by two ferocious and tiny mongrels, to a whole street of seafood street eateries, to the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts set in a beautiful old French colonial building, and even to a gorgeous old temple dedicated to the Chinese sea-goddess Thien Hau in the heart of Chinatown with refined etchings, beautiful paintings and delicately rendered porcelain figures.
Over the few days we were in Saigon I gradually adjusted to the strangeness of this new world. I loved just sitting in the roadside restaurants and listening to the many shaded voices that chorused all around us, not understanding a jot of what was being said as I watched babies being passed from expectant arms to expectant arms, jokes being shared, people dropping in for lunch alone or with friends.
I also delighted in the little details of city life; the scabby dog sat in the bottom of an open cupboard, the sugar cane press and the delicious fresh juice.
He greeted us as we passed. Another thing that marked me about this city was the pace at which it seemed to run, the sheer speed of life. The world seemed to be constantly rushing around. Even crossing the road here is a wild experience as traffic swirls around in every direction, it requires one to walk slowly but deliberately across the oncoming traffic, looking both ways first in case a rogue moto has decided to creep up the wrong side of the road unnoticed.
Generally one waits for an opportune moment when there is a temporary break in the steady flow of vehicles. This adrenaline-fuelled challenge though is nothing compared to a Grab ride like Uber but cheaper on the back of a motorcycle where just a flimsy helmet is provided and the only handhold seems to be behind you. Here traffic comes from basically every direction at once and at all times, bar from above and all that one can do is place his entire faith in the confidence and the ability of his driver and do his best to stay on.
Revision : after a few more rides I now thoroughly enjoy a ride on the back of a motorcycle. It rained the other day. During the brief deluge the streets ran with water and temporarily the motorbikes were silenced as the roads cleared almost completely. The tall and elegantly thin buildings dripped with water as the rain tumbled over their greenery laden balconies towards the grubby streets below.
This means that the dry season here in the south is almost over. Afterwards someone told me that when it began to pour the people around her applauded. For most of my twelve days in Cambodia I travelled with a Londoner called Chirag. He is thirty years old and has recently left his job as a designer for a tobacco company back in the UK. Throughout the trip he partied harder than me and was always keen for whatever harebrained scheme seemed to be on the cards.
The road between the two cities while being one of the countries main thoroughfares was for large parts little more than a dirt track but in the arid heat of the dry season it had turned to dust.
The road was crawling with vehicles as everyone made the journey back to the capital in whatever way they could following the New Year festivities.
They crowded onto buses or were packed tightly into minivans, they sat four people to a motorbike or squeezed into trailers towed behind motorbikes or make-shift tractors while some perched in the rears of pick-up trucks, and many even stood pressed together like livestock in the back of cattle lorries.
A few people even sat on the lower halves of car-boot doors which jutted out like the lower lips of sulking children and were held up only by a couple of thick ropes from the road below. While still in Kampot I had witnessed a minibus stuffed to the gills with passengers while hundreds of bananas protruded from the half-open boot. Beneath the mass of bananas one could just discern the rear wheel of a motorcycle that hung half-in, half-out of the car.
Just to top it all off a dead chicken dangled from it. As this unholy caravan wound its way back to the capital it kicked up a vast cloud of red dust that caked the many houses that lined the road in a thin layer of red. I remember watching as two men engaged in a losing battle as they tried to sweep the entrance of their abode. Through the dust the dim shapes of cars and tuktuks came towards us.
Motorbike drivers wore medical face masks to protect their throats and lungs. As night fell and we neared the outskirts of the city this chaos only worsened as it descended into a hellscape of bright red, orange and white lights and the shrill klaxon of horns and, as I was sat in the aisle seat at the back it was my absolute pleasure to be able to watch every single close call, every single onrushing car, every single angry lorry and it was to my utmost relief when we finally arrived safely in Phnom Penh.
Thankfully the road to Siem Reap was a far more controlled affair and went by without a hitch. In Siem Reap we met up with two other people from Kampot, Eddie and Bronwyn and had many a memorable night. Siem Reap as a city has really sprung up around the celebrated Temples of Angkor, the most famous of which is the huge Angkor Wat. It is only one of a number of ancient and mysterious temples built here between the 9th and the 14th century in the heyday of the Khmer Empire by a succession of kings each trying to outdo their predecessors.
I spent three days exploring a variety of temples from the enigmatic and confusing Bayon with its giant faces staring down upon the milling tourists from its spindly towers, to the labyrinthine corridors of Preah Khan and the red stone pyramid of Pre Rup.
I also made very sure to arrive early at the romantically ramshackle and overgrown Ta Prohm temple so that I could explore it before the crowds arrived. The jungle has spent the last few hundred years reclaiming this temple with trees and roots and plants growing from among the stones. In the peace of the early morning, the only signs of life are the scent of burning incense sticks and the occasional glimpse of an orange robed monk in a doorway.
I do not hear a single voice just a cacophony of birds arguing in the tree tops. I wandered down the temples winding corridors and through its archways marvelling at the way that the huge trees exploded skyward from atop its crumbling walls, how their thick boa constrictor roots had wound themselves like ivy over its doorframes and its icons, how nature had upset pavements and tumbled walls.
In various places the grey stone had been overrun with patches of pale blue lichen, while the occasional splodge of ochre still stained its stone walls. On my first trip to Angkor Wat, I made the obligatory dawn pilgrimage to watch the sun rise over it. Having woken up at am and feeling it, Chirag and I and the rest of our tour group tumbled out of the minivan into the already stifling heat, even at am it was around 35 degrees.
We crossed the floating bridge, a temporary structure while they repair the old one and gathered with the hundreds of other tourists on the desecrated grass inside the outer walls of the temple and waited for the sun to appear.
It is rather less spectacular than it must be in the rainy season. Around us the slumbering jungle begins to wake. A monkey stumbles with limbs full of sleep from one tree to another while the voices of birds begin to make themselves heard. Eventually the sun comes up and once everyone has taken enough pictures the crowd moves inside all at once, filling the corridors with noise and blocking passageways. By now the heat is truly oppressive too and we are all hungry and overall the experience was a little less than satisfying.
So two days later I returned to Angkor Wat again with Chirag, this time in the late afternoon. The temple stands vast and quiet now after the crowds have moved on. The only noises that disturb the silence as I sit in contemplation on the sun warmed stones are the distant echoes of music, the twittering of birds and the occasional distant hum of monks chanting.
In the stillness of the failing day golden light pours in through the westward facing windows. Now each glance reveals some new otherworldly beauty be it the detail of an aspara a dancing girl or the sudden magnificence of an elephant in one of the bas-reliefs.
The setting sun turns it all to gold. As I walk over these worn stones i end up imagining the thousands upon thousands of people that have walked these hallways before and find it strange now how empty it is and how easy it is to disappear down a corridor or vanish in one of the many nooks and crannies of the magnificent temple. I think the majesty of Angkor Wat lies largely in the way that it brings together the symmetry and scale of its size with the intricacy and elegance of its details.
As Chirag and I leave the darkening corridors and courtyards of the temple behind, I turn and notice that hovering above its spires sits a massive plume of cloud that flattened out at the top as if it was some divine mountain or heaven come to earth.
In the moat, the water boatmen dance like raindrops on the surface of the water, little ripples, skating between the lilies and the lily pads. The cloud plume is now painted on the dark water, as the temples fade into the haze of night. Behind us the blood red sun burns in the thickening clouds. I returned again to Angkor Wat, one last time, to leave a little piece of my heart there. I hid it in a little hole, in one of its darkest corridors, on the eastern side, where the sun always rises.
A line from this new release by the National keeps incessantly leaping into my head in such a way that I have been unable to ignore it as I move through the chaotic turbulent vortex that is life here in south-east Asia and so I thought it only fitting to include it here:. I could not find a version of this song on YouTube without this heart-aching clip shot in Angkor Wat from the end of the film. Do not watch if you are worried about spoilers although out of context it will not give much away at all.
And so it seemed so unreal sliding through the cold grey haze of the autumn morning, half awake, my stomach balling itself up into tight little knots. Half dreaming I left the towering skyscrapers of Melbourne behind… From the plane I saw the many domes of Kata Tjuta… When we reached the coast, I stopped and looked down out of the window and felt pangs of regret, perhaps.
I was leaving behind a couple of strong and valued friendships, and a new if old family, but I felt that more than that, I was turning my back on a realm of possibilities, futures that I felt like I had missed out on, a partially botched job.
I returned instead to an old world, a familiar world, a world of connotations, where one thing suggests another, where each thing has many meanings, and the layers of the past run deep and drip into one other, like some thickening mire. It was April 14th and I was sat in the back of a tuktuk on my way to my hostel. In that moment I felt an overwhelming sense of excitement and promise. The roads were unlike anything I had ever witnessed.
Children rode in the back of pick-up trucks, a woman drove her food stand cum motorbike home, orange-clad Buddhist monks perched on the back of motos as we whizzed past a roadside paddling pool stand air IS included , a car inched out slowly and deliberately across the oncoming traffic and the tuktuks and motorbikes hardly slowed down but weaved around it while either the Buddha or the king and his dictatorial prime minister gazed out over the rolling vehicles from a background of flashing lights.
It was the first day of the Khmer New Year, and as it is the roads of Phnom Penh were considered to be quiet. In the light of day, I could see the capital of Cambodia in all its glory: the ramshackle housing, the rubbish strewn everywhere, the dilapidated advertising hoardings for shops that looked as though they had probably never even existed, the bin bags like pus-filled boils that sat festering in the hot sun while rats and roaches scurried around them, the twenty chickens cooking on spits by the roadside, the bricks and construction, all signs of overhwelming poverty.
It was also clear to me now that the streets were all but deserted, looking for all the world like the people that worked and lived there had just downed tools for a moment to pop inside for a quick break and were just about to return and pick them up again. This was because in the three days of the Khmer New Year, everyone returns to the village or town that they come from to celebrate with family.
However of those people that remained in the city, it seemed that everyone was drunk. I decided shortly after my arrival in the capital to make my way down to the relatively quieter city of Kampot. As I sat in the bus station, literally just an office where the whole family sat behind the desk, I watched their little boy of about four run around the room brandishing with glee a water pistol that he fired at all and sundry.
It is traditional for people and particularly children to soak one another with water pistols during the New Year celebrations. It was the dry season and the heat was nothing short of unbearable as temperatures soared into the high thirties, it was little wonder that there was cause for such a form of celebration. As we pulled into Kampot in the bus the streets had erupted into a hive of activity and celebration with families out in the streets celebrating the new year.
From their vantage point in the back of a pick-up truck drenched children soaked passers-by on tuk-tuks and motos. In the morning light I explored Kampot, and was at first taken aback by the grubbiness of the city, litter was everywhere, occasionally a mangy dog would wander across the street, and everywhere there seemed to be motorbikes for hire.
Down by the river squat old barges sat more like pontoons than boats now with many of them holding restaurants on their wooden decks. Everywhere the angry buzz of traffic swarmed willy-nilly. A steady stream of traffic flowed backwards and forwards across the two bridges that connected the opposing banks.
Old semi-colonial style houses poked out from beneath dirty awnings down by the river front, or leaned against one another seemingly just holding each other up. In one spot, a heavy canopy of beautiful flowers sprawled over a small but elegantly decrepit French-style house and I began to see how beautiful Kampot was.
Whilst in Kampot, I went on a jungle trek led by a drunk and sunburnt Irishman from Limerick called Sean who blasted pop music all the way through the banana plantations and yelled barely understandable Khmer phrases to the shocked farmers in their tiny, wall-less huts as we climbed the hill in the full heat of the afternoon.
By the time we reached the bottom again we were by now in serious danger of overheating so when Sean spotted a couple of children playing outside their house with water pistols he ran on over and motioned to the kids that they should spray him. While at first they hesitated, glancing back to their parents for reassurance but eventually the little boy plucked up the courage and sprayed Sean and I much to our relief and delight.
When he saw the smiles on our faces he giggled and sprayed us again before breaking out into cackles of laughter. Afterwards as I sat exhausted and dehydrated in the back of the tuktuk, I cradled a cold coconut, pulled from a refrigerator at one of the roadside stalls and hacked open in front of my eyes with a straw protruding from the hole in its top.
The new year had begun. The earth was red. Shrubs struggled to find any sort of foothold in the dry ground while the trees looked like something torn straight out of a Doctor Seuss book, tall and slender with droopy mop-tops of floppy greenery like the Beatles, after they met Ravi Shankar rather than when they were four fresh faced boys emerging from the Merseybeat scene.
I later found out that these were juvenile desert oaks that were between 80 and years old, while the more orthodox looking trees were older desert oaks that might be up to a thousand years old. This was an ancient land and over it all towered the ancient and vast form of Uluru. I was excited about coming to visit Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, because I had as of yet had little to no contact with either the indigenous people of Australia or their culture.
Up until now, most of what I knew about them was based purely on what I had been told or the small amount I had read about their history and their current situation. I was staying at the only accommodation in proximity to Uluru, Ayers Rock Resort. I soon discovered both through observation and a conversation I had with a member of staff that many of the shops and cafes around the resort offer traineeship programmes for young people both from indigenous communities and elsewhere.
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