Thai minister to propose Vitai Ratanakorn as next central bank chief, sources and Thai media say
The appointment of Vitai, 54, the president and CEO of the Government Savings Bank, would be subject to cabinet and royal approval. He would serve a five-year term starting October 1.
The government sources declined to be identified because they were not authorised to speak to media. The finance minister's decision, from among two candidates, was reported by the Manager and Thansettakij news outlets on Tuesday.
If appointed, Vitai would succeed Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput, who could not seek a second term as he has reached retirement age.
Vitai has a master's degree in finance from Drexel University in the United States, as well as degrees in economics and law from Thailand's Chulalongkorn and Thammasat universities.
The new governor faces a tough task of supporting a struggling economy facing tepid consumption, high household debt and steep U.S. tariffs, with limited monetary policy room.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Nagasaki's bells ring for the first time in 80 years to mark US atomic bombing
Nagasaki commemorated the 80th anniversary of the US atomic attack with twin cathedral bells ringing in unison in Nagasaki for the first time in 80 years. The atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 claimed approximately 70,000 lives. This followed the devastating attack on Hiroshima three days earlier, which killed 140,000. Japan 's surrender on 15 August 1945 brought an end to the Second World War and nearly half a century of Japanese aggression across Asia. On Saturday at 11.02 am, the moment the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, participants observed a moment of silence as a peace bell rang. The twin bells at Urakami Cathedral, which were destroyed in the bombing, are to ring together again for the first time. One of the bells had gone missing after the attack but was restored by volunteers. About 2,600 people, including representatives from more than countries, attended the event at Nagasaki Peace Park, where Mayor Shiro Suzuki and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba spoke. Dozens of doves, a symbol of peace, were released after a speech by Suzuki, whose parents are survivors of the attack. He said the city's memories of the bombing are 'a common heritage and should be passed down for generations' in and outside Japan. 'The existential crisis of humanity has become imminent to each and every one of us living on Earth,' Suzuki said. 'In order to make Nagasaki the last atomic bombing site now and forever, we will go hand-in-hand with global citizens and devote our utmost efforts toward the abolition of nuclear weapons and the realisation of everlasting world peace.' Before the event, Despite the profound pain from their wounds, the discrimination they faced, and the debilitating illnesses caused by radiation, these dedicated survivors have consistently called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Yet, as this significant anniversary is commemorated on Saturday, they voice growing concern that the world appears to be moving in the opposite direction, away from their shared goal. Now, the ageing survivors and their supporters are entrusting the younger generation with their hopes for nuclear disarmament, stressing that the attack is not merely distant history but a vital issue for their future. Teruko Yokoyama, an 83-year-old member of a Nagasaki organisation supporting survivors, said she feels the absence of those she has worked with, which fuels her strong desire to document the lives of remaining survivors. The number of survivors has fallen to 99,130, about a quarter of the original number, with their average age exceeding 86. Survivors worry about fading memories, as the youngest of the survivors were too young to recall the attack clearly. 'We must keep records of the atomic bombing damages of the survivors and their lifetime story,' said Yokoyama, whose two sisters died after suffering illnesses linked to radiation. Her organisation has started to digitalise the narratives of survivors for viewing on YouTube and other social media platforms with the help of a new generation. 'There are younger people who are beginning to take action,' Yokoyama told The Associated Press on Friday. 'So I think we don't have to get depressed yet.' Nagasaki invited representatives from all countries to attend the ceremony on Saturday. China notably notified the city that it would not be present without providing a reason. The ceremony last year stirred controversy due to the absence of the US ambassador and other Western envoys in response to the Japanese city's refusal to invite Israel.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Henry Kissinger was brilliant and complicated. Why deny that?
Two years on from his death at 100, Henry Kissinger endures as a prop in international relations. An opinion on Kissinger can still signal something deeper – his name invoked to offer the highest praise for sagacious realism, or to deliver the harshest condemnation for its moral cost. Some today treat Israel's war in Gaza as a folly akin to the American bombing – overseen by Kissinger – of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s. Others cite Kissinger's relentless shuttle diplomacy between Middle Eastern capitals after the 1973 Yom Kippur War as the model for how to corral warring parties into an agreement. Kissinger's realism may ultimately seem the best option in a fractured world; to seek respite not 'in order to guarantee universal peace, but to achieve tolerable armistice'. Kissinger was a man of three centuries, and his period in government – as national security adviser and secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1969 to 1977 – was just a slice of a life that looked beyond his years. He was a relentless force of a man, and he accrued all the complex traits that life as a Jewish boy under Hitler, a refugee from Germany, an American soldier, a concentration camp liberator, a scholar at Harvard, a diplomat, and a celebrity, would instil. The first book he wrote concerned the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and he followed history with a wary eye. His final books covered AI, as he peeked over a frontier he would see only briefly. Jérémie Gallon's Henry Kissinger is a newly translated contribution to the world of 'Kissingerology', as one historian has called the field. As well as the typical biographies, books on Kissinger include psychological studies, novels, polemical charge sheets for suggested war crimes trials, and business books about his deal making. One can still buy a book by Brice Taylor, purportedly 'the memoirs of Bob Hope's and Henry Kissinger's mind-controlled slave' (and endorsed by David Icke), which apparently claims that the pair used the author's brain as a computer chip for their New World Order. As such, it takes quite some doing to write one of the worst entries in the Kissinger canon. Originally published in French before Kissinger's death, Gallon's book, an 'intimate portrait' of the diplomat, is a fundamentally odd work. Yet it is not strange in an ambitious or provocative way, where a contrarian angle might offer something fresh about Kissinger's life. Simply, it is odd because the author has chosen not to structure the book chronologically or thematically but according to the alphabetical order of the chapter titles. The reader's head is already spinning by the time they open the contents page. No explanation is offered. The reader starts with 'De Gaulle', and canters through such chapters as 'Glamour', 'Humour', 'Nixon', 'Refugee' and 'Teacher', finishing with 'Zhou Enlai'. The most generous explanation is that someone dropped the manuscript and this was the only way they knew how to reorder the pages. Otherwise, the book is a kaleidoscope of fragments, unreadable for those who aren't experts and irrepressibly banal for those who are. The reader bounces around Kissinger's life, trapped in a pinball machine. Key figures such as Fritz Kraemer, Kissinger's mentor during the Second World War, and Nelson Rockefeller, the first politician whom Kissinger advised, are flung in seemingly at random, to be either explained in later chapters or never at all. Kissinger was a gifted performer, and Gallon is intoxicated by the work-hard, play-hard world he dominated. If there is an argument within this drawer-ful of shuffled notes, it is of Kissinger as a slick raconteur, charming politicians and women alike (a veritable 'sex symbol'), pioneering secret diplomatic initiatives, often to the surprise of his own colleagues. Gallon celebrates Kissinger's role in détente with China and the Middle East – in which he rebalanced America's relationship with the great powers and helped end a war between Israel and its Arab neighbours – rooting these achievements in his reverence for the European statesmen who held together the balance of power after the fall of Napoleon. But behind the glitz is a vacuous text, indifferent to anything but the show. Gallon examines Kissinger's relationship to Judaism primarily through the eyes of others – Israeli leaders, or the anti-Semitic Nixon – but never considers seriously how Kissinger's own religious identity and refugee experience shaped the man who fled the Nazis and who helped liberate the Ahlem concentration camp in 1945 as an American soldier. Kissinger famously refused to acknowledge the influence of his early life on his statesmanship, yet Gallon fails to confront that deflection; and again and again, he abandons the historian's mission of asking why, and of looking deeper. While Gallon's research draws mainly on English-language sources, major works such as Jeremi Suri's Henry Kissinger and the American Century and Thomas Schwartz's excellent 2020 biography Henry Kissinger and American Power, go uncited. Niall Ferguson's 1,000-page survey of Kissinger's early life is barely registered, despite it being the most important biography of the statesman published. Gallon has made no use of Kissinger's papers at Yale University, which are available online to researchers. The dearth of intellectual curiosity is most stark where Kissinger is most controversial: the allegations of war crimes, in the Vietnam War, support for coups and juntas, and the abetting of invasions by American allies. All the accusations are confined to a single chapter, glibly titled 'Indefensible?' Kissinger's dates with starlets, including Candice Bergen and Liv Ullmann, get more space than the wiretapping of his staff; a roll-call of his quips runs longer than the account of the CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile; his passion for football outpaces coverage of the bombing of Vietnam, whose tonnage exceeded that of the entire Second World War. One cannot bury half of Kissinger's legacy to let the rest shine. Gallon, a former diplomat himself, admits that 'the primary reason for my fascination with the life of Henry Kissinger is that it carries so many lessons for Europe', and for the 'political project that I consider to be both the most precious and the most fragile'. His lofty, if idiosyncratic, aim is to invigorate the EU's diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service, by offering a model in Kissinger. But to do so by suppressing the full scope of Kissinger's Cold War strategy is blinkered, because for Kissinger, it was all connected: the negotiations, the distant wars, the coups, the quiet trade-offs in the game of great-power politics. Consider the opening to Communist China in 1971-72, generally regarded as Kissinger's greatest achievement. Gallon praises the establishment of relations between the US and the People's Republic as one that 'none of the great adherents of 19th-century European Realpolitik would have disavowed', and which, he claims, 'carried the seeds of future major successes for America'. The opening to China was indeed a triumph of realist diplomacy, but it also lay at the centre of Kissinger's larger strategic architecture, what he called 'triangular diplomacy'. China was engaged by the US to counterbalance the Soviet Union; it was hoped Beijing might pressure North Vietnam to end the war; and to use Pakistan as an intermediary, Kissinger and the Americans looked away while the Pakistani military massacred thousands in Bangladesh – one of the most enduring charges against him. To understand that complexity – and to judge what was gained and what was lost – is to confront the central paradox of Kissinger and American power. Gallon, however, mistakes interest for genuine curiosity, awe for open-mindedness. He splices Kissinger, stretching the admirable and suppressing the condemnable, evading the reality that he lives on because his legacy forces questions of security, stability and morality. Plenty of writers have produced serious and admiring studies of Kissinger. But Gallon is too fixed on crafting a parochial companion for his quest to empower European diplomacy. He can have Kissinger for that purpose if he wishes, but he should at least confront the choices he makes in doing so and recognise what he leaves behind. ★☆☆☆☆
Times
3 hours ago
- Times
Nagasaki as it happened: the atomic bombing of Japan in real time
It has been three days since a new horror dawned on the world when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. About 80,000 people died instantaneously and everything within a half-mile radius was wiped out. Survivors, who suffered terrible burns and other injuries in the almighty blast, are now beginning to fall ill with a mysterious sickness. The death toll will rise further. Nevertheless, Japan has not surrendered. The militaristic government remains split 50-50 between those who would give the Allies the unconditional surrender they demand and those who believe Japan can fight its way to another deal. Better terms would be bought by forcing an Allied invasion of Japan, in which maybe more than a million would die. Besides, the anti-peace camp includes many who find the idea of surrender utterly abhorrent. The Japanese Supreme War Council will meet later today. The American bomber convoy expects to reach its target at about 9.40am. In the morning skies over Yakushima, an island south of the western edge of Japan, two planes have been circling for 40 minutes. The B-29 bombers, called Bockscar and The Great Artiste, are carrying very different cargoes. The Great Artiste is filled with scientific instruments, cameras and even a journalist. Bockscar is carrying a single bomb. They have been waiting for a third plane, called Big Stink, at this isolated rendezvous point. They can wait no longer. With a waggle of its wings, Bockscar indicates that it is time to proceed. They head north. Some 170 miles away, the summer sun is waking the city of Nagasaki.
