Bangkok

MAD COWS AND ENGLISHMEN, A NEW MODEST PROPOSAL While much of the world shuns British cows, a Cambodian newspaper suggests that the animals be shipped to Cambodia and allowed to roam free to detonate the millions of land mines littering the country. "The English have 11 million mad cows and Cambodia has roughly the same number of equally mad land mines. Surely the solution to Cambodia's mine problem is here before our very eyes in black and white," the Cambodia Daily said yesterday.

They have come to Germantown Academy from Bucks County and Bangkok, from Downingtown and Delaware. There are 11 new faces on the boys' and girls' swimming teams this season, including six transfer students. They have joined the Patriots for one reason - to swim for demanding coach Dick Shoulberg, who has produced nine Olympians in a career that began in 1957. Shoulberg, 56, has been at GA for 27 years. "I have a dream of going to the Olympics and breaking world records," said sophomore David Hartzell, who moved from Middletown, Del., to attend Germantown Academy.

The harbor here, one of the most beautiful in the world, is badly fouled by sewage and chemical wastes. In Bangkok, chronic traffic jams make workers late to their jobs and delivery trucks late to their destinations, as well as spew choking fumes into commuters' lungs. In much of Indonesia, public water supplies are so tainted that bottled water is a household staple. Throughout East Asia, in fact, pollution has become a way of life or, in too many cases, of illness and death.

Gao Xianggui climbed the ladder of the rusty cargo ship in Bangkok and stepped on board into a throng of other Chinese people. It was March 1993, and the ship was called the Golden Venture. Nearly a hundred Chinese passengers boarded the ship in Bangkok. Another 200 would come aboard in Mombasa, Kenya. All were chattel being smuggled across two oceans and into the United States by gangsters known as "Snakeheads. " Each had scraped together tens of thousands of dollars to pay the Snakeheads for a trip that would end in disaster.

Michael Jackson launched his "Dangerous" world tour, which includes stops across Asia and the Middle East, by playing it notably safe with the media. Jackson appeared in Bangkok yesterday for what was billed as a news conference. A crowd of 500 photographers and reporters showed up. But all that the world's media got from Jackson was eight words, a lip-sync performance and a wave. The singer made his appearance yesterday in a modified three-wheeled Thai taxi known as a tuk-tuk.

There's something bogus and a little nettlesome about The Good Woman of Bangkok, a "documentary fiction" in which Dennis O'Rourke, an Australian filmmaker recently divorced, ventures to Thailand to lick his wounds - and expose the wounds of the strip dancers and prostitutes working in the skin trade. A bleak, depressing chronicle of life in the Third World capital of whoredom, The Good Woman of Bangkok opens with these words: "The filmmaker was 43 and his marriage had ended. He was trying to understand how love could be so banal and also profound.

They gathered in Bangkok for a rally one week ago and started marching to Government House, students and teachers, workers and young professionals, all demanding that the prime minister resign. The police were waiting at a barricaded bridge. Soon the global village watched in horror as this irresistible force - Thailand's swelling democracy movement - hit a seemingly immovable object - the Thai military, intent on running the country. But today, it appeared the demonstrators got what they wanted.