Your Monday Briefing: Thailand Votes for Change


Thai voters overwhelmingly sought to finish practically a decade of navy rule, casting ballots in favor of two opposition events which have pledged to curtail the ability of two highly effective conservative establishments: the navy and the monarchy.

With 97 p.c of the votes counted as of early this morning, the progressive Transfer Ahead Celebration was neck and neck with the populist Pheu Thai Celebration. Transfer Ahead had received 151 seats to Pheu Thai’s 141 within the 500-seat Home of Representatives.

“We will body this election as a referendum on conventional energy facilities in Thai politics,” Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow on the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, stated. “Individuals need change, and never only a change of presidency. They need structural reform.”

What can also be clear is that the outcomes are a humbling blow for Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took energy in a coup in 2014.

Transfer Ahead: The social gathering has focused obligatory navy conscription and seeks to amend a regulation that criminalizes criticizing the royal household. It has made beautiful strides, capturing younger city voters, and voters within the capital Bangkok.

Pheu Thai: The social gathering was based by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who remains to be fondly remembered as a champion for the poor after his ousting in a coup in 2006 amid accusations of corruption. Thaksin’s daughter was the main selection for prime minister, in response to polls.

What’s subsequent: As a result of each Pheu Thai and Transfer Ahead should not have sufficient seats to kind a majority, they might want to negotiate with different events to ascertain a coalition. However beneath the foundations of the Thai system, written by the navy after the coup, the junta would nonetheless play kingmaker. A call about who will lead might take weeks and even months.


President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was going through the fiercest political problem to his 20 years in energy as Turkish voters went to the polls yesterday. The end result might reshape the home and international insurance policies of Turkey.

The outcomes are nonetheless coming in, however the state-run information company reported that preliminary outcomes confirmed Erdogan forward. Opposition leaders dismissed these figures, and Erdogan’s prime challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, wrote on Twitter, “We’re main.”

If no candidate secures a majority, the 2 front-runners would go to a runoff on Might 28. Comply with our stay protection.

Background: The vote was, in some ways, a referendum on Erdogan’s 20 years as Turkey’s dominant politician. He confronted a particularly tight race, largely due to anger on the state of the economic system, which has suffered painful inflation since 2018.

The vote additionally got here three months after earthquakes killed greater than 50,000 individuals in Turkey, elevating questions on whether or not Erdogan’s emphasis on building produced buildings that have been unsafe.

Election integrity: Turkey is neither a full-blown democracy nor a full-blown autocracy, and Erdogan has tilted the political taking part in area in his favor over the previous 20 years.

The warfare in Ukraine: A defeat for Erdogan can be a boon to the West and a loss for Russia. Erdogan has elevated commerce with Moscow, pursued nearer ties with President Vladimir Putin and hampered NATO’s enlargement.

A storm forecast to be the strongest to hit Myanmar in additional than a decade made landfall close to the Bangladesh border yesterday. The storm, Cyclone Mocha, has killed at the very least six individuals, however early studies recommend that it up to now has not led to the humanitarian disaster that the authorities feared.

The world hit by the cyclone, in western Myanmar, is residence to a number of the world’s poorest individuals. The storm handed by way of Cox’s Bazar, a metropolis in Bangladesh that’s residence to the world’s largest refugee encampment, although officers stated they’d not but acquired studies of injury there.

The World Meals Program stated it was making ready for a large-scale emergency response. However some officers expressed cautious hope that the area might be spared the storm’s worst attainable harm because it weakened over land.

Many Asian American girls are named after Connie Chung, a veteran U.S. tv journalist. The author Connie Wang explored the phenomenon, which she calls “Technology Connie.”

“All of us have our personal tales about how our households got here to america, and why they selected the identify they did,” she wrote. “However we’re additionally half of a bigger story: in regards to the patterns that kind from particular immigration insurance policies, and the ripple results that one lady on TV prompted simply by being there, doing her job.”

For hundreds of years in India, the branding of witches was pushed largely by superstition. A crop would fail, a effectively would run dry, or a member of the family would fall sick, and villagers would discover somebody — virtually all the time a girl — in charge for a misfortune whose trigger they didn’t perceive.

Many Indian states have handed legal guidelines to eradicate witch looking, however the observe persists in some states. From 2010 to 2021, greater than 1,500 individuals have been killed after accusations of witchcraft, in response to authorities information.

One state has tried to cease the observe by deploying “witch-hunting prevention marketing campaign groups,” which conduct road performs to lift consciousness. However enforcement of anti-witch-hunting legal guidelines will be weak, and entrenched beliefs are troublesome to alter, activists say.



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