Word: bangkok
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...country's two main political antagonists, who were pictured on television kneeling in front of the stern-faced monarch. In a surprising move on Monday, a group of Thai senators filed a petition to the King pleading for him to intervene to end the bloody political standoff on Bangkok's streets. Luckily, this clash was resolved. But what happens next time...
...With reporting by Robert Horn / Bangkok...
...above politics, the 81-year-old monarch rarely comments on political matters and instead stands as a suprasymbol of Thai cohesion. His picture graces most every restaurant and business in the land, and a giant billboard of his visage with the words "Long Live the King" greets visitors at Bangkok's airport. For years, millions of Thais wore yellow every Monday in a voluntary show of support for the King, who was born on the first day of the week and is represented by the golden hue. As the country has cycled through a seemingly endless parade of coups...
...Notably, when the Red Shirts thronged central Bangkok by the thousands, few held aloft pictures of the Thai monarch. The absence was marked, especially compared with the omnipresent images of the King clutched by Yellow Shirt protesters last year, when they besieged Bangkok's airports for a week in an effort to unseat the government, which was then essentially a Thaksin proxy party. (Late last year, a Thai court dissolved that ruling party. The opposition Democrats - led by current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva - took over, prompting the Red Shirts to initiate their protest movement.) Indeed, the Yellow Shirts' very choice...
...some ways, the fact that Abhisit's government and troops were able to disperse the entrenched Red Shirts from central Bangkok on Tuesday without further bloodshed suggests that Thais may finally be moving toward solving their political problems without relying on a royal arbiter. But the Red Shirts have vowed to rekindle their protest movement - and the divide that has cleaved the country is so wide that no one seems to have any idea how to bridge it. "I hope from now on we don't have Yellow Shirts, Red Shirts, Blue Shirts, whatever color shirts," said Apirat...