Word: bangkok
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...September 2006 military coup that unseated elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. A billionaire tycoon who is generally loved by the poor and reviled by the rich, Thaksin was charged with corruption and his party was disbanded. On Wednesday, the first of many cases against Thaksin got underway in Bangkok, just as other courts were busy issuing rulings that dealt body blows...
...Although kathoeys do face some stigma and bureaucratic hurdles in Thailand - those who have undergone sex-change operations, for example, are still listed as men on their national I.D. cards - they are also a normal and visible part of society. A Bangkok travel agency I use is staffed by kathoeys, and a cashier at my local grocery store is rapidly transitioning toward womanhood. One of the Immigration Department officers who last year helped me renew my work visa had both an Adam's apple and lavish mascara. Kathoeys star on TV soap operas and grace catwalks at fashion shows, while...
Forget about any honeymoon. Just four months into his tenure, Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej is battling for his political life. For more than a month, thousands of street protesters have rallied in Bangkok, even besieging Government House last week and forcing the 73-year-old P.M. to sneak to work through a back door. On June 27, the veteran politician, who also moonlights as a television chef, suffered the indignity of a parliamentary no-confidence vote; although Samak's six-party coalition, which controls two-thirds of the lower house, shot down the motion by a vote...
...Thaksin effect pleases rural voters, who were charmed by the former P.M.'s populist health-care and micro-financing policies. But members of Bangkok's middle class and élite, many of whom were angered by a tax-free $1.9 billion business deal that Thaksin and his family profited from while he was in office, are rather less happy. The military, which went to the trouble of toppling him in 2006, surely is also irate over Thaksin's lingering shadow. (Thaksin himself has said he's done with politics, although his avowals have been rather less strenuous of late...
...record highs, cheap, environmentally low-impact insects could be the food of the future--provided we can stomach them. "This is an idea that shouldn't just be ridiculed," says Paul Vantomme, an officer at the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, which recently held an entomophagy conference in Bangkok...