Word: padded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crowds still camped outside Samak's former offices are not impressed. The demonstrators, who call themselves the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), had been calling for Samak's ouster ever since he took office, labeling him nothing more than a puppet of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who himself had been deposed by a bloodless military coup in 2006. A billionaire tycoon who now lives in self-imposed exile in Britain, Thaksin has been charged with corruption in several different cases. (On the same day Somchai was voted in, the Supreme Court issued a third arrest warrant against Thaksin...
...settled on the 61-year-old Somchai, whose cautious demeanor bespeaks two decades spent in the judiciary. Somchai is a career bureaucrat and one of the PPP's most respected politicians. But his marriage to Thaksin's sister, who also served as a parliamentarian, makes him unacceptable to the PAD, which accuses Thaksin of having bought many of the rural voters who swept him into office with a record mandate. "[Somchai] is Thaksin's brother-in-law and will be even more his proxy than Samak ever was," Chamlong Srimuang, one of the PAD's leaders, told reporters, vowing...
...PAD actually wants to rule Thailand is less clear. In spite of the fact that the group uses the word "democracy" in its name, the PAD backs a political system in which an elected parliament could be replaced by one that is partly appointed. Some PAD leaders have advocated what they call a "People's Revolutionary Government," though there's little consensus among the PAD's disparate factions - which include labor activists, ethnic Chinese businessmen and staunch royalists - as to how such a government should come to power or what it might do on a day-to-day basis...
...Somchai, who was named as caretaker Prime Minister when Samak was stripped of that position last week, quickly lifted the state of emergency the former P.M. had declared after clashes between the PAD and a pro-government group turned deadly late last month. The move was, in part, designed to calm the battered stock market and send a message to tourists that Thailand was stable again - a badly needed signal given that hotel occupancy is down roughly 40% from last year...
...management company. But those costs skyrocket to $12,000 or more for the 1 in 2 diabetics who do not carefully tend to their illness, says Nationwide. Bottom line: shed some pounds, avoid these diseases and invest the related windfall from, say, age 40 to 65--and you could pad your nest...