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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...
...Sunny Thailand may once have been a political bright spot in a region overshadowed by autocrats and juntas, but the last few years have been nothing short of chaos. In September 2006, after months of street protests against elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the military deposed him in a bloodless coup. (Thaksin, a billionaire tycoon, was subsequently banned from politics and now faces corruption charges, which he denies.) A year of uninspired army junta rule followed. In elections last December, voters, who had once handed Thaksin the largest mandate in recent Thai history, brought to power right-wing firebrand Samak...
...that one of the first constitutional amendments the P.M. pushed for is a reversal of the party-dissolution rule. Speaking to TIME, Samak scoffed at the possibility of a court case derailing his leadership and vowed to serve out his four-year term. But Thaksin is the only elected Prime Minister in modern Thai history to complete a full term. Unless Samak can channel Thaksin's once-mighty political skills, the occasional TV chef may be returning to stirring the wok full-time...
There's no clear game plan for the afterlives of former national leaders. Some build houses and make peace (Jimmy Carter), some try to stay in the political game (Bill Clinton) and some just disappear on the golf course (Gerald Ford). But former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is taking a different tack. Since he left 10 Downing Street a year ago, Blair has spent much of his time in Jerusalem, working to broker a new peace deal in the Middle East. As if trying to untangle the world's most intractable diplomatic knot didn't keep him busy enough...
Audiences appear ready for such a thing--even beyond those 15 million people, many of prime moviegoing age, who share the protagonists' appetites. Pot films are making out like criminals. The second of Harold and Kumar's trips, not nearly as critically acclaimed as the first, nevertheless did twice as well at the box office. And while the presence of (legal) tobacco cigarettes in films has become a cause célèbre among public-health advocates, there's not a lot of protest that putting pot in movies, even ones as silly as Pineapple Express, glamorizes...