Word: primed
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...weeks later, Mati was dishing out bowls of beef noodles when she noticed police cars crowding her street. A man sauntered toward her restaurant and ordered some soup. It was the Prime Minister, who said he had come to personally promise her that he would combat the Chiang Rai drug trade. Today Mati's son, at least, is clean. "Thaksin is my hero," says his 53-year-old mother, wiping away tears with her apron. "He is the only Prime Minister who ever cared about normal people...
...teacher of Thai dance in Chiang Rai. "But in our hearts we still supported him." Such sentiments propelled the People Power Party (PPP) to victory in the first postcoup elections last December. A proxy for Thaksin, whose own party was disbanded by the junta, the PPP is led by Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej. His new Cabinet teems with Thaksin loyalists: the Foreign Minister is Thaksin's former lawyer, while his brother-in-law has been named Education Minister...
...having Thaksin back in Thailand is enough. A few days before he returned home, Mati and other members of the self-proclaimed Thaksin Loyalists' Club organized a "We Miss Thaksin" day. Around 2,000 people showed up, although it's not entirely clear whether the lure was the former Prime Minister or free bowls of Mati's tasty beef soup. Either way, she was satisfied. "Feeding noodles to 2,000 people," Mati says, "is a lot cheaper than sending my son to another expensive rehab program...
...took an unprecedented concert of international diplomatic pressure, united behind former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to force Kenya back from the precipice. In a power-sharing deal, opposition leader Raila Odinga will now serve as Prime Minister while the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki will remain in that post. All of Africa and Kenya's friends abroad breathed a sigh of relief when the deal was signed...
...opportunity to resolve some of Kenya's fundamental problems. We now have a coalition government that was forced on the Kenyan political élite by the international community. Had it not been for the vigorous intervention of Kenya's neighbors, and of the wider world - particularly Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who worked the phones ceaselessly - the belligerents would not have set aside their differences. The upside of this is that the Kenyan crisis has empowered the region and the African Union to intervene robustly when things go badly wrong in an important member country. The downside is that...