Word: thailander
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...Thailand may have a reputation for indulging visitors in their various vices, but smoking is no longer one of them. On Tuesday, more than 600 fired-up protesters invaded a convention center in Bangkok in an attempt to smoke out representatives of the global tobacco industry, who were holding a conference in a country with some of the strictest tobacco controls in Asia...
...tobacco industry sees Asia as its most promising market, says Bangorn. Though Thailand has strict controls on smoking in public places and bans advertising of tobacco products, more than 14 million of its 65 million people are smokers. In Southeast Asia, 125 million - or 31% of adults - smoke, and China alone has some 350 million smokers. The alliance claims that 2.4 million people in Asia die each year from tobacco-related causes, the equivalent of 6,575 people...
...Billed as "the biggest tobacco exhibition in Asia," Tabinfo 2009 has been years in the making. Nonetheless, the meeting apparently caught Thailand's government by surprise. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who has said he was unaware of the conference until two weeks before it started, ordered government and tourism agencies not to do anything to promote or support it after activists presented him with a petition opposing the conference that contained more than 82,000 signatures. Thailand's state-run tobacco monopoly withdrew its exhibitions and sponsorship of a buffet breakfast for industry representatives just days before the conference began...
...Outside the U.S., according to Amnesty International, lethal-injection executions have been carried out in China, Thailand, Guatemala and the Philippines, although the last two of these countries recently outlawed capital punishment. (Taiwan technically permits lethal-injection executions but has never killed anyone with the method.) China, which executes more people than any other nation by far, is phasing out death by gunshot in favor of lethal injection; the government provides mobile execution vans, which travel to smaller cities and towns that don't have permanent death chambers. While that morbid procession wouldn't fly in Virginia, the state clearly...
...will likely come of age in a very different Switzerland. One day, he will vote in its elections and do national service in its army. But he will always be half English and - since he was conceived and born in Bangkok - "Made in Thailand," too. Fake watches might be for fake people. But authentic Swiss are harder to define than ever, and that's something Switzerland should probably celebrate...