Word: thailander
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...year-old son was demanding to wear his T-shirt from our vacation on Bali. Getting him to focus on anything in the mornings, let alone sartorial choices, can be an ordeal. So Bali it was. It was only after we walked outside into the tropical heat of Thailand's capital, Bangkok, that we realized just how monumental a mistake we had made. Thais in the parking lot stared. The whispering began. Could it be that a blond American toddler had knowingly dressed himself in a red shirt...
...Thailand, people literally wear their politics on their sleeves. The nation has been locked for years in a paralyzing political showdown between two camps. There are the red shirts, who support former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 military coup and later convicted in absentia of abuse of power. And there are the establishment yellow shirts, who back current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. On March 12, around 100,000 red shirts, whose numbers are drawn largely from Thailand's poor rural regions, began descending on Bangkok by bus, truck, boat and tractor for what they deemed...
...Thailand's Red Cross Society had refused an appeal from the Red Shirt leaders to help in gathering the blood, saying it could not take blood for the purpose of a political protest. Thailand's Nurse and Midwife Council considered the blood letting unethical and possibly dangerous, and that the group might take action against nurses who participate. "We will consider punishing them on a case-by-case basis," council president Prof Vijit Sriruphan told The Nation newspaper. "They should know that collecting blood is only done for research or medical purposes...
...Other medical professionals, however, were happy to help. "We volunteered to help take the blood because the people don't want this Prime Minister," said Tip Daosakhun, a nurse from Siriraj Hospital, where Thailand's constitutional monarch is recovering from a lung infection, as she worked in one of the medical tents...
...Many of the protesters are from the poor rural areas of north and northeastern Thailand and are supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 military coup and now lives in self-imposed exile rather than serve a two-year prison sentence on a corruption conviction. The protesters, who have numbered over 100,000 at their peak, have occupied the main road in the old quarter of Bangkok for four days in an attempt to pressure Abhisit to resign. By Tuesday morning, their numbers had thinned to no more than 20,000, as many needed...