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Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014.

The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment.

When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade

Thailand’s Parliament has voted to make abortion legal in the first trimester, while keeping penalties in place for women who undergo it later in their pregnancies.

to amend a law that had imposed prison terms of up to three years for anyone having an abortion, and up to five years for those who perform one.

Advocates say the measure doesn’t go far enough: Anyone in Thailand who has an abortion after 12 weeks, except under conditions set by the country’s Medical Council, still faces potential fines and up to six months in prison.

Sineenat, 34, was the first royal consort in Thailand for almost a century. When she was given the title in July, it made her an official companion - but not a queen - of the king shortly after he married his fourth wife, Queen Suthida.

Historically, polygamy and the taking of royal consorts was used by Thailand's royals to assure the allegiance of powerful families across the provinces of the large kingdom.

Thai kings throughout the centuries took multiple wives - or consorts. The last time a Thai king took an official consort was in the 1920s and the title has not been used since the country became a constitutional monarchy in 1932.

Thailand's senate has rejected an amnesty bill that could have led to the return to the country of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

The amnesty was meant for offences committed during and after Thailand's 2006 coup, which ousted Mr Thaksin.

"This house rejects this bill for consideration," said deputy senate speaker Surachai Lengboonlertchai

At least 114 civilians were killed across Myanmar on Saturday, according to a tally by the independent Myanmar Now news outlet, as the military junta continued to crack down on peaceful protests.The killings in 44 towns and cities across the country would represent the bloodiest day of protests since a military coup last month.

Among those killed is reportedly a 13-year-old girl, who was shot in her house after the junta's armed forces opened fire in residential areas of Meikhtila, in Mandalay region, according to Myanmar Now. She is among 20 minors killed since the start of the protests, Myanmar Now reported.

The lethal crackdown came on the country's Armed Forces Day. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, said during a parade in the capital Naypyitaw to mark the event that the military would protect the people and strive for democracy, Reuters reported.State television had said on Friday that protesters risked being shot "in the head and back." Despite this, demonstrators against the February 1 coup came out on the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and other towns.

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

. The Chinese government stunned environmentalists this year by reviving plans to build a series of hydropower dams on the upper reaches of the Nu,

Critics say the project will force the relocation of tens of thousands of ethnic minorities in the highlands of Yunnan and destroy the spawning grounds for a score of endangered fish species. Geologists warn that constructing the dams in a seismically active region could threaten those living downstream.

Among the biggest losers could be the millions of farmers and fishermen across the border in Myanmar and Thailand who depend on the Salween,

researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.

The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.

When the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair. But the gene had several other effects, they report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell. One was that the mice, to the researchers’ surprise, had extra sweat glands. A Chinese member of the team, Sijia Wang, then tested people in China and discovered that they, too, had more numerous sweat glands, evidently another effect of the gene. Another surprise was that the engineered mice had less breast tissue, meaning that EDAR could be the reason that East Asian women have generally smaller breasts.

When the rice shoots began to wither on Lam Thi Loi’s farm in the heart of the Mekong Delta, a usually verdant region of Vietnam, she faced a hard choice: Let them die in the parched earth, or pump salty water from the river to give them a chance.

The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s premier rice growing region, is suffering its worst drought since French colonial administrators began recording statistics in 1926.

The increasingly dramatic effect of El Niño, the weather phenomenon that causes excessive heat and reduced rainfall in Southeast Asia, is the prime reason for the crop failures in the delta, scientists say. But it is not the only one.

From inside her "war room" in a temporary office at the Defense Ministry, Thailand's beleaguered Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is watching television feeds of flag-waving protesters trying to bring down her government.

Yingluck can't order a police crackdown for fear of triggering a military coup. And she is now facing a serious legal threat: The country's anti-corruption commission has announced that it will probe her handling of a controversial rice policy, an investigation that could force her from office if she is found guilty.

The power struggle has taken place against what analysts also see as a battle for control over a crucial transition period when the country's 86-year-old monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, passes from the scene. But for much of it, Yingluck had stayed out of the spotlight.

the two most decisive factors in the outcome of the war were incompetent micromanagement by PresidentLyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

and Hanoi’s brilliant propaganda campaign, which fueled a gullible—and often disingenuous—global peace movement. Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.

As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.”

One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.

The dirtiest word in the marxist vocabulary is “neoliberal,” which stands for an economy based on capitalist principles and processes. Students have learned that “neoliberal” is equivalent to evil. Two students, independently, recently said to me that “we need to replace capitalism,” although they had no suggestions about what to replace it with. That half the world tried to replace capitalism in the 20th century, with disastrous results, they apparently had no idea. That capitalism has brought unparalleled prosperity, if not peace and happiness, is unknown to students. They have been taught that the only products of capitalism are exploitation and oppression. Globalization is taught as the expansion of exploitation and oppression worldwide. The great economic developments in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the economic progress in Africa, is terra incognita to students, taught only problems but no successes.

The United States has been at war continuously since the attacks of 9/11 and now has just over 240,000 active-duty and reserve troops in at least 172 countries and territories.

While the number of men and women deployed overseas has shrunk considerably over the past 60 years, the military’s reach has not. American forces are actively engaged not only in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that have dominated the news, but also in Niger and Somalia, both recently the scene of deadly attacks, as well as Jordan, Thailand and elsewhere.

There are traditional deployments in Japan (39,980 troops) and South Korea (23,591) to defend against North Korea and China, if needed, along with 36,034 troops in Germany, 8,286 in Britain and 1,364 in Turkey — all NATO allies. There are 6,524 troops in Bahrain and 3,055 in Qatar, where the United States has naval bases.

A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections.

The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, said she would hand over the recordings if the United States granted her asylum. She faces criminal charges and deportation to Belarus after coming under suspicion of working in Thailand without a visa at a sex-training seminar in the city of Pattaya.

“If America gives me protection, I will tell everything I know,” Ms. Vashukevich said on Monday. “I am afraid to go back to Russia. Some strange things can happen.”

Over the past few weeks, as Chinese health officials reported new “imported” coronavirus cases almost every day, foreigners living in the country have noticed a change. They have been turned away from restaurants, shops, gyms and hotels, subjected to further screening, yelled at by locals and avoided in public spaces.

Experiences range from socially awkward to xenophobic. An American walking with a group of foreigners in a park in Beijing saw a woman grab her child and run the other way. Others have described being called “foreign trash”.

A recent online article, under an image of ship stacked with refuse being pushed away from China’s coast, was headlined: “Beware of a second outbreak started by foreign garbage.

This is a big problem: An enormous amount of global financial activity depends on the use of the dollar. If we are to contain the fallout from the crisis, America’s central bank must act as a lender of last resort not just to America’s financial system but also to the entire world’s.

The good news is that the Federal Reserve is taking its responsibility seriously: It is funneling dollars to central banks around the world. But is the Fed fighting the last war?

The question turns on what we mean by global finance. In 2008 the dollar shortage was confined largely to the banks of Europe and America