With barely more than a month under her belt as a professional politician, Yingluck Shinawatra stood poised Monday to become Thailand's first woman prime minister after her Pheu Thai party scored a resounding victory in Sunday's national elections. Riding a well-oiled political machine and benefiting from the popularity of her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed as prime minister in a 2006 military coup, Yingluck and her party won an apparent majority in parliament according to unofficial ...

Of all the petty annoyances, misdemeanors and felonies of public life, there is none that Barack Obama detests more than to have his words twisted or oversimplified. It is a big part of his frustration with the media; it is a bigger part of his disdain for the talk-show wing of the Republican Party. And so it wasnt hard to imagine smoke jetting from the Presidents ears as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, willfully misinterpreted ...

The Thais know how to throw a good party — and the one unfolding in the center of Bangkok was a doozy. With the scent of grilled squid and beer in the air, thousands of citizens from across Thailand grooved to rocking guitar riffs and cheered until their voices grew hoarse. But beneath the revelry lay a measure of menace. These were not simple partygoers but protesters from the People's Alliance for Democracy , who on Aug. 26 besieged Government ...

From Egypt's Tahrir Square to Tunisia's central Bourguiba Avenue to the plazas of Syria's ancient cities, public squares have been at the center of the Arab Spring. But the centrality of these spaces to the narrative of the uprisings in the Middle East has largely been overshadowed by the role that social networking played in fomenting rebellion. For all the praise that has rightly been lavished upon the Arab world's youthful revolutionaries, one must not forget the ...

the early 1960s, china was in the throes of economic catastrophe and widespread famine--both resulting from the radical political and economic experiments of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. As opposition to Mao's leadership grew, the Chairman left Beijing in late 1965 for Hangzhou, where he would map out his last assault on the Communist Party's revisionist leadership--the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. After months of cloistered plotting, Mao suddenly resurfaced in Wuhan in the summer of 1966 ...

The people who pay attention to weekend box office reports usually have some financial stake in what comes out on top. While I have zero prospect of gaining monetarily from the success of director Paul Feig's raunchy, smart Bridesmaids, I will nonetheless watch the weekend numbers with bated breath. I'm vested because I want to know how America feels about women both defecating on screen and discussing it. This might be a turning point in feminism and ...

With the announcement of national elections on July 3, Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has placed his fate in the hands of the voters, and put the country's developing democracy to what may prove to be a perilous test. At 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, parliament was officially dissolved after 30 months under Abhisit which were marked by bloody protests, economic crisis and deepening social and political polarization. The elections will be Thailand's second since a bloodless military ...

While television reporters delight in doing stand-ups while wading through water, the truth is, only a tiny percentage of the city of Memphis has been affected by flooding. But with images of the swollen Mississippi River driving tourists away from Beale Street, the city's famed party strip is dry and far too sober. "It's been killing business," laments Elliot Schwab, whose family started A. Schwab's souvenir shop on Beale Street in 1876. "It's the media that's causing the ...

Spring flowers bloomed and soldiers could be seen goose-stepping across Tiananmen Square as I walked through the recently renovated National Museum in Beijing. A new exhibit, "The Road of Rejuvenation," promised to highlight "the glorious history of China under the leadership of the Communist Party." So what's included in a permanent show that contains 2,220 "First-Rank Cultural Objects" and occupies roughly one-fifth of the massive museum's exhibition space? I made my way through room after room of obscure communist artifacts, ...

One of the great ironies revealed by the global recession that began in 2008 is that Communist Party–ruled China may be doing a better job managing capitalism's crisis than the democratically elected U.S. government. Beijing's stimulus spending was larger, infinitely more effective at overcoming the slowdown and directed at laying the infrastructural tracks for further economic expansion. As Western democracies shuffle wheezily forward, China's economy roars along at a steady clip, having lifted some half a billion people ...