BANGKOK, Thailand — The curiously named Caravan of the Poor, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s own version of Nazi brownshirts who intimidated anti-government demonstrators on the streets of Bangkok earlier this year, has evaporated in the week following Thailand’s coup. Instead, smiling mothers photograph their plastic gun-toting sons who pester to be lifted onto tanks parked in the capital’s streets. Newly married couples choose a backdrop of the flower-festooned armored vehicles instead of the royal palace or a historic temple to commemorate their special day on film. But the calm and the lack of combatants comes at too high [...]
In August, employees of the Singapore Ministry of Education received a memo telling them to guard their computers against miscreants “targeting Singapore government’s web presence . . . in an attempt to discredit the event and embarrass the organizing country.” The event is the annual meeting of the Boards of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The miscreants are anti-globalization protestors. Yes, the IMF and World Bank are in town, with a total of more than 10,000 delegates, advisors, and hangers-on. This time, the hangers-on will not include the sideshow of civil society and anti-globalization protesters [...]
HONG KONG — Global leaders — meeting far and wide from the UN General Assembly in New York to the IMF annual summit in Singapore — were quick to condemn the military coup in Thailand that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. But the reality is the coup could actually end months of political uncertainty and benefit the country over the longer run. This was reflected on Asian stock and foreign exchange markets, where benchmarks fell in only a limited fashion in the immediate aftermath of the coup, with investors sensing the end of a difficult and messy era in Thai [...]
