1 Martial law in Thailand (BBC) The Thai army says
that it is imposing martial law amid a political crisis "to preserve law
and order". The surprise announcement also granted the army wide-ranging
powers to enforce its decision. The military insisted that its assumption of
responsibility for national security was not a coup. Martial law comes after a
long-running political crisis, and months of escalating tensions between the
government and the opposition.
The chief security advisor to the interim prime
minister said the government had not been consulted about the army's decision. "Everything
is normal except the military is responsible for all national security
issues," said Paradorn Pattanatabut. An army spokesman said that the
imposition of martial law will have no impact on the caretaker government which
remains in office.
Troops have taken steps to stop pro-government
red-shirt supporters from gathering at their usual rallying-place outside
Bangkok. The Thai military last took power in 2006. Earlier this month a court
ordered Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and several cabinet ministers to
step down.
2 Tough task for China to achieve 2014 trade target
(Straits Times) China faces an arduous task to achieve its 7.5 per cent trade
growth target this year as the high growth period for its trade is over, a
senior commerce ministry official said. Zhang Ji, head of foreign trade
department at the commerce ministry, added that violence against Chinese firms
in Vietnam could hurt bilateral trade.
Last week, China's cabinet announced a raft of
measures to support the wobbly trade sector, including giving more tax breaks,
credit insurance and currency hedging options to its exporters. The government
has set a target of 7.5 per cent growth for exports and imports this year.
China missed its targets of 8 per cent in 2013 and 10 per cent in 2012.
http://www.straitstimes.com/news/business/economy/story/china-faces-arduous-task-achieve-2014-trade-growth-target-20140520
3 When the BJP was a joke for India’s Rahul Gandhi
(Jawed Naqvi in Dawn) High on his party’s unexpected victory in 2004, Congress
scion Rahul Gandhi had mocked the Bharatiya Janata Party. “The BJP is a joke.
They have always abused my family,” he had said. This was barely two years
after the Gujarat pogroms, mind you.
It took the young leader a full decade to
understand, but only after he faced a rout, that the BJP represented a
challenge to Nehruvian secularism. Progressive writers on their part were never
blind to the communal question though they may have failed to detect other
social fault lines.
Dalit temples, for example, were mostly allowed to
be built outside the Lucknow city perimeters. Did the progressive intellectuals
(other than Premchand) look into the predicament of the Dalits, the
vulnerability of the Christian tribals, or the politics of aloofness forced on
the Sikhs?
My fear is that our progressive peers unwittingly
shunned potential allies and allowed them to be swamped by an entire phenomenon
of rightwing culture and the unobtrusively appealing communal street literature
that got harnessed into a movement, one which came into its own last week to
sideline them ever more.
http://www.dawn.com/news/1107400/is-bjp-still-a-joke-rahul
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