Laos' ruling communist party won its expected landslide in last month's parliamentary elections, which ushered two independents among 71 newcomers into the National Assembly, according to official results reported yesterday.
The widely anticipated results, published in the Vientiane Times, showed that 113 of the 115 seats in the National Assembly went to candidates of the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party.
Lao Foreign Ministry Spokesman Yong Chanthalansy said that voter turnout from the April 30 polls was not yet available.
War veterans
The leadership of the single-party Southeast Asian state -- one of five remaining communist countries in the world -- has long been dominated by aging members of the party who participated in the civil war against a US-backed regime that ended with a communist victory in 1975.
This election marked an effort to bring fresh faces into the party, with incumbents making up only about a quarter of the candidates.
Among the fresh faces are more women, with 29 female lawmakers as opposed to 25 in the outgoing National Assembly, the newspaper reported.
The government of Laos -- a poor country of about 6.2 million people -- has partially liberalized the economy to encourage development, but has kept a tight grip on political power. Its leaders are among the most secretive in Asia, tolerating no opposition and maintaining strict control over the media.
Independents
Laos allowed independent candidates to run for the first time in 2002. At that time, only one ran in the race. This time around, three independents were allowed.
The two independents elected to the incoming lower house are businessmen, Somphiane Xayadeth and Oun-Heuan Phothilath, the foreign ministry spokesman said.
The country's last elections were in February 2002, and the assembly would normally serve a five-year term but was restricted to four years this time because the session before ran an extra year.
Western observers expect the party to retain tight control over the country in the near future, noting that its 8th Party Congress ended in March with a commitment to maintain the status quo.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the