Ireland’s Labour Party elected its first female leader on Friday, naming lawmaker Joan Burton to guide the nation’s traditional voice for the poor.
Welcoming her election, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny announced Burton’s appointment as deputy prime minister, a post previously held by the outgoing Labour leader, Eamon Gilmore.
Labour is the junior party in Ireland’s coalition government.
In her victory speech, the 65-year-old Burton said Labour faces a fight to remain Ireland’s main left-wing party, given its slumping support in opinion polls and a heavy defeat in May’s European and council elections.
Ireland’s parliament faces re-election by March 2016, when the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party hopes to woo Labour supporters with an anti-establishment, punish-the-rich message.
Many Labour voters have expressed dismay that, since 2011, the party has helped lead a government committed to increasing taxes on property and utilities while cutting welfare benefits.
Ireland has imposed deepening austerity measures since 2008 as its credit-fueled property boom collapsed, pushing domestic banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing the government to negotiate an international bailout.
Kenny’s government remains committed to austerity despite the fact that Ireland has finished its bailout and resumed normal borrowing on bond markets. It plans a further 2 billion euros (US$2.7 billion) in new taxes and cuts in the budget for next year in hopes of reducing next year’s deficit closer to the eurozone target of 3 percent of GDP.
Burton has been vocal in questioning the need for more cuts. Some analysts believe Labour could break ranks with Kenny’s conservative Fine Gael party and trigger an early election.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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