Outgoing Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday he was weighing whether to run for re-election but would wait to decide until after the confusion surrounding new court-ordered polls has cleared.
Two days after a high court ordered the nullification of April 2 polls, it remained unclear when the new elections would take place and if Thaksin, the target of a months-long anti-government campaign, would seek to return as prime minister.
"I'm still confused," he told reporters, when asked about his political plans. "I will have to wait until the political direction is clearer. We don't know when the election will be."
A day earlier, two of Thaksin's top aides said they expected him to run in coming parliamentary polls but it was unlikely he would return as prime minister.
Thaksin called the April 2 snap election three years ahead of schedule to defuse anti-government street protests and win a fresh mandate amid growing calls for his resignation.
The Constitutional Court ruled on Monday that the Election Commission had scheduled the polls too soon after Thaksin dissolved parliament, making it unfair for small parties. The court also ruled that ballot booths had been positioned in a way that compromised voters' right to privacy.
Thaksin stepped down shortly after last month's vote, saying he felt compelled to take a "break" from politics to restore unity, but his opponents have accused him of plotting a comeback.
Indeed, his political hiatus was short-lived. He remains the leader of the ruling Thai Rak Thai party and has spend much of his time at closed-door meetings with party members.
When asked if he was ready to make a comeback, Thaksin admitted to feeling restless.
"I have too much energy," he said, smiling, as he entered the party's Bangkok headquarters. "I may have to go to the gym more often or play more golf to burn off the extra energy."
Meanwhile, a bomb exploded yesterday in a popular morning market in Pattani in southern Thailand, killing three people and injuring 16 others, radio reports said.
The victims included two female teachers, one of whom was pregnant, and one army soldier who died from shrapnel wounds at hospital, Pattani police said.
The device, hidden in a parked motorcycle, went off outside a crowded food stall, where dozens of people, including soldiers, were having their breakfast, Pattani's deputy police superintendent Lieutenant Colonel Somporn Misuk said.
The explosion, believed to have been triggered by a mobile phone, was the latest in a long list of acts of violence in Thailand's majority-Muslim "deep South," where more than 1,200 people have died in clashes, ambushes, shootings, explosions and beheadings since January 2004.
The deep South consists of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces, which border Malaysia.
The area, once an independent Islamic sultanate, was first conquered by Bangkok in 1786 but only came under direct rule of the Thai bureaucracy in 1902.
A separatist struggle has simmered in the area for decades, fuelled by the local population's sense of religious and cultural alienation from the predominantly Buddhist Thai state.
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
RSS