Thailand declares state of emergency as students protest
BANGKOK — Thailand’s government declared a strict new state of emergency for the capital Thursday, a day after a student-led protest against the country’s traditional establishment saw an extraordinary moment in which demonstrators heckled a royal motorcade.
After the predawn declaration, riot police moved in to clear out demonstrators who after a day of rallies and confrontation had gathered outside Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s office to push their demands, which include the former general’s resignation, constitutional changes and reform of the monarchy.
Several top leaders of the protest movement were taken into custody, with one later declaring on his Facebook page that he had been denied access to a lawyer and was being forced onto a helicopter and taken to a city in the country’s north. Police said they had made 22 arrests.
Despite a new ban against large public gatherings, thousands of people rallied again in another area of the city later Thursday. The new gathering, which appeared to have drawn more than the 8,000 people police said had attended the previous night’s rally, lasted about six hours and began winding down shortly after 10 p.m.
Organizers announced they would gather again Friday.
“It shows that no matter how many are arrested, new faces will join the protest,” Patsaravalee Tanakit-vibulpon, an engineering student and protest organizer, told the online publication The Standard.
The protest Wednesday in Bangkok’s historic district, not far from glittering temples and royal palaces, was the third major gathering by student-led activists who have been pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable — and legal — language by publicly questioning the role of Thailand’s monarchy in the nation’s power structure.
Embattled Kyrgyzstan President Sooronbai Jennbekov said Thursday he was resigning following protests over a disputed parliamentary election, the third time in 15 years that a leader of the Central Asian country has been ousted by a popular uprising .
Supporters of Jennbekov’s rival, newly appointed Prime Minister Sadyr Zhaparov, rallied in the capital of Bishkek and threatened to storm government buildings if he is not elevated to acting president. Under the constitution, the speaker of parliament would be next in line, but he refused to serve as caretaker leader, according to Zhaparov, who claimed the top office.
The resignations of the president and the parliament speaker’s apparent refusal to succeed him followed unrest that gripped the country of 6.5 million people on the border with China since the Oct. 4 parlia
Kyrgyzstan upheaval:
mentary election that was swept by pro-government parties.
Supporters of opposition groups dismissed the results, pointing at vote-buying and other irregularities, and took over government buildings hours after the polls closed. The protesters freed several opposition leaders, including Zhaparov, who was serving an 11year jail term.
Israel on Thursday pressed forward on plans for more than 3,000 West Bank settlement homes, making 2020 one of the most prolific years for settlement building, according to a settlement watchdog group.
Thursday’s approvals, along with more than 2,000 new homes approved a day earlier, are part of a building boom that has gained steam during the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump. It
West Bank settlements:
also comes months after Israel promised to put on hold plans to annex parts of the West Bank in exchange for a U.S.-brokered normalization deal with the United Arab Emirates.
The latest approvals raised the number of settlement homes to be advanced this year to more than 12,150, according to Peace Now, the settlement watchdog group. It is the highest number of approvals since Trump took office in early 2017 and the highest since Peace Now began recording the figures in 2012.
The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as part of a future independent state.
Nazi stolen art: A painting of two young, 19th-century skaters that was looted by Nazis from a Jewish family in 1933 and recently discovered at a small
museum in upstate New York was returned Thursday after 87 years.
The painting “Winter” by American artist Gari Melchers was part of a cache of more than 1,000 pieces of art and artifacts seized from the Mosse family, prominent Jewish residents of Berlin who became early targets of the Nazi Party. Heirs have been tenaciously seeking to recover the lost pieces for the past decade.
“The Mosse family lost nearly everything because they were Jews. But they did not lose hope,” Antoinette Bacon, acting U.S attorney for the Northern District of New York, said at a repatriation ceremony at the Albany FBI office.
Parole in Louisiana case: A Black man whose life sentence for stealing a set of hedge clippers in a 1997 burglary drew scathing criticism from the chief justice of Louisiana’s Supreme Court was granted parole Thursday.
The 3-0 vote during an online meeting of the Committee on Parole means freedom, with conditions, for Fair Wayne Bryant.
Louisiana’s Supreme Court had denied release for Bryant, 63, earlier this year for the burglary from a carport storage room.
The case drew national attention for a dissent by Chief Justice Bernette Johnson, the high court’s only Black justice. She said the habitual offender law under which Bryant was sentenced was a “modern manifestation” of Jim Crow era laws aimed at jailing Black people for simple crime.
Vatican scandal: Pope Francis named a new head for the Vatican’s saint-making office Thursday to replace the oncepowerful cardinal at the center of a growing corruption scandal that has raised questions about the current Holy See leadership.
Francis promoted a bishop who has been involved in efforts to draft a reform of the Vatican bureaucracy, Monsignor Marcello Semeraro, to head the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Semeraro was the secretary of the commission of cardinals that Francis created to reform the organizing constitution of the Vatican Curia.
He replaces Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was fired as prefect of the saint-making office in September. Francis cited evidence that Becciu, when he was the powerful No. 2 in the Vatican’s secretariat of state, sent $117,000 in Vatican funds to a charity controlled by his brother.
Becciu, whose rights and privileges as a cardinal were also yanked, has admitted he sent the money but insisted it was destined for the charity, not his brother.