Earlier this year, things came to a head when a extremely diverse coalition of academics, activists, businessmen, and many others came together to form a People’s Alliance and started a protest (essentially blockading the headquarters of the Government). Eventually, the Prime Minister was forced to resign on a technicality, and now another Prime Minister, Somchai Wongsawat (incidentally a brother-in-law of the deposed Prime Minister Thaksin) came to power; and he is facing the same protests:

In a day of street battles that left more than 100 people wounded, anti-government protesters surrounded Parliament on Tuesday, trapping hundreds of lawmakers inside throughout the afternoon. Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat escaped over a back fence in the morning after delivering a policy address. But other members were unable to leave for more than five hours, when the police dispersed the massed protesters with volleys of tear gas and cleared the way for them. The assault on Parliament escalated a six-week sit-in on the grounds of the prime ministers office, a kilometer away, that had forced the government to relocate its business to a former international airport.
The People’s Alliance is a patchwork coalition of businessmen, academics and activists who accuse the government of being a proxy for former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed in a coup in 2006 and who fled to exile in London in August. The alliance says it wants to modify the country’s democratic system to weaken the electoral power of the rural poor, who formed the base of support of Thaksin and now of the governing People Power Party.

This is one of the systematics debates about democracy; where a section of the population believes that they know better than the others (who may be less educated, or more radicalized, or more susceptible to populist pressures, or fill in your own reason). In some cases this may be true, but to seek a version of democracy where the votes of people are not equal, is going on a very slippery slope.

Thailand’s Constitutional Court is set to decide later Tuesday whether Samak violated the constitution by taking money from a private company to host the “Tasting and Grumbling” cooking show. If found guilty, he and his cabinet would be forced to resign — something that protesters occupying the grounds of his offices have not been able to achieve since storming his Government House two weeks ago. However, Samak would not be barred from holding office, and his deputy has already held out the possibility that the ruling coalition could simply vote him back as prime minister.
The protesters, who call themselves the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), are pushing a broader agenda than just Samak’s resignation. They want to curtail Thailand’s democracy so that only 30 percent of seats in parliament would be elected, which they say would restrict the influence of poor rural voters in places like Udon Thani, who have widely supported Samak. PAD supporters say the change would ensure that Samak’s allies cannot return to power.

In this current confrontation, thankfully, both the military and the king have so far pledged their neutrality; anyhow, military intervention just led to a gap of some years; when finally the elections took place, a party similar to the previously ruling party was again voted back into office.

Chinese President Hu Jintao Saturday defended the crackdown on protests in Tibet and denied the disturbances were linked to human rights in his first public comments on the incident. Hu told Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd the unrest was aimed purely at “splitting the motherland” and insisted Beijing’s handling of unrest was its own affair, according to state media.
“It is a problem (of) either safeguarding national unification or splitting the motherland,” he said on the southern island of Hainan. “The Tibet problem is entirely an internal issue of China.” Exiled Tibetan leaders say Beijing’s suppression of the rare protests, which began last month, left about 150 dead. Hu, whose officials say only that Tibetan “rioters” left 20 dead, maintained the response was justified.

The steps that China has taken are typical; stop all reporting out of Tibet, prevent outsiders from reaching there; try to implement a total breakdown; blame Tibetans for the violence, and then claim that nobody outside has any right to say anything. And the sad truth is, China is now so powerful economically that nobody will be able to say what they want.

Tibet was hit by a fresh wave of violence Friday as protests by hundreds of Buddhist monks and other residents against Chinese rule resulted in burned shops, vandalized police vehicles and at least 10 deaths, government officials and witnesses said. American citizens in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, reported rioting and gunfire, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said in a warning to stay away from the city, which has seen several days of anti-Chinese protests.
“There’s smoke and flames coming from the old city, but I can’t tell what’s going on since soldiers have surrounded the area,” said one Lhasa resident by telephone, who declined to be identified because of fear of repercussions. A tour guide surnamed Zhu, who wouldn’t give his first name, said there was a police and military crackdown underway, particularly in the area around Jokhang Temple. He said he could see dozens of military vehicles. Tibet is among the most tightly controlled areas in China. Protests first flared March 10, when monks took to the streets to mark the anniversary of a 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule. Communist Chinese troops seized control of Tibet in 1950.

China has enforced the regular tactics. There is a total cut-off of information flow with journalists no longer being allowed there; and of course, it is out of the question that people in the mainland will be able to see what is going on. The thing that has changed from previous times is the spread of information technology, and it is now a fight between the efforts of Chinese censors and the Government to implement control and the use of technology to get information out. In the short run, China will win. Western Governments are too tightly involved with the Chinese Government and its economy to raise much of a stink, but at some point, freedom will prevail.

Despite pressure by the Bush Administration and the rest of the international community for Israel to withdraw many of its Jewish citizens from 220 hilltop settlements and outposts in the disputed West Bank, such a move could be so divisive in Israel that no Prime Minister, especially one as embattled as Ehud Olmert, would risk it. After months of dithering and judicial pressure, Israel’s government decided on Aug. 7 to remove two Jewish families squatting in Palestinian-owned buildings. At 6:20 a.m., riot police bashed in doors as teenage settlers on the roof hurled down stones, oil and eggs at the police, while Wagner played over loudspeakers. (As every Israeli knows, Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer, and the music was a brutish way — for the benefit of TV news crews — for the settlers to draw a parallel between Israel’s security forces and the Nazis.)
The eviction itself went relatively smoothly, but the hard feelings it generated resound deep inside Israeli army barracks. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were initially assigned only to secondary tasks, such as manning roadblocks to stop religious Zionist sympathizers from joining their Hebron brethren. Still, when orders were given to the Duchifat Battalion to assist evicting the two settler families, 38 out of 400 soldiers initially refused to obey after many called their rabbis on cell phones. Eventually, all but eight relented. These “refuseniks,” as they were dubbed in the Israeli press, were slapped in the army prison for 14 to 28 days and some were banished from their élite combat unit. The incident has left lingering doubts over whom soldiers will obey: their commanding officers, or hard-line rabbis who believe it’s the destiny of Jews to occupy the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, even if they are now in disputed Palestinian territory? One senior IDF commander complains to TIME: “It seems like every soldier is consulting his own rabbi.” The more extremist rabbis, he says, “want to change the system,” bringing Israel’s vibrant secular society more in line with their orthodox views.

If this situation continues, Israel will find it difficult. Most Israeli politicians understand that a peace with the Palestinians will involve removing most Israeli settlers from the West Bank, and it would be the army that would be called out to help in such a operation. If such a trend of the army soldiers being swayed by rabbis continues, Israel will be in a difficult position.

For the first time in its history, the Palestinian Authority has published a policy platform that doesn’t include “armed resistance” to Israel as a core principle. A new government program presented by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salaam Fayyad has drawn praise from peaceniks on both sides, and fresh scorn from Hamas, after the Arabic word muqawama was left out of the document for the first time since the PA was established in 1993. The program was presented to the Palestinian cabinet on Thursday, but details of it began to emerge only Friday.
An aide to Mr. Fayyad said Friday that the deletion didn’t mean Palestinians are any more accepting of the 40-year-old Israeli occupation of their lands. Instead, the new government will embrace what Mr. Abbas has called “popular struggle” while rejecting armed attacks on Israeli targets. “We have the right to refuse and resist the occupation, but our experience shows that peaceful, active resistance — like in the first intifada, which was absolutely non-violent — could be more effective,” said Jamal Zakut, a close confidante of Mr. Fayyad’s.

This is something that Israel will welcome. No matter what the current state of progress between the Palestinians and Israel, there is a large section of people in Israel who would like nothing better than to have a time of peace, and not be worried about terrorism and suicide bombings. Currently they have that due to the wall in the West Bank, but a long term peace is something that will enable the country to develop and grow economically much more.
Of course, any solution or a peace initiative still does not reconcile the changed status of the Gaza Strip where the Hamas rulers refuse to acknowledge any peace initiatives by the Fatah movement and will certainly find it hard to accept any accord that leaves portions of the West Bank, Gaza or Jerusalem with the Israelis, and Israel will not accept any agreement that removes control of Jerusalem from it.

In a severe blow to U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s Supreme Court reinstated its chief justice to his post Friday four months after Musharraf’s government suspended him. Reversing Musharraf’s removal of Judge Iftikhar Chaudhry, the Supreme Court also ruled a series of government charges against him “illegal.”
It was, by all accounts, a historic day for Pakistan. The court had rarely defied the country’s political establishment in the past; its decisions could be counted on to legitimize military coups, such as the one that brought Musharraf to power in 1999. Most in Pakistan saw the case as a test of the rule of law in their nation: Could a military ruler brush aside the head of the Supreme Court at will? “When you go through the 60-year history of Pakistan, whenever a moment, a test came, somehow or the other we always failed,” said Tariq Mahmoud, a member of Chaudhry’s legal team and a former high court judge. “But this decision gives us an independent judiciary, and with that, whenever there are illegal government actions, these matters can now be brought before the court.”

These are times of incredible reversals for Musharraf. His victory in the siege of the Lal Masjid has come at a great cost, with people blaming him for the crisis reaching that point, and the religious right totally against him now. The US and other countries are now realizing that he is a reluctant convert to the war against terror, and their dependence on him to clear terrorism from the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan has failed.
And now this. The Supreme Court had originally granted his coup legitimacy, but with this reversal, a severe dent to his image has happened. And now that people see that a high constitutional authority is willing to challenge him, his power is going to be much weaker now.