Colombia central bank cuts benchmark interest rate to 11.25% Colombia's central bank cut the benchmark interest rate by 50 basis points to 11.25% on Friday, its fifth cut since December, as policymakers looked to boost the economy while keeping a ... 06/28/2024 - 8:05 am | View Link
The Czech central bank again cuts a key interest rate as inflation stays low and economy recovers The Czech Republic's central bank has cut its key interest rate for the fifth straight time as inflation remains low and the economy shows signs of recovery. 06/27/2024 - 5:02 am | View Link
Budget 2024: Expect a focus on growth, initiatives to support Viksit Bharat goal, says Virk of Shoonya by Finvasia Sarvjeet Singh Virk, the co-founder and managing director of Shoonya by Finvasia, believes the Budget 2024 will keep its focus on growth, especially on advancing India's digital public infrastructure. 06/25/2024 - 8:33 am | View Link
Stock Market Highlights: Short-term trend of Nifty remains positive; key upside levels to be watched on Wednesday Sensex advanced by more than 200 points, and the Nifty surpassed the 23,600 level in early trade on Tuesday. Smallcaps and midcaps showed strong performance with buying observed across most sectors ... 06/25/2024 - 3:14 am | View Link
India’s Foreign Reserves Fall From Record as RBI Supports Rupee (Bloomberg) -- India’s foreign exchange reserves fell after touching a record high in the previous week as the central bank sold dollars ... nation’s entry into a key global bond index. 06/20/2024 - 8:43 pm | View Link
In July 2023, Indian authorities led a Rohingya refugee couple to burial grounds in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir. Their 40-day-old daughter had just died in the refugee detention center where the couple was also held, following refugee-led protests in which police deployed teargas against detainees. As their daughter was buried, they watched on with handcuffed wrists, tethered to police escorts.
LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivian officials announced Friday they had arrested four more military officers in connection with Wednesday’s thwarted coup against the government of President Luis Arce, raising to 21 the number of detainees allegedly linked to a rogue general’s mutiny attempt.
In a press conference, senior Cabinet member Eduardo del Castillo said those arrested include the driver of a tank that repeatedly rammed into the doors of the government headquarters and a former infantry captain accused of giving orders to soldiers who took over the capital’s central Plaza Murillo.
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“These people commanded the destruction of Bolivian heritage,” del Castillo said.
The coup attempt was led by Juan José Zuñiga, who until his public sacking and arrest Wednesday was the commanding general of the army.
2024 is a make-or-break election year, with seemingly existential democratic contests in many parts of the globe. In Europe, ballooning support for parties of the political extreme was confirmed by the recent European elections. In France, the results pushed Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the national assembly and call for snap elections, which could usher in a radical shift in the political direction of the country and its relationship with the E.
Taking part in an election is seldom a walk in the park. But the Thai Senate race, which culminated this week, has put its candidates and voters through the shrubbiest of hedge mazes—and raised questions about the still-evolving state of democracy in the Southeast Asian nation of 72 million.
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Thailand’s 2024 Senate election is the first of its kind after the upper legislative body was created by the country’s 2017 constitution that was implemented after successive coups had ousted former Thai governments—though the first group of Senators was not elected but rather appointed by the military in 2019.
As the country has slowly begun to cast aside its military leaders—in general elections last year for the National Assembly’s lower chamber, voters overwhelmingly supported parties that ran on a pro-democratic platform—the fact that the military-appointed Senate (nicknamed “the junta’s senators”) remained in power until this year seemed a vestige of the past.
Last year, the Senate thwarted the progressive and most popular candidate for Prime Minister from taking the premiership, handing it instead to the more moderate Srettha Thavisin, who formed a coalition with the military- and royal-linked conservative establishment.
Now, even as those Senators leave office, the process for choosing their replacements has been described as the “most complicated election in the world” and slammed by critics as unnecessarily convoluted and undemocratic.
Here’s what to know about the Thai Senate election—and where Thailand goes from here.
A closed vote behind closed doors
On Wednesday, nearly 3,000 senator candidates met at a convention center near Bangkok to vote on one another.
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia — Mongolia, where parliamentary elections were being held Friday, is a sparsely populated and landlocked Asian nation known for its bitter winter cold and independent spirit.
As a democracy of just 3.4 million people in the shadow of two much larger authoritarian states, China and Russia, it has taken on symbolic importance in an era when democracy is under pressure or in crisis in many countries, including the United States.
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In an earlier era, the fierce nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppe were widely feared, at one point conquering China and expanding west across Asia to the edges of Europe.
Today, it is a country punctuated by extremes.
It all started out comically enough. When British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stood outside 10 Downing Street in the pouring rain to announce the country’s July 4 snap election, there was a palpable feeling of excitement. Five years (and three prime ministers) since Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019, the British people would finally get their chance to elect a new government—one that, if the polls are to be believed, will almost certainly end with Sunak’s ruling Conservatives getting booted from power after 14 years.
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But whatever excitement the snap election generated seemed to quickly give way to bewilderment and disillusionment as, gaffe after gaffe, the Conservatives appeared to sacrifice what little hope they had of narrowing Labour’s poll lead and consequently staving off an electoral wipeout.