World in brief: Protesters say they’ll fan out
BANGKOK, Thailand – Thousands of defiant anti-government demonstrators vowed today to expand their protests to other parts of Thailand’s unnerved capital after ignoring police orders to end their occupation of Bangkok’s paralyzed commercial district.
The protesters, mostly farmers from impoverished provincial areas, have sworn not to let up their pressure until the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva steps down and new elections are called.
Jatuporn Prompan, a protest leader, said Sunday night that the demonstrators would branch out to an undisclosed location but also maintain bases within both Bangkok’s commercial heart and the separate historic quarter of the city where they began to encamp March 12.
The weekend protests forced the closure of more than six upscale shopping malls and tough security measures at nearby five-star hotels, with economic losses estimated at up to $15 million a day.
Report identifies second bomber
MOSCOW – The second Moscow suicide bomber may have been a 28-year-old schoolteacher from the southern province of Dagestan, a Russian newspaper reported Sunday, quoting the woman’s father as saying he recognized her in a photograph.
Rasul Magomedov told Novaya Gazeta that an acquaintance sent him a photograph of the subway suicide bomber that has been widely circulated on the Internet.
“My wife and I immediately recognized our daughter Maryam,” the newspaper quotes him as saying. “The last time my wife saw our daughter she was wearing the same red scarf as in the photograph.”
Magomedov said his daughter, Maryam Sharilova, disappeared the day before the March 29 bombings that shocked Moscow, though he has no idea how she got to the city from their home in southern Russia.
“She was religious, but she never expressed any radical beliefs,” Magomedov was quoted as saying.
The attack by two female suicide bombers killed 40 rush-hour commuters and wounded at least 121.
One of the bombers has been identified as the 17-year-old widow of a slain Islamic militant, also from Dagestan, one of several predominantly Muslim provinces in the North Caucasus.
No officials were available to comment on the Novaya Gazeta report late Sunday.
President’s allies advance in votes
LA PAZ, Bolivia – Allies of leftist President Evo Morales made modest advances in state and local elections on Sunday, according to independent exit polls.
Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism campaigned hard in opposition-controlled eastern provinces where resistance is strongest to the central government’s redistribution of land and wealth.
Pro-government candidates for governor had comfortable leads in five out of nine state races, according to exit polls released by television broadcasters ATB and Unitel. The first official results were due today.