obama

Obama to visit Thailand in November?

August 19, 2011

Today’s Bangkok Post says:

US President Barack Obama is expected to pay an official visit to Thailand in November during his trip to Bali to attend the East Asian Summit, government sources said.

Thailand extended an invitation for Mr Obama to visit the kingdom after he was inaugurated, which was about the same time that former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva took office.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been the highest-level Obama administration cabinet member to visit Thailand, in July 2009. President Obama telephoned Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Saturday to congratulate her on her election as the country’s first female prime minister, describing it as a sign of “success of the democratic process”.

On Twitter this morning, U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Kristie Kenney wrote, seemingly in response to a question about Obama’s potential visit:

It is way to early to know. There are no definite plans at this point.

Elsewhere on Twitter, some have speculated about whether or not a potential Obama visit would affect the situation of Thai-born American citizen Joe Gordon.

As I mentioned in May, Gordon is being detained for allegedly insulting the Thai king.

As it happens, the AP reported yesterday that he has now been officially charged:

A lawyer says an American citizen has been formally charged with insulting Thailand’s monarchy, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

(Emphasis mine.)

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Obama and Abhisit at APEC

November 18, 2009

WhiteHouse.gov has this brief video (embedded below) of President Obama speaking after he met with ASEAN leaders at APEC in Singapore on Sunday. Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva appears in the video, and Obama thanks him at the end.

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Around the Web: improving college rankings, Federer’s footwork, inventors killed by their own inventions, and more

September 13, 2009

Some links that have caught my eye of late:

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Obama inauguration in Bangkok’s newspapers

January 21, 2009

President Obama’s inauguration was, of course, front-page news here in Bangkok today. Here’re the top left corner of Thai Rath newspaper, a popular daily1:

Obama inauguration in Bangkok's Thai Rath newspaper

And here’s today’s Bangkok Post2.

Obama inauguration in the Bangkok Post

UPDATE: Hong Kong blogger Thomas Crampton has a nice round-up of Obama front pages around Asia.

  1. Thai Rath‘s coverage can be quite sensational. Today’s issue contains three striking below-the-fold images not included in this scan: a man who was killed in a car crash; a woman embracing what appears to be a dead relative; and a crime scene photo of a shirtless man face down in a pool of blood. [↩]
  2. Apologies for the poor scans. My scanner isn’t big enough to accommodate the papers’ broadsheet size. The full Bangkok Post headline reads “Obama Pledges New America.” [↩]

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Obama Cookies

January 18, 2009

Obama Cookies

Thanks to my friend FH for sending along this image of a package of Obama cookies, which she found at a Safeway grocery store in Washington, DC.

Just in time for the big inauguration.1

  1. Thailand readers: President elect Obama is scheduled to take the Oath of Office at approximately midnight Bangkok time (noon eastern time) on Tuesday, January 20. [↩]

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Obama wins: electoral maps, images, and more

November 6, 2008

"Obama Makes History" Washington Post front page

Some links:

  • For a recap of the election, this Wikipedia page — United States presidential election, 2008 — is a good place to start.
  • Newseum has images from today’s front pages. (Here’s a bigger image of the Washington Post front page above.)
  • The Big Picture has a collection of photos of Obama throughout the campaign.
  • Kottke.org has a nice round-up of electoral map images.
  • Electioneering ’08 is “a historical snapshot of various media sources’ coverage of Election Day 2008.”

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    Watching the election from abroad

    November 4, 2008

    2008 presidential election electoral map

    A and I will be gathering around the TV tomorrow1, watching the election results with a group of friends. We’ll be checking out the live news coverage, and I’m sure there’ll be some laptops and smart phones out, with folks consulting electoral analysis sites like the intriguing FiveThirtyEight.com2.

    There’ve been some intense discussions among our pals, though, about what time the results will be known. We’re 12 hours ahead of eastern time, so, we’ve been wondering, will we know who the next POTUS is by 9 a.m. tomorrow3? 10 a.m.? 11 a.m.?

    Turns out that some news organizations might be calling the election by early as 8 a.m. Bangkok time (8 p.m. eastern).4

    NY Times: Networks May Call Race Before Voting Is Complete

    At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.

    A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.

    “We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”

    Similarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David Plotz, said in an e-mail message that “if Obama is winning heavily,” he could see calling the race “sometime between 8 and 9.”

    “Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency,” Mr. Plotz wrote. “We will call it when a sensible person — not a TV news anchor who has to engage in a silly pretense about West Coast voters — would call it.”

    (Emphasis mine.)

    Bangkok friends and other readers abroad: How do you plan to follow the election news? Got any good Web sites to share? Let us know in the comments.

    Electoral map image via the NY Times.

    1. Later today, US time [↩]
    2. Baseball stats-like analysis + politics = great reading [↩]
    3. Er, Tuesday night eastern time [↩]
    4. You see how confusing this can get. [↩]

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    Tavis Smiley and Obama

    August 5, 2008

    Tavis Smiley

    I enjoyed this New Yorker Out Loud podcast episode, “The Dissident,” in which Kelefa Sanneh talks about Tavis Smiley and Barack Obama. Sanneh’s New Yorker story, which he discusses in the episode, is called “What He Knows for Sure: Tavis Smiley confronts the Obama candidacy,” and it can be found on the New Yorker site here.

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