[UPDATE: Live-blogging the Thai military’s coup, complete with great photos and on-the-street interviews. Go there.]

I’ll be back in Thailand in three week with my family, so this story certainly caught my eye. We’ve all heard about it by now, and all I can say is that I’m amazed.

In Thailand’s first coup in 15 years, military leaders seized control of Bangkok on Tuesday night, suspended the Constitution and declared martial law in the capital, effective immediately.

There were no reports of violence.

The moves came while Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was in New York preparing to address the United Nations. He declared a state of emergency on Thai television, but was cut off in mid-speech. Later, he canceled his address to the General Assembly.

The coup, led by the army chief, Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratkalin, also ‘terminated’ both houses of Parliament, the cabinet and the Constitutional Court.

The events on Tuesday returned Thailand to a time that most experts here thought was finally past, raising questions about the future of Thai democracy and the stability of a country that is a prime tourist destination with strong economic links to the West.

The coup came at the height of a drawn-out political crisis. In April, Mr. Thaksin was forced by huge street protests to step aside despite an overwhelming electoral mandate. In fact, though, he continued to lead the government and to wage political battles against his opponents.

I never liked Thaksin, and while I’m not sorry to see him ousted, it’s never a good thing to see a democracy in peril. (Thaksin of course ignored the democracy, continuing to rule after he was voted out.) Where this will lead is anyone’s guess, and I suspect all eyes will soon be on the king, whom the Thai people adore with a religious fervor. Small wonder the first thing the army did was swear its allegiance to him. This will be one to watch closely.

Now this is an odd one. Here is the entire short piece.

Chinese authorities have shut down an online survey that found most respondents would prefer a different nationality if they were born again. According to the South China Morning Post, two editors of the host website, NetEase, have also been fired in the past few days, prompting speculation that they have been punished for organising the poll.

Electronic surveys are popular in China, but while the authorities tolerate voting for TV pop idols they are uneasy about polls on sensitive political subjects. This did not deter NetEase, which asked readers of its 163.com game site: “Would you like to be Chinese if you had a second life?”

The survey was supposed to run until the second week of October, but it has closed and news editor Tang Yan and opinion editor Liu Xianghui have been sacked. NetEase declined to answer The Guardian’s request for an explanation.

At least two blogs, however, claim to have maintained a record of the results. If correct, they suggest greater insecurity about national identity than is usually reported. Of the more than 10,000 respondents, 64% said they would not want to be Chinese if they were reincarnated. The main reason, given by almost 40% of the respondents, was that Chinese citizens lacked human dignity. Among those who wanted to keep Chinese nationality in a future life, the main reason was love of the country, given by 19% of the total.

I’m trying to find more information on this and hope to expand this post later in the day. Based on the above, it sounds like more of the same: you craft the news to support the party line and make China look good, and if you do otherwise by telling the truth you can lose your job or worse. Nothing new there, but the suppressed results of the survey are definitely intriguing. But not really so surprising.

Thanks to the reader who flagged this for me.

Never liked them. Never will.

Infuriating. Punishing Americans and the environment for the sake of “protecting” our farmers. Money quote: “Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.”

Dumb as We Wanna Be
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 20, 2006

I asked Dr. Jose Goldemberg, secretary for the environment for Sao Paulo State and a pioneer of Brazil’s ethanol industry, the obvious question: Is the fact that the U.S. has imposed a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to prevent Americans from importing sugar ethanol from Brazil ‘just stupid or really stupid.’

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I’ve been called names, but this is a new first.

I graciously accept the designation; if Chinese politics and human rights issues don’t make you angry, what will?

You will almost certainly enjoy this tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek article on the “first new recruit to the terracotta army in more than 2000 years.” Thanks to the commenter who pointed it out.

An oily little demagogue is sticking his thumb in Bush’s eye, using ammunition Bush provided himself.

Hostage to Iran Again?

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 20, 2006

It was galling to be lectured on ethics, truth, justice, virtue and respect for the rights of human beings by a Holocaust-denying, Iraq-meddling, American-hating pipsqueak. A guy who showed up to address the United Nations without even bothering to wear a tie, so casual in a disco-looking cream suit and open-necked pink shirt he looked like he was going to kick back later in Chelsea.

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Am I the only one who finds this story so sickening, so repellent and vile in every way that I want to see my president and his henchmen tried for crimes against humanity? I hope not.

Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.

The report, released in Ottawa, was the result of a 2 1/2-year inquiry that represented one of the first public investigations into mistakes made as part of the United States’ “extraordinary rendition” program, which has secretly spirited suspects to foreign countries for interrogation by often brutal methods.

The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda “watchlist,” without justification, the report said.

Arar was also listed as “an Islamic extremist individual” who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O’Connor.

Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan — where he never has been — and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found.

Syria is always made out by Bush to be one of our pro-“Islamofascist” enemies – yet when they provide a service we require, torture on demand, it’s all love and kisses. On every level, this story should make us tremble with rage. This is what we have become – a nation that employs the tactics once celebrated by Juan Peron and other scum, where “enemies” vanish in the night to face torture or death. Think about how you would feel had this been your sister or your brother – or yourself. We are talking about a flesh and blood human being, an innocent IT consultant, put through hell on earth for nearly a year. If he’s not insane from the experience, I can bet you anything he harbors an undying and immeasurable rage against us all for the rest of his life. As will all those who know him. Thanks for that, Mr. President. Thanks for making me once again utterly ashamed to be an American.

Note that the Canadian agents were “under pressure” to find suspects after the 911 attacks. It reminds me of Stalin’s and Mao’s quota system, where local leaders were put under pressure to come up with lists of “class enemies.” That kind of pressure, of course, leads to hideous and tragic errors. America was supposed to be way better than that.

Hitch tears into the Pontiff’s recent thoughtless remarks on Islam, and finds him guilty of a multitude of sins, from hypocrisy to dogmatic closed-mindedness to old-fashioned stupidity. When he is in form, there is no one like Hitchens. Sample:

To read the bulk of the speech, however, is to realize that, if he had chanced to be born in Turkey or Syria instead of Germany, the bishop of Rome could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim. He may well distrust Islam because it claims that its own revelation is the absolute and final one, but he describes John, one of the apostles, as having spoken “the final word on the biblical concept of God,” and where Muslims believe that Mohammed went into a trance and took dictation from an archangel, Ratzinger accepts as true the equally preposterous legend that St. Paul was commanded to evangelize for Christ during the course of a vision experienced in a dream. He happens to get Mohammed wrong when he says that the prophet only forbade “compulsion in religion” when Islam was weak. (The relevant sura comes from a period of relatively high confidence.) But he could just as easily have cited the many suras that flatly contradict this apparently benign message. The familiar problem is that, if you question another religion’s “revelation” and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own. Which is just what has happened in the present case.

Much more; the final paragraph is a showstopper. I found the masterpiece via this blogger, who glibly remarks,

Of course, what Benedict has said about Muslims is positively benign compared to what he has said about homosexuals. But somehow, I don’t think we’ll get an apology. After all, we don’t threaten to kill people.

“Heh.” “Indeed.”

Hilarious, as always, because there’s so much truth to it.