my responsibility as a journalist is to get beyond the smoking mirrors it's not just about the career and balance or being neutral it's about being truthful. and i were giving. this news coming up on the program keeping controlled by that military look set to maintain its influence over the country after dominating the ballot box but something is election driven free and fair and. a search for survivors and. often another industrial accident. behind the country's safety record.

by british babaji welcome to the show it's good to have you with us and has seen nearly five years of military rule and now it looks like the status quo when continue after general elections held on sunday up for all military parties says it's ready to form the next government that means this former army chief and current prime minister. could carry on as prime minister for the next four years but the vote itself has come under scrutiny opposition parties have criticized the result as have been lection observer groups human rights watch has called reports of voting irregularities very alarming. he became prime minister thanks to a coup now. looks to have secured democratic mandate for keeping the chop his party which is linked to thailand's powerful military. victory soon after partial

results were released. we have we have indicated the principle is that. the party of parties that have. there are able to assemble the largest number of which should have the opportunity to try for the next government waking up to the news this morning this man said he was happy about a continuation of power but. i think the country is heading in a direction that private as planned he will take care of the economy peace and especially corruption. but others aren't convinced though the electoral system favors the plan patcher out party p p r p if you had expected it to do so well. i was surprised p.p.i. got the most votes. by the looks of the popular votes the p p r p appears to have

swayed voters in the country's poor rural north but rights groups are questioning the credibility of the election. there will report about buying the records about your equality is in relation there were reports about intimidation of opposition party members. with criticism growing over the way the vote was carried out the political divisions that have afflicted thailand in the last decade and even further. and joining us for more professor john j. ross on but one city from thomas at university in bangkok professor welcome before the chat i'd just like to show our viewers the wider context within which this vote has taken place now following the change in the constitution in twenty seventeen boller months has a total of seven hundred fifty seats of which two hundred fifty in the senate these are framed by an elected member as appointed by the military that means that going

into this election the military already had two hundred fifty seats in the bag needing only one hundred and twenty six to reach the majority mach of three hundred seventy six. professor given this arrangement is it a surprise that the probability tree pollen project out party has come up trumps not surprised at all i mean. the whole if for a process has been decided to give the advantage to the party to close so eighty s. so i mean as a type person there's already been speculation that they would somehow form the coalition government however the fact that they got more than one hundred seats is quite surprising for a lot of analysts who predicted that they would get lower than that but so that's actually connected to the whole and even the playing field that has been created around the electoral process and i think that is creating

a lot of you know. anger at the moment this is what human rights watch also alluded to there's an even playing field in the lead up to this election and also about some irregularities on voting day do you actually believe that this is true or is there something else at play here well the irregularities that appeared on the asian there is just another episode of the whole process and the before that for months you see the misuse of state resources for campaigns. and you see the intimidation candidates of the opposition have faced and you've seen. all kinds of distortion of rules in order to give advantage to the ruling party but at the same time and of mining opposition parties are you saying that in thailand the vast majority of people do not support the military led government i wouldn't dare to say that the society has been denied it for for

a decade or more and i believe that half of the society believes in the establishment. and. now we are facing with the rest of the other half of the country do not share these beliefs right so the who is favored by these half of society the consulate is part of society if you like and because of that they have a lot of populist work but on top of that there is this. electoral a wreck rallies that we've talked about so morphing combine you have the electoral gains that are quite unexpected by the plank bush era thailand has had a history of military coups i think this is only the eleventh or the trolls who i lose count to be honest has a vis military government done something differently to the other military

governments in the. twenty course. successful. well i think we have to see the players of the military government in a historical context this is the first election and actually the court that oversaw all the transition from the last written to the new read write so what they do is they try to kind of smooth the transition process and in so doing they have to sustain the ruling position. so the election is the signed for the elites to be able to sustain that old political order yeah so what if they have done is good for those who want to see the established order doing well but not good for the rest who want to see change in the country or will have to give the professor done some but the city thank you so much for coming in to

think of yours. to try it on our which last week suffered one of its wast industrial accidents more than sixty people died in a chemical plant blast that flattened an industrial park and destroyed the city of young junks the explosion was so powerful. earthquake dozens of people lost and missing. it was a massive blast. flattening nearby buildings and shattering windows almost two kilometers away. rescuers pulled this man out of the rubble of the destroyed chemical plant almost forty hours after the explosion happened the survivors hundreds of them are recovering in more than a dozen local hospitals. my injury is heavier than those of my

friends i was sitting right next to the window and shards of glass from a smashed window hit me our factory had temporarily suspended production and we were attending class to study suddenly i had a bang and a huge impact right smashed the window. outside this hospital the red cross society of china has been collecting and dispatching basic supplies for people whose homes were destroyed by the blast and people have been lining up to help by giving blood so. i found out from the news that the blast caused many casualties so i rushed over as it's not far away i'd like to make a small contribution to the people who need help. this accident has stoked public anger further in china over the frequency of industrial accidents and safety standards the exact cause of this latest enormous explosion is still under investigation but tangy i chemical the owner of the plant has

a history of violating environmental. regulations. and that appears to be the underlying reason in a number of other industrial accidents in china last november for example an explosion at a chemical plant in the northern city of junkyard who killed twenty four people and injured twenty one others investigators said the chemical farm lacked safety measures in july also of last year a blast at a chemical plant in you've been in sichuan province left one thousand dead and twelve injured it's said the company had got it out illegal construction work and in twenty fifteen more than one hundred seventy people were killed in a series of explosions in the port city of tenzin authorities blamed incorrect storage of chemicals for that incident. and joining us for more is you double correspondent mathias billing in beijing mathias it appears to be a common theme there are a carelessness a lack of adherence to safety procedures why does this keep happening in china.

well the problem is not regulations that. are up to international standards for safety the problem is that these companies ignore regulations and that these regulations are not enforced by local governments and this is of course because there is a close link often between these governments and the companies the companies are either owed by the state or they are big tax payers and for governments for the most time of the last forty years the most important target to meet was growth rate so in order to meet the growth rate they would look away at a lot of things and this seems to be the case here as well what has happened in the case of the latest explosion in junk to province that occurred last week what are authorities saying. well the central government has send an investigation team it seems i coding to what we hear or what is reported that.

explosions have been happening there before one rather big one in two thousand and seven that killed eight people and that residents have been very worried about this industrial park the chemical plant was part of an industrial park that is now damaged as well. and a lot of people have been complaining that this dangerous potentially dangerous plant has been constructed to closely to a residential area however nothing has ever been done for my investigations by joining this have been shut down or journalists have been. threatened not to report on this so we may be going to see a lot more in the coming few days on this but i did have a correspondent but here's billing speaking to us from beijing thank you very much for that thank you. and there's more of that photo off our site.

and be sure to check us out on facebook as well really even though with pictures from the blast site in young chang and the continuing search for survivors is your next stop. nico is in germany to learn german english binnacle. why not learn with him james e. learning course because fake. africa. got me president to hong. end of the london patriotic front to include the rebel army and in the one nine hundred ninety four genocide wasn't when all in the rulers there wasn't when to ask of the un but i'll need to reinforce it because i knew

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