标签： Asia

BANGKOK – A new chapter in Thailand’s national governance officially began this week, as the country’s freshly formed coalition government, headed by Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, completed its formal swearing-in ceremony on Monday evening. The inauguration followed a royal endorsement granted to the new administration one week prior, clearing the final ceremonial hurdle for the incoming leadership.

The 35-member cabinet took part in time-honored constitutional traditions, gathering at Bangkok’s Dusit Palace to recite the official oath of allegiance during an audience with King Maha Vajiralongkorn. In addition to Prime Minister Anutin, all seven deputy prime ministers, alongside full cabinet ministers and their respective deputies, were in attendance for the historic ceremony.

Shortly after the formal inauguration concluded at the royal palace, Anutin traveled to Thailand’s government house to lead the first extraordinary cabinet meeting of the new administration. In the coming days, the prime minister is scheduled to deliver his administration’s official policy statement to the national parliament. This address marks the last procedural requirement before the new government can fully take up its governing duties and begin implementing its policy agenda.

Anutin, the 59-year-old leader of the Bhumjaithai Party, secured a second term as prime minister of the Southeast Asian nation after winning a parliamentary confidence vote held in March. His victory cleared the way for negotiations to form the ruling coalition that has now officially taken office.

Escalating geopolitical tensions between the United States and Iran have reached a new critical juncture, as top Iranian officials have issued a stark warning that they could disrupt global energy supplies by closing a second key international oil chokepoint if the Trump administration follows through on threats to target Iranian civilian infrastructure. The warning comes after former U.S. President Donald Trump openly threatened to bomb Iranian power plants, a move that international legal experts widely characterize as a violation of the laws of war and a potential war crime.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a former Iranian foreign minister and currently a senior advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced the potential retaliatory measure in a social media post published over the weekend. Velayati threatened that Iran could move to close the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb, a strategically critical waterway located off the coast of Yemen, where the Iran-aligned Houthi movement holds effective control over the adjacent coastline. “If the White House dares to repeat its foolish mistakes,” Velayati cautioned, “it will soon realize that the flow of global energy and trade can be disrupted with a single move.”

As Al Jazeera highlighted in an analysis published on Monday, the Houthi movement already closed the Bab al-Mandeb Strait for a period during Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, demonstrating the feasibility of such a disruption. If Iran moves to close the Strait of Hormuz — the world’s most important oil chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies pass — at the same time that the Bab al-Mandeb is shut down, the combined disruption could send global energy prices soaring to uncharted highs, the outlet reported.

“The strait is a vital route through which Saudi Arabia sends its oil to Asia,” Al Jazeera explained. “If Bab al-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz were both shut, that would block 25% … of the world’s oil and gas supply.”

Energy markets have already seen steep price increases following the launch of new U.S. military hostilities against Iran more than a month ago, a conflict that critics have repeatedly deemed illegal under international law. As of Monday’s trading session, Brent crude oil futures were holding at $110 per barrel, while average U.S. retail gasoline prices climbed to $4.12 per gallon, according to data from motoring group AAA.

Last week, Democratic members of the U.S. Congress’ Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released a formal analysis estimating that American consumers are now paying 35% more to refuel their vehicles than they did just one month prior, with the entire increase directly tied to the escalation of conflict with Iran.

Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat and member of the JEC, highlighted the committee’s findings in a Monday social media post, blaming the Trump administration’s unplanned, unauthorized military escalation for the financial strain hitting American households. “Americans are getting hit with major price shocks because President Trump decided to wage an illegal war against Iran with no plan or strategy,” Beyer said.

Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat and the ranking member of the JEC, told local outlet WMUR that the conflict has exacerbated pre-existing financial pressures that were already pushing working- and middle-class American families to the breaking point. “Families are already being pushed to the brink,” Hassan said. “That was true before the war started, by the cost of everything from groceries to rent to healthcare insurance premiums and prescriptions and even more. But now they’re being forced to pay more at the pump.”

Decades of gender-based exclusion at one of Hinduism’s most revered pilgrimage sites will once again be put under constitutional scrutiny this month, as India’s Supreme Court prepares to hear a high-stakes review of a 2018 ruling that opened the iconic Sabarimala Temple to women of menstruating age.

Located in the southern Indian state of Kerala, the Sabarimala shrine dedicated to Lord Ayyappa has long enforced a ban on all women between 10 and 50 years of age, a restriction rooted in traditional Hindu beliefs that frame menstruation as a state of ritual impurity. For generations, only prepubescent girls and post-menopausal women have been permitted to enter the temple, which draws millions of male devotees from across India annually.

That centuries-old practice was upended in 2018, when a five-judge Supreme Court bench delivered a landmark 3-2 verdict striking down the entry ban as discriminatory and unconstitutional. The majority ruled that the constitutional right to practice religion is guaranteed equally to all people regardless of gender, rejecting arguments that long-standing tradition justified the exclusion. The ruling’s lone female justice, Indu Malhotra, who has since retired, issued a notable dissent, arguing that courts should avoid interfering with deeply held religious sentiments, and that secular concepts of rationality have no place in adjudicating religious customs.

The 2018 verdict sparked widespread, sometimes violent protests across Kerala, with conservative groups mobilizing to block women attempting to access the temple; many women who tried to enter were turned away, and some were physically assaulted. In response, hundreds of thousands of supporters of gender equality in religious spaces held counter-protests, while dozens of petitions for judicial review of the 2018 ruling were filed with the Supreme Court by groups seeking to reinstate the ban.

The Supreme Court accepted the review petitions in 2019, first convening a seven-judge bench that quickly expanded the scope of the case to include a range of parallel gender and religious freedom disputes across India’s different faith communities. A planned 2020 hearing before a nine-judge constitutional bench was derailed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the case in limbo for years.

That changed this past weekend, when Chief Justice of India Surya Kant announced the reconstitution of the nine-judge constitutional bench to finally hear the petitions. The bench’s composition has drawn note for its deliberate diversity: it includes Justice BV Nagarathna, currently the only female judge on the Supreme Court and the justice in line to become India’s first female Chief Justice in 2025, with judges drawn from a cross-section of India’s religious, caste and regional communities. Legal analysts widely view this inclusive selection as an effort to build broader public legitimacy for a verdict that is certain to touch on deeply contested cultural and religious issues.

Beyond the future of Sabarimala, the bench’s ruling will set a binding precedent for a slate of other pressing questions around gender, religion and constitutional rights across India. These include challenges to entry bans for women in Parsi fire temples and Muslim mosques, the legal authority of religious institutions to excommunicate community members, and the long-debated legality of female genital mutilation practiced within the small Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community.

In the lead-up to the opening of hearings, the Travancore Devaswom Board, the government body that manages the Sabarimala temple, has urged the court to avoid intervening in faith-based traditional practices. India’s federal government has also formally signaled its support for the review petitions seeking to overturn the 2018 ruling. The hearings are scheduled to conclude on April 22, with a ruling expected in the coming months that will shape the contours of gender equality and religious freedom in India for decades to come.

Over the past decade, women’s rights activists across India have increasingly challenged centuries-old gender-based restrictions at religious sites, arguing that such exclusions violate the fundamental equal rights guaranteed to all citizens under India’s constitution. The outcome of the Sabarimala review is widely expected to either advance or set back that movement for equal access to religious spaces across the country.

In a landmark move marking the first visit by an incumbent leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party to mainland China in a decade, Kuomintang (KMT) chairperson Cheng Li-wun landed in mainland China on Monday. Cheng, who assumed the KMT’s top leadership post last year, confirmed she happily accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping for the six-day trip, framing her visit as an effort to build a “bridge for peace” across the Taiwan Strait.

Cross-strait communications have been partially frozen by Beijing since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence leaning Democratic Progressive Party took office as Taiwan’s president. Beijing cut the formal exchanges after Tsai refused to accept the 1992 Consensus, which endorses the one-China principle.

During her visit, Cheng is scheduled to travel across three major Chinese cities: Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beijing, with a planned meeting with President Xi expected in the final stretch of the trip. While the KMT has historically held warmer cross-strait ties with the Chinese Communist Party compared to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, analysts note that Cheng’s eager approach to this visit marks a clear shift from the more cautious stance adopted by her recent KMT predecessors.

The timing of the visit comes as growing skepticism toward the United States has spread among sectors of Taiwan’s public, a shift largely driven by inconsistent signals from former president Donald Trump on U.S. policy toward Taiwan and ongoing uncertainty stemming from the Middle East conflict, according to William Yang, a Northeast Asia analyst at the International Crisis Group, a non-profit global think tank.

Yang explained that Cheng is positioning this visit as an opportunity to demonstrate her ability as a political leader to sustain constructive cross-strait exchanges and work toward de-escalating long-running tensions between the two sides. For decades, Beijing has maintained its position that self-governed Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory, stating it will eventually reunify the island with the mainland and not ruling out the use of military force to achieve this goal. Meanwhile, a large share of Taiwan’s population identifies as a distinct sovereign nation.

While the United States officially recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China rather than Taipei, it has remained Taiwan’s largest provider of military arms for decades. In recent years, Trump has publicly stated that Taiwan should fully compensate the U.S. for any security protection it receives against mainland China. Just one week before Cheng’s arrival in mainland China, a bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers visited Taipei to push Taiwan’s legislature to pass a proposed $40 billion special defense budget, which is currently stalled in the opposition-controlled legislative body.

The invitation from Xi to Cheng also comes roughly one month before Xi is set to hold a scheduled meeting with Trump during Trump’s visit to Beijing on May 14 and 15. According to Wen-ti Sung, a political scientist at Australian National University’s Taiwan Centre, Beijing’s move to hold a cordial dialogue with Taiwan’s main opposition party is a strategic step to weaken arguments in favor of expanding U.S.-Taiwan defense cooperation.

This strategic positioning, Sung added, will allow Beijing to prioritize negotiating trade and economic agreements with the U.S. during Trump’s visit, rather than being forced to center the meeting on cross-strait disputes.

For Cheng and the KMT, the visit carries clear domestic political benefits ahead of Taiwan’s upcoming local elections scheduled for later this year. Though Cheng launched her political career as a pro-independence advocate, she has worked in recent years to build a public reputation as a cross-strait peacemaker. Yang notes that Cheng is attempting to navigate a careful middle path between Washington and Beijing, strengthening her own domestic leadership standing while highlighting that current Taiwan President Lai Ching-te has failed to restart official engagement with mainland China.

However, Cheng’s conciliatory stance toward Beijing has faced significant backlash within Taiwan, according to Chong Ja-Ian, a political scientist at the National University of Singapore. Chong explained that many Taiwanese voters view Cheng as an unprincipled opportunist who prioritizes her own political survival and advancement over core issues, a public perception that is reflected in opinion polls showing low public confidence in her leadership.

“That also means that she is willing to wheel and deal,” Chong added. “Who this benefits, and how much, are the bigger questions that remain unanswered.”