Word: monarchical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...street demonstrations by the urban middle class, who chafed under his increasingly authoritarian rule, the generals stepped in. Bangkok residents, euphoric at Thaksin's demise, showered the soldiers with praise and flowers. The military claimed that Thaksin was corrupt, dividing the country, fomenting violence, and disloyal to revered constitutional monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej (all allegations that Thaksin has denied). But while the generals' takeover was executed with impressive precision, the same can't be said of their administration of the country. Their appointed government of mostly elderly bureaucrats has been criticized as slow-moving and inept. A Muslim insurgency...
...Blush-colored shirts became a fashion craze in Thailand when King Bhumibol Adulyadej was spotted wearing a pale pink shirt and blazer last month. To meet the growing demand, the Commerce Ministry produced 30,000 more of the prized garments for those who wished to emulate their longest-serving monarch and honor his 80th birthday...
...public vote held to name a cat on the children's show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry, Cookie, in favor of Socks) and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence to suggest (deceptively) that the monarch had stormed out of a photo session...
...triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters (55% to 45%) decided that to have an Australian President appointed by a democratically elected government was elitist and unsafe, whereas to have an immensely rich hereditary monarch as their head of state was somehow democratic and good. To understand how this weird inversion could occur, one must be aware that Australians are even more skeptical about the character of their "pollies" than Americans are, though they have little reason to be: the level of serious political graft in Australia...
...fined the magazine's publishers 3,000 euros for "insulting the monarchy.") The couple were already having a tough year: A few months earlier, Letizia's sister had committed suicide. This fall, groups of Catalan nationalists publicly burned photos of the king and queen, and last week, Morocco's monarch temporarily recalled his ambassador from Madrid to protest the Spanish monarch's visit to the contested cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Through it all, Juan Carlos and his wife Sofia have maintained their habitual calm, confident, no doubt, of both of their high approval ratings and their own exquisite manners...