Thailand’s government must hold elections soon to prove it has a public mandate after protests that left 90 dead in the nation’s capital, a lawyer for fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said today.

Thailand’s Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on terrorism charges related to the country’s recent bloody protests.

Judges in Moscow are in their ninth day of reading the verdict in oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s trial, going over details of tax evasion charges, as the politically-charged case approached its end.

Yukos tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky returns to court for a fourth day for the gruelling reading of the verdict in his fraud case today, with his frustrated lawyers speculating that the numbing pace is aimed at killing interest in the biggest trial in post-Soviet Russia.

RUSSIA’S richest man, billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, went on trial in Moscow yesterday in a case that will delve into the murky privatisations that accompanied the dismantling of the Soviet Union.