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An anti-government protester waves a flag bearing a portrait of Che Guevara behind a barricade built with bamboo poles and tires in Bangkok on Sunday, April 25. Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Saturday rejected an offer by demonstrators to end weeks of increasingly violent protests in return for early polls. BANGKOK - Security forces and agitated protesters faced off at a major intersection Friday after bloody grenade attacks rattled Thailand's chaotic capital — a scene of tense, weekslong confrontations between die-hard demonstrators and a wavering government. The late-night attacks killed three people and wounded 75, Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban said. Attackers shot five M-79 grenades from near where anti-government Red Shirt protesters have been encamped and the blasts struck areas where counter-demonstrators have gathered, but Suthep stopped short of directly blaming the Red Shirts for the attack. The mostly rural Red Shirts have been entrenched on ...

The Billionaire Dissident An oil tycoon in a glass cage aspires to be Russia's next Sakharov. BY SUSAN GLASSER, PETER BAKER   |   MAY/JUNE 2010 He has been stabbed, spied on, and sent to solitary confinement. His oil company assets have been seized by the state, his fortune decimated, his family fractured. And now, after nearly seven years in a Siberian prison camp and a Moscow jail cell, he is back on trial in a Russian courtroom, sitting inside a glass cage and waiting for a new verdict that could keep him in the modern Gulag for much of the rest of his life. Each day, he is on display as if in a museum exhibit, trapped for all to see inside what his son bitterly calls "the freaking aquarium." Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest man, the most powerful of the oligarchs who emerged in the post-Soviet rush of crony capitalism, and the master of 2 percent of the world's oil production. Now he is the most prominent prisoner in Vladimir Putin's Russia...