Former Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, who prefers to be known as “BTP” following his release from prison, met with the leader of Hanura party, Oesman Sapta Odang (OSO), on Friday evening.The meeting was recorded on camera and uploaded on OSO TV, a YouTube channel owned by OSO, and it quickly went viral as it answered a burning question; will there be a wedding soon?

After complimenting BTP on “looking younger”, OSO asked the former governor, “Is the rumor true that you’re getting married?” to which BTP replied, “Yes. Because my mother said ‘Hok, I cannot take care or live with you, I’m in my 70s. How long [do I have to take care of you]?”

“My mother also said ‘your wife should be my replacement to cook, make cakes and take care of you’. The last one didn’t want to,” he added. BTP said his mother had advised him to get married right away, before reaching the age of 55.

He confirmed his plans to marry Second Brig. Puput Nastiti Devi, a police officer. “Yes, it’s her. She has been helping [my mother] cook for a long time now.”

BTP told OSP that it all started when full police protection for his family was ordered by Gen. Tito Karnavian following the “411” rally in 2016. “I didn’t think that I would date a female police officer. That never entered my mind,” he said.

“A friend of mine came and said that I should marry somebody with ‘the same palm lines’. My ex-wife, in Chinese beliefs, could not accept her luck and that is why we parted. It doesn’t mean [my future wife] has to have the same lines on her palms as I do, but it means that our fate is the same,” BTP said.

Read also: Marriage forms signed: Wedding bells for BTP and Puput?

Following this conversation with his friend BTP asked to meet Puput, then his wife’s aide, and to his surprise, the lines on their palms matched. He also mentioned that Puput came from a family of police officers.

Halfway into the interview with OSO, BTP invited Puput to join in and show her palms to the camera to compared them with his.

According to BTP, his relationship with Puput has led to an improvement in his mother’s health. “My mother is now healthier. Her cholesterol level is below 200,” he said.

“She knows that there will be somebody to take care of her son. She already trusts me,” Puput chimed in.

When asked whether she was of Chinese ancestry, Puput said she had no knowledge of any Chinese ethnicity, “I don’t know about that, all I know is that my whole family is Javanese, but yes, most of my family have fair skin and chubby cheeks.”

Rumors about the impending marriage between BTP and Puput had been circulating weeks prior to his release. Both families denied the rumors, although City Council speaker Prasetio Edi Marsudi had confirmed the Feb. 15 wedding. “I will be their witness,” he said as quoted by tempo.co recently.

Basuki Tjahaja Purnama divorced his wife, Veronica Tan, in April 2018.

Finally, almost five years after ousting the elected government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shina-watra with the barrel of a gun, the military junta has called for an election.

The March 24 elections will end the military rule that began in 2014. Army chief Prayut Chan-o-cha led a bloodless coup that toppled the government then led by the Pheu Thai party. The coup leader took over as prime minister.

What happened to Shinawatra then was history repeating itself.

In 2006, the military launched a coup against her brother, then Prime Minister Thaksin Shina-watra, when he was in New York City to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

I remember that coup. At that time, I was The Star’s Thailand correspondent based in Bangkok and also the Asia News Network (ANN) editor.

That night, I was home in Bangna near Bangkok when I received a phone call saying there was an ongoing coup. I rushed to the nearby The Nation office where I worked.

Thasong Asvasena, a journalist from The Nation, told me not to worry as friendly soldiers had arrived to secure the newspaper’s premises. I looked out the window and saw armed soldiers surrounding the building.

It was called the Happy Coup as many Bangkokians hated Thaksin. They were delighted to see the end of his reign.

But that was not the end of Thaksin’s political grip on Thailand. The billionaire is like the Terminator. He’ll be back – through political parties linked to him.

Although he was in self-imposed exile, his party, the People Power Party (PPP, a reincarnation of his Thai Rak Thai party which had been banned by the military junta) won the election in 2007.

A year later PPP lost power in a “judicial coup” in which Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, who is married to Thaksin and Yingluck’s sister, was forced from office by a Constitutional Court ruling. The court disbanded PPP for electoral fraud and barred its leaders from participating in politics for five years.

Opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva, from the Democrat party, formed a coalition and became Prime Minister.

In 2011, an election was called. Pheu Thai (the reincarnation of the banned PPP) won in a landslide victory and Yingluck became Thailand’s first female prime minister.

In 2014, the military seized power. It was the country’s 12th coup d’etat since the first in 1932.

Now, in 56 days, Thais will go to the polls. The big question is, can the self-exiled Thaksin, whose party has never lost an election, make a political comeback through his Pheu Thai alliance?

On Friday in Bangkok, I met Sean Boonpracong, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Yingluck, and Cod Satrusayang, the managing editor of ANN, to get their insights into Thai politics.

“Can Thaksin make a comeback?” I asked them in separate interviews.

“Absolutely, because essentially the Thai Rak Thai, PPP and Pheu Thai parties – which are the incarnations of Thaksin’s political base – know how to capture the political aspirations of the people,” said Boonpracong.

After more than four years in power, the military junta could not deliver what the people wanted, he said.

Boonpracong said early polls – by various credible pollsters – indicate that Pheu Thai and its allies, such as Thai Raksa Chart and Future Forward (led by auto parts billionaire Thanathorn Juangroong-ruangkit), could win 272 to 300 seats for MPs out of 500.

“It looks like Pheu Thai will still win. Despite the odds stacked against them, despite the military drafting a Constitution that’s supposed to be anti-them, despite the redrawing of the constituencies, they will still win,” said Satru-sayang.

The question now, said the ANN editor, is not whether Pheu Thai will win – “But whether they’ll win by a large enough margin so that the other side can’t call in the clause that can put in place an unelected prime minister who is not an MP,” he said.

The electoral odds are stacked in favour of the military junta, though.

There will be 750 representatives – 500 MP posts (constituency and party lists) from the lower house of Parliament (like our Dewan Rakyat) up for grabs and 250 from the upper house (like our Dewan Negara) comprising junta appointees and military brass. These 750 people will decide who will be prime minister.

In theory, the junta needs parties aligned to it, such as Phalang Pracharat, to have 126 MPs win seats as it has 250 senators (who are not elected, remember). The math is 126 + 250 = 376, which is a simple majority.

Whereas Pheu Thai and its allies have to have 376 MPs win to form the government, as the 250 senators are all junta appointees.

In a nutshell, the junta leaders can still remain in power even without an elected representative majority.

Even if Pheu Thai and its allies win most of the votes, there is no guarantee that it can form the government because the electoral system favours the military junta, said Boonpracong.

“Pheu Thai (and its allies) have to win the lower house seats overwhelmingly,” he said.

When I was working in Bangkok from 2006 to 2010, Thailand was divided into two groups: “I love Thaksin” and “I hate Thaksin”. There was no middle ground. And those who loved Thaksin hated those who hated Thaksin. And those who hated Thaksin had no love for those who loved Thaksin.

Thaksin has been in voluntary exile since 2006, and I was curious to know whether he is still a divisive figure.

Well, after more than four years of junta rule, the divisiveness – based on social media postings – has reduced, Boonpracong said.

“As he has not been in power for 12 years, essentially, they (those who hate him) can’t blame Thailand’s ills on the bogeyman that is Thaksin,” he said.

Satrusayang said Thaksin is really popular in rural areas, especially in the north-east and north. The former prime minister, he said, is still popular among the poor because of his populist policies, such as cheap health care and loans when he was in power.

“They also have a feeling that they voted for this guy and the Bangkok elites keep overthrowing him over and over again – as if they know better. There’s an us (the poor in the north and north-east) against them (elite Bangkokians) mentality,” he said.

Boonpracong said: “Thaksin is just a politician who we should not overpraise. But overall he has he has done a lot of good for the people on the periphery who make up 70% of the bottom rung of Thai society.

“He has moved the earth to make their life better economically,” he said.

Bangkokians, Boonpracong feels, are less angry at Thaksin. “They feel that Thailand’s economic performance the last five years under the junta has been less dynamic than our neighbours’,” he said.

Satrusayang, however, feels that Thaksin is still hated by most Bangkok people. But there’s not as much intensity between the red shirts (pro-Thaksin) and yellow shirts (anti-Thaksin), he said.

“The yellows and reds agree that they hate the military more because it has been in power for too long,” he said.

“The yellows aren’t going to vote for Pheu Thai and reds won’t vote for the Democrats (or junta aligned parties) but the military is the central figure of hate now.”

According to Satrusayang, this is because when the military came into power it promised that it would be gone in a year.

“Now it has been more than four years. They kept on postponing the elections, they keep on lying, they keep on infringing on civil liberties.”

The military junta, except for Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, is not popular, said Satrusayang.

“Prayut is decently popular because he is seen as a funny uncle. But Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan is hated because of his watch scandal,” he said. (Wongsuwan is said to own a collection of undeclared luxury watches.)

It looks like Thaksin’s alliance will win the popular vote but it won’t be easy for it to form the government.

It needs about 100 senators to switch sides or for the junta (under pressure from a higher power) to blink on polling night.

“These young people have already suffered enough violence and abuse during their journey to Italy and are particularly vulnerable,” Raffaela Milano, the director of the Italian arm of Save the Children, said in a statement.

She called for an “immediate” response to the call by Catania prosecutors to allow the minors on board the Dutch-flagged rescue ship Sea Watch 3, currently sheltering from bad weather off Sicily, to be disembarked.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), its children’s agency (UNICEF) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) also called for an “urgent” solution for the minors and other migrants, saying the situation was “critical”.

But far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini repeated his refusal to take in the migrants, and claimed the 13 unaccompanied minors were nearly 18 years old and not children.

“I will not change my mind. Italy’s ports are closed and will remain closed to people traffickers and their accomplices,” he said.

Salvini has insisted Germany or the Netherlands take responsibility for the 47 mainly sub-Saharan African migrants, who were rescued off Libya by the German NGO Sea Watch a week ago.

“Dutch ship and German NGO? Amsterdam or Berlin are waiting for you,” he said.

Dutch Migration Minister Mark Harbers said his country “was not obligated” to find a solution, telling Italy’s Corriere della Sera daily that the Sea Watch 3 had acted “of its own initiative”.

“It is up to the captain to find a safe port for the 47 migrants he saved,” he said in the interview, adding that the Dutch government would “not participate in an ad hoc solution”.

‘Every minute counts’

“For three days we have faced storms, strong winds and heavy rain,” a doctor on board told ANSA news agency.

The migrants “are wet because there is not enough room under cover. They have no room to rest,” she said, adding that many of them had scars from violence inflicted on them in Libya.

The mayor of Syracuse, Francesco Italia, has said he would welcome those rescued and some inhabitants in the Sicilian coastal city on Saturday hung white sheets from their balconies, with the message “let them disembark”.

Dozens of residents gathered for a sit-in on the beach, where the ship could be seen just over a mile out.

Sea Watch called for “an end to this odyssey” and cited a 16-year-old Guinean onboard who left home two years ago to find work to support his family after his father died, and who said he was forced in Libya to work at gunpoint for no pay.

“They killed one of my friends in front of me. He was killed because one morning he couldn’t get up to go to work,” he said.

Milano warned that “every extra minute spent on the ship… is likely to leave indelible marks that these youngsters will carry with them for the rest of their lives”.

Migrants rescued by ships have frequently been left in limbo since Italy’s anti-immigration government began turning them away last summer.

Since coming to power last year, Italy has been demanding greater solidarity from reluctant fellow EU states.

But EU members have failed to agree on a permanent mechanism to relocate migrants who reach Europe’s shores, even though arrivals have dropped sharply since a peak more than three years ago.

Seven bodies were recovered Friday hours after the disaster, after a torrent of mud broke through the dam at the iron-ore mine close to the city of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerias, around 1:00 pm.

By early Saturday the official death toll had risen to nine, local firefighters said, who also doubled the number of people presumed missing from the previous toll to nearly 300 people.

Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais, told reporters that while all was being done to find survivors, “from now, the odds are minimal and it is most likely we will recover only bodies”.

Brazil’s new president Jair Bolsonaro, who rushed home from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is scheduled to fly over the disaster zone Saturday along with his defense minister.

The mine is owned by Brazilian mining giant Vale. It was involved in a 2015 mine collapse in the same state that claimed 19 lives and is regarded as the country’s worst-ever environmental disaster.

Vale shares plummeted on the new accident, losing eight percent in New York trading.

Minas Gerais officials obtained a court order blocking Vale’s bank account in the state to the tune of $270 million, money that would used for victim relief, according to the G1 news website.

‘Where are our relatives?’

The massive, muddy flow from the collapse barreled towards the nearby town of Brumadinho, population 39,000, but did not hit it directly.

Instead, it carved its way across roads, vegetation and farmland, taking down a bridge, and damaging or destroying homes.

Television images showed people being pulled out of waist-high mud into rescue helicopters, dozens of which were in use by late Friday because land access had been cut off.

Brazil’s new government reacted to its first major emergency by launching disaster coordination between the defense, mining and environment ministries and the authorities in the affected state of Minas Gerais.

Bolsonaro’s environment minister raced to the area late Friday.

“Where are our relatives?” wailed Raquel Cristina, one of several people demanding information about their missing kin in the mud-hit area.

“My five-year-old nephew is asking me if his dad died. What do I tell him?” asked another, Olivia Rios.

Some of the firefighters used earth-moving machinery to dig down to engulfed dwellings.

Would-be rescue volunteers were warned away because of the slippery, perilous piles of mud. Media were urged not to use drones to avoid collisions with the helicopters.

Up to 150 of those missing worked in the company’s administrative offices which were closest to the dam break, the firefighters said.

Walter Morais, a member of the Red Cross team sent to the disaster zone, told AFP that his relief group “will begin humanitarian actions helping people who were rescued and are homeless”.

‘Human tragedy’

Vale CEO Fabio Schvartsman called the incident a “human tragedy” and was resigned to more deaths being confirmed at his company’s mine.

“We’re talking about probably a large number of victims — we don’t know how many but we know it will be a high number,” he told a media conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Schvartsman, who had his two-year term renewed last month by Vale’s board, said it was an “inactive dam” that was in the process of being decommissioned that burst apart “very violently, very suddenly”.

Its contents — tailings, or mining byproducts mixed with water — cascaded into another dam, which overflowed, he said.

The disaster recalled trauma from the 2015 dam break near Mariana, in Minas Gerais. That accident released millions of tons of toxic iron waste along hundreds of kilometers (miles). Vale was joint operator of that dam, along with the Anglo-Australian group BHP.

The Brazil office of Greenpeace, the environmental activist group, said Friday’s dam break was “a sad consequence of the lessons not learned by the Brazilian government and the mining companies”.

Such incidents “are not accidents but environmental crimes that must be investigated, punished and repaired”, it added.

Some 600 revellers partied under a blazing sun as the discreet community slowly emerges into the limelight in a country where gay sex remains illegal.

Compared to just five years ago when the festival got off the ground, “Myanmar LGBT people, especially young people, are now more courageous and more ‘out’,” said Hla Myat Tun, co-director of &Proud, which organises the celebration and other events across the country.

Last year marked a milestone after authorities granted permission to hold the event for the first time in a public park with some 12,000 people coming along.

Flushed with their success, organisers re-branded this year’s event as a true ‘Pride’, even if a full march through the streets remains an elusive goal in a country still wary of protests.

Billboards sporting huge photos of LGBT couples were plastered across the city in the build-up to the festival.

The boat party kicked off the packed programme of events that will include films, debates and the much-anticipated drag queen Olympics, featuring handbag throwing and stiletto races.

But there is a very serious message beneath the flamboyance.

Perceptions can be very different away from the main cities and many LGBT people often still face discrimination in the socially-conservative country.

“Most non-LGBT people are not understanding LGBT persons,” said 28-year-old activist and transgender woman Shin Thant, adding that a lot more work is needed to combat the comical stereotypes of LGBT people reinforced by TV and film.

The festival’s theme this year is “Heroes” to celebrate those who are standing up to fight for the community.

Macho actor Okkar Min Maung was recognised as a role model after shocking the country with his coming out Facebook video last year.

He was travelling in the US, but his mother accepted the award on his behalf, saying she was happy to have a gay son.

With rainbow flags painted on his cheeks and pink beads round his wrist, make-up artist Thu Yar Zaw, 25, told AFP how much the festival means to him.

“At work people didn’t accept me being gay. I was quite depressed, but I don’t have that feeling any more.”