yarl network - யாழ் இணையம்

By Amy Sawitta Lefevre BANGKOK (Reuters) - Her eyes welling with tears, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra pleaded on Tuesday for anti-government demonstrators to clear the streets and support a snap election, but defiant protest leaders called for her to step down within 24 hours. After weeks of sometimes violent street rallies, protesters rejected her call on Monday for a general election and said she should be replaced by an unelected "people's council", a proposal that has stoked concern Southeast Asia's second-biggest economy may abandon the democratic process. Yingluck said she would continue her duties as caretaker prime minister until the election, which is set for February 2. Yingluck, a 46-year-old former businesswoman, had no political experience before entering a 2011 election that she won by a landslide, largely on the back of rural support.

By Niklas Pollard STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system. "I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality," said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament's education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party. In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health. Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden's secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.