He was dancing on the beach at the time, at the tail end of the massive new year party on Haad Rin beach, which had attracted tens of thousands of mostly young foreign tourists.

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The minister of defence, Ehud Barak, has said his Labour Party will leave the coalition at the end of the year if there is more building and no talking.

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The president says he will also hold talks with the United Front, which formed the outgoing government, and the Congress party, which supported it until the end of last year.

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Nor was Kim Dae Jung able to convince the PM to merge his United Liberal Democratic Party (ULDP) with the president's proposed new party, or even remain in their current alliance through the end of his five-year term.

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It replaced a supposedly neutral caretaker government that, under Bangladesh's fraught two-party system, normally takes over for three months at the end of a government's five-year term to oversee fair elections.

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