Global

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Millions of Thais were gripped with suspense, misery, or delight seeing a Shakespearean display of political knives and an agonized "Et tu Brute?" echoing in the hostile Senate when it voted twice to crush popular Pita Limjaroenrat's chances to become prime minister.

The grim, militarized, junta-appointed 249-member Senate was not a welcoming place for Pita, 44, who won a nationwide House election in May, promising to reform the U.S.-trained military and stop them repeatedly seizing power through coups.

Pita also wanted to "reform" the constitutional monarchy, slash the military's opaque budget and lucrative commercial enterprises, downsize the swollen number of generals, end conscription, and disband the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) which is currently grappling with Islamist Malay-Thai separatists in the south.

The Senate's votes on July 13 and 19 ended Pita's current climb to the prime ministry.

Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum goes Bollywood, with Terrence McNally’s India-set A Perfect Ganesh, which opens with a barefoot Apsara (Shivani Thakkar) or celestial nymph in Hindu mythology, traditionally dancing onstage in age-old Indian radiant raiment. The dancer is followed by Ganesha (Mueen Jahan), the narrator wearing an elephant mask, denoting the Hindu god Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, bearer of good luck and patron of arts.      

“. . . we need to do everything we can to keep (global) warming as low as possible.”

When it comes to climate change, one two-letter word has me totally perplexed: “we.” There’s an implication of global unity — a transcendent “we,” marching as to war (so to speak) — facing humanity’s greatest crisis, undoing the exploitative, Earth-destroying aspects of our social structure and grabbing control over the planet’s rising temperature. We need to do everything we can!

This is the perfect opportunity for Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to exit the stage. But he will not. 

Abbas’ brief visit to the devastated Jenin refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on July 12 demonstrated the absurdity and danger of the PA and its 87-year-old leader. 

As he walked, Abbas struggled to keep his balance, in what was promoted as a ‘solidarity’ visit to the camp.

“A riddle wrapped up in an enigma” is a shortened form of a quotation made in October 1939, just one month after the Second World War had begun, by Sir Winston Churchill in a radio broadcast to the British people. At the time, Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. The full comment was “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…” Somehow that statement popped up into my head as I tried to decipher the meaning of the Yevgeny Prigozhin alleged coup attempt in Russia on Saturday June 24th, an unanticipated development that has energized the imaginations of pundits and government officials worldwide, generating a torrent of written articles as well as many hours’ worth of spoken commentary.