Global

Harold Pinter was a prolific playwright and screenwriter. I enjoyed the 1960s films he’d written the screenplays for, The Servant and Accident, which were directed by that refugee from the Hollywood Blacklist, Joseph Losey. After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter’s rather heroic, 2005 noble Nobel Lecture dared to challenge the prevailing pro-war propaganda, excoriating the Iraq War. Although he was too sick to travel to Scandinavia, the hospitalized 75-year-old British man of letters videotaped his 46-minute frontal assault on U.S. foreign policy that was screened at the Swedish Academy. (See: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/.) Pinter did the best thing one can do with status, using it as a platform to be a scourge of the status quo, an implacable enemy of social injustice.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- After 15 years as an international fugitive ousted in a coup, homesick billionaire ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returned on August 22, allowing the Supreme Court to sentence him to eight years for corruption and send him under heavy security to Bangkok's grim Remand Prison.

Hours later, in a backroom choreographed arrangement which is still playing out, Parliament ended a three-month deadlock and elected the candidate of Mr. Thaksin's extended party to be prime minister, politically inexperienced real estate tycoon Srettha Thavisin, 60.

Mr. Thaksin's spectacular return may have been in expectation that Mr. Srettha will somehow grant him leniency.

Mr. Srettha, relatively unknown to the public, said he will "improve the living conditions of all Thai people."

The prime minister-elect's name needs the king's endorsement before he can take over.

Mr. Srettha secured the prime ministry only by including, in his 11-party coalition, two political parties -- the United Thai and Palang Pracharath -- linked to the most recent 2014 coup.