Global

There are a lot of anonymous bureaucrats that man the offices in the nation’s capital. If one were to mention the name Wendy Sherman at a Washington DC cocktail gathering it is likely that few in the room will have ever heard of her, but she has long been one of the most important players in Democratic Party administrations when it comes to foreign policy in key parts of the world. Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, will be retiring this summer after more than thirty years with the Foreign Service. She has been a fixture in often controversial top level policy making since Bill Clinton was in the White House, where she served as a top adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, also taking on the role of lead negotiator in the ultimately unsuccessful talks to stop North Korea’s ballistic missile program in the late 1990s.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat is, like their 1971 Broadway hit Jesus Christ Superstar, a rock
rendition of a tale from the Bible. Framed through the prism of a pop sensibility, these
ancient sagas are rendered with the style and sound of the late sixties/early seventies,
giving them a contemporary, hip veneer.
Whereas Superstar adapts the New Testament, Dreamcoat is derived from Genesis, the
very first book in the Old Testament. Joseph (Chris McCarrell) is the favorite of his
father Jacob’s (Peter Allen Vogt) dozen sons in Canaan, land of the Biblical Jews. A
clever young man, Joseph has the gift to interpret dreams – yet, somehow, he can’t
foresee that his envious siblings will turn on him. The betrayal of his brothers causes
Joseph to end up in Egypt, where his interpretation of the Pharoah’s (Daniel Dawson)
dreams leads to his being appointed as the Egyptian monarch’s righthand man.
I’d guestimate that only around 10 percent of this production is actually derivative of the
Old Testament tales. Dreamcoat spins a crowd pleasing two-act musical less than two

After signing a military decree on May 18, allowing illegal Israeli Jewish settlers to reclaim the abandoned Homesh settlement located in the northern Occupied West Bank, the Israeli government has informed the US Biden Administration that it will not turn the area into a new settlement.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Pita Limjaroenrat is deliberately entering a political minefield, littered with politicians and governments which failed.

Wealthy Mr. Pita's youth-led victory in nationwide elections on May 14 to try and become Thailand's youngest prime minister, is a vivid rejection by a large swath of Thai society against the U.S.-trained military's unpopular political domination and coups.

Mr. Pita, 42, is now struggling to have his Move Forward Party (MFP) form a coalition government uniting smaller parties, while litigious knives sharpen around him.

Projecting robust defiance, Mr. Pita said May 15 it would be "quite far-fetched" for anyone to oppose his victory.

"With the consensus that came out of the election, it will be quite a hefty price to pay for someone who is thinking of abolishing the election results, or forming a minority government," Mr. Pita said at a celebratory reception.

Ballots from Sunday's election for the 500-member House of Representatives gave him and his MFP the most votes of all candidates and parties.