massachusetts
Sometimes, it feels like your life has come full circle. For Israeli choreographer Roy Assaf, it was like that when he danced in his piece "The Hill," which had its US premiere this summer at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts. "The Hill" takes its name and inspiration from Ammunition Hill, the site of a brutal battle during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and several of its neighboring Arab countries.
It didn't take a divisive presidential election to get Mark Chester interested in immigrants. Chester has been celebrating immigrants for years, making it his mission to photograph two people from every nation. Chester is well on his way. Since 2011, he's photographed people from 185 of the world's 196 countries, all of them immigrants who have settled in Massachusetts, a state he affectionately calls "a mini United Nations."
With its future increasingly intertwined with ASEAN, the United States must maintain the momentum of its rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific, focusing on three pillars: comprehensive and inclusive security networks, economic integration and connectivity, and soft power and people-to-people ties.
Perhaps less apparent is the fact that the multiple dimensions of Beijing’s coercive diplomacy have been complemented by the Communist Party of China’s renewed utilization of people-to-people relations in order to advance political objectives.