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• BANGKOK (AP) -- Thailand's all-powerful army chief started the extraordinary meeting by asking participants to give a progress report on their "homework."
• The participants were the country's most important political rivals, plus four Cabinet ministers from the embattled government, election commissioners and senators. The homework: solving a crisis so complex it has split the Southeast Asian nation for nearly a decade, fueling repeated spasms of bloodshed and upheaval.
• They didn't know it then, but they only had about two hours to figure it all out. Just after 4:30 p.m. Thursday, the conference room would be sealed by soldiers, and the man who called the meeting, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, would become Thailand's new ruler.
• Accounts of those pivotal moments at a military complex in Bangkok known as the Army Club, relayed by two lawmakers who were present and Thai media, indicate that Prayuth had no intention of engaging in the kind of protracted negotiation necessary to mediate a conflict that reignited last year when protesters took to the streets.
• The sequence of events raises questions about whether the meeting was a ruse to neutralize anyone who might oppose the coup. The fact it happened so swiftly suggests that Prayuth was already planning to do what demonstrators had pushed for all along: overthrow the government, if the two sides could not reach a compromise.
• ___

• AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Pope Francis has arrived in Jordan, kicking off his three-day trip to the Middle East.
• The pope's flight from Rome landed Saturday afternoon at Amman's Queen Alia International Airport.
• Pope Francis will meet with King Abdullah II and Queen Rania at the royal palace first.
• Then he'll celebrate Mass in Amman's International Stadium. The Vatican expects some 25,000 people to attend, many of them Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi

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