Yangon: Myanmar Foreign Minister U Win Aung said his country wishes to develop friendly ties with all countries in the world and development of such ties with its five neighbors, including China, stands as Myanmar’s target of priority.
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July 4: For more than half of his forty years, all of his adult life, Win Myint, a Burmese from the Karen State of Burma, has been living in Mae Sot, Tak province. Since he left in 1980 he has never returned to his native village, about 320 kilometres across rivers and mountains to the northwest.
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Guwahati: There has been a large-scale increase in drug smuggling, including psychotropic substances, across the Northeast of India.
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Yangon: Myanmar is making preparations for the establishment of steel plants and machinery equipment factories in three industrial zones to produce equipment as import-substitutes, a local news journal reported Thursday.
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Bangkok: Thai police have arrested a woman accused of helping her husband torture their 18-year-old Myanmar maid, who was later set on fire and then died at a hospital.
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October 15: Special Report: Aids: Drugs

Chris Beyrer started working with HIV/Aids in Thailand in the early 1990s on one of the first trials of an Aids vaccine, among military recruits. But he grew impatient: “I found the vaccine trials frustratingly slow since we were obviously in the midst of an epidemic,” he says. So he moved out of applied medicine and helped to set up a programme at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to train Asian health officials and doctors in Aids prevention.
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Italian sportswear brand Sergio Tacchini is to stop getting kit made in Burma.
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October 7: Raleigh: US President George W. Bush signed a law renewing a range of sanctions against military-ruled Myanmar for a further period of 12 months, the White House announced.
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Phnom Penh: What do you do with a region where the economic rationale points to a large measure of integration but political and historic divisions keep the place apart?
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