Brig-Gen Thein Zaw, the minister for communications posts and telegraphs, was scheduled to arrive in Myitkyina, the capital of the Kachin State in northern Burma, on Friday to launch a campaign for the 2010 general election. (more…)

Underground youth activist group Generation Wave distributed leaflets around Rangoon yesterday to mark the one-year anniversary of the group’s founding, witnesses said. (more…)

Residents of cyclone-devastated townships in Rangoon have complained that they are being forced by local authorities to do unpaid reconstruction work, preventing them from earning money. (more…)

Major armed groups that had ceasefire agreements with the Burmese Army are inevitably divided between “doves” and “hawks,” as pressure to surrender arms and contest the 2010 elections mounts, according to sources inside Shan State. (more…)

The unstable political and economic situation in Burma (which was renamed Myanmar by the ruling junta) is driving a section of women in Kachin State into prostitution, sources said. They have been frequenting night clubs. (more…)

Famine in Chin State is causing people to abandon their native homeland, says an ethnic Chin man interviewed as he approached Three Pagodas Pass, on the Thai-Burma border. (more…)

Since the military government announced in July that it will issue licenses to unregistered motorcycles, sources say about 1,000 motorcycles are being smuggled into Burma each day from Thailand and China. (more…)

The Burmese tycoon Tay Za, head of the Htoo Trading Company, accompanied the junta’s number two, Vice Snr-Gen Maung Aye, on his recent three-day visit to Bangladesh, according to business sources in Rangoon. (more…)

The Burma junta’s second-in-command, vice senior general Maung Aye, has signed a contract in Dhaka leasing 50,000 acres of paddy fields in Arakan state to the Bangladeshi government. (more…)

Myanmar authorities have banned the import and distribution of nine Chinese dairy products found to be contaminated with the toxic industrial chemical melamine, state media reported Friday. (more…)

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has urged the federal government to promote democracy, human rights and religious freedom for people in Kazakhstan and Burma. (more…)

At the height of the bloody suppression by the Burma (Myanmar) regime of protesting monks last year, the heated question was whether the international community should intervene. In response, a well-known Chinese professor told an American newspaper “China has used tanks to kill people on Tiananmen Square. It is Myanmar’s sovereign right to kill their own people, too.” (more…)