Journalists working in military-ruled Myanmar continue to face intimidation, torture and arrests in reporting on the country’s corrupt and brutal regime, despite international calls for more press freedom, a conference on media safety heard Tuesday. (more…)

New Delhi  – The Burmese military junta authorities in Rangoon Division have banned a sermon by abbot U Thumingla, organizers and friends said. (more…)

Rangoon – In a dark room in a dormitory for workers at a steel factory, a 58-year-old woman is fanning her daughter, who is moaning in agony and covered in sweat. “It hurts, it hurts,” the young woman groans. “Mother, it hurts.” (more…)

A striped rabbit, a rodent thought to have gone extinct 11 million years ago, a frog with green blood and turquoise bones, and a hot-pink millipede that secretes cyanide are just a few of the new species that have been discovered in the Greater Mekong Region of Southeast Asia in just the last decade, according to a new report by the WWF. (more…)

Yangon – Myanmar and Thailand will continue to work for raising the momentum of mutually-beneficial economic cooperation between the two countries next year, the local weekly journal Yangon Times quoted Myanmar’s biggest business organization as reporting Wednesday. (more…)

New York – The United Nations said on Tuesday that there is no immediate plan for its special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, to visit the country. (more…)

Last month, U Gambira, a leader of the All Burma Monks Alliance, received a 68-year sentence for his role in organizing last year’s Saffron Revolution, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and political activists peacefully protested the junta’s brutal regime. Myanmar comedian Zarganar was sentenced to 59 years in jail by one of the military junta’s secret courts. His crime? Publicly criticizing the regime’s slow response to Cyclone Nargis. And poet Saw Wai received a lighter sentence: a “mere” two years. His crime? Penning an eight-line Valentine’s Day poem that contained a hidden message. Putting the first letters of each line of the poem together read “Power Crazy Than Shwe” in Burmese, mocking the junta’s leader. Two years in prison. That’s three months per line. 9.4 days per word. (more…)

When I finally picked up Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles earlier this week, I arrived with a unique array of biases:

I have not read either Pyongyang or Shenzhen, Delisle’s previous two travelogues from Drawn & Quarterly. I was, however, fresh off Secret Invasion Dark Reign. (more…)

ASEAN Should Monitor Jailed Activists
New York – Burma’s military government has used the country’s legal mechanisms to intimidate political prisoners and to deny them access to justice, Human Rights Watch said today, citing new testimony from a defense lawyer who has just fled the country. In a crackdown that started in October 2008, Burma’s courts have sentenced over 200 political and labor activists, internet bloggers, journalists, and Buddhist monks and nuns to lengthy jail terms. (more…)

The Burmese military junta sentenced three ethnic Kachin student leaders to one year in a forced labor camp which doubles as a prison on charges of being involved in a ‘racial movement’ in Mon Ywa University in Sagaing Division in northern Burma in September, said Kachin student sources. (more…)

Authorities in Bago division’s Nyaunglebin district have been forcing farmers to grow sunflowers and threatening to confiscate lands of those who refuse to comply, according to locals. (more…)

Chief Justice U Aung Toe met with division, districts and townships judges of Yangon Division at Supreme Court (Yangon) yesterday. (more…)

Murder, suicide and torture among gamblers has been rising steadily with the opening of Chinese-owned casinos along the Sino-Burma border meant to earn money in the shortest possible time by Burma’s ethnic insurgents’
ceasefire groups, said border sources. (more…)

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) received at his office in Riyadh His Excellency Khin Zaw Win, Ambassador of Myanmar to Saudi Arabia. The meeting was attended by Ms. Nahla Alanbar, Personal Assistant to HRH the Chairman. (more…)

The World Association of Newspapers condemned the crackdown on freedom of expression in Burma, in a press statement released on Monday. (more…)

Political observers and leaders of opposition and ethnic groups in Burma said they would like to see UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon return to the country to push for political reform, even as they expressed doubts about his chances of persuading the ruling junta to change its ways. (more…)

In Burma the people are afraid of their rulers – and the rulers are so afraid of the people that they hide from them in a crazy capital city hundreds of miles from anywhere. The only open opposition comes from a lonely woman in a besieged villa and a troupe of comedians in a tiny back-street theatre, who are forbidden to tell jokes in their native language. (more…)

Since 2003, many political events and diplomatic initiatives in connection with Burma have proved that the military regime still basks in its well-calculated isolationism. Willing to go “back to the old habits” inherited from the autarchic and strictly controlled Ne Win regime (1962-1988) as well as the Burmese kings traditions, this policy of “isolationism without isolation” was clearly illustrated by the entrenchment in Naypyidaw initiated in 2005, the careful courting of regional powers – especially China, India and Russia – and the way the SPDC has somehow “survived” the September 2007 and May 2008 crises and external pressure it was the object. Given the international community’s inability to exert any credible and concrete leverage over it, it has somehow contorted its position. (more…)

Washington, DC – On behalf of the Women’s League of Burma, thank you. It is a great honor to receive the Madeleine K. Albright Grant from NDI. We see this award as international recognition of our work to empower women to participate in political decision-making. It affirms the importance of our efforts for the restoration of democracy in Burma. Your support has rekindled our strength to continue the struggle. We are deeply honored to share this occasion with Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu who serves as a source of inspiration to our democracy movement. (more…)

Burma Campaign UK has published a list of 170 companies that directly or indirectly help to finance the military junta ruling Burma. (more…)