Yangon – A man detained at a police station Wednesday in eastern Myanmar detonated a bomb, killing himself and wounding at least four policeman in the latest in series of blasts apparently linked to political discontent. (more…)

Rangoon—People along Burma’s western coastal areas should pay close attention to weather reports of cyclones and storms in the Bay of Bengal during the early monsoon season in April and May, experts have warned. (more…)

The Karen National Union/Karen National Liberation Army (KNU/KNLA) Peace Council, an armed ethnic ceasefire group, has apparently defied the Burmese junta’s order to transform into a state militia, saying the junta has not fulfilled its ceasefire agreements. (more…)

Washington – Armed ethnic groups in rural Burma face a choice on Wednesday – join a government militia, or be outlawed and face possible attack.  The standoff between the two sides has renewed fears of violence along the China-Burma border. (more…)

Large-scale civil war can break out again, warned Lt-Gen Yawdserk, leader of the anti-Naypyitaw Shan State Army (SSA) ‘South’, given the military junta’s one sided policy to convert all ceasefire groups into forces controlled by the Burmese Army. (more…)

Imprisoned Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt, whose role in disseminating news of the September 2007 uprising in Burma won him international applaud, has received the prestigious PEN/Barbara Goldsmith award. (more…)

Harn Lay, The Irrawaddy’s illustrator and cartoonist, has received a Hellman/Hammett grant for his political cartoons and art penned against the Burmese regime. (more…)

Tonight PEN will honor Nay Phone Latt, a young Burmese blogger who is serving a twelve-year sentence in a remote and harsh prison for using his blog and the Rangoon Internet cafés he owned to spread news about the street demonstrations that peacefully challenged Burma’s military regime in 2007. I wanted to meet Nay Phone Latt when I travelled to Burma in early 2008, but he’d already been arrested. I met other young bloggers, journalists, and activists who knew him. They were almost painfully earnest and idealistic. They believed that their movement, because it was largely leaderless and decentralized, like the Web itself, would be more durable, harder to crush, than earlier democratic movements. They had heard of Foucault, and one blogger spoke of a postmodern opposition. Since then, many of those young Burmese have been jailed, for years and even decades; others have fled the country. Foucault has turned out to be no more help to the beleaguered Burmese than any of his predecessors. (more…)

The Ten Alliances of Burmas democracy and ethnic rights movement expressed support for the European Unions renewal of its Common Position on Burma for another year, which also extended economic sanctions on the military regime. (more…)