Government ministers serving under Burma’s ruling junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), will likely resign from their posts before the opening session of Parliament on Jan. 31, according to official sources in the administrative capital of Naypyidaw. (more…)

New Delhi – According to Naypyidaw observers, retired General Thura Shwe Man has the best chance to become the new President in the upcoming Parliament. (more…)

Overseas development assistance for Burma has fallen by some 30 percent since 2008, despite an overall increase in global aid distribution.

The quantity of ODA going into Burma is now lower than Cambodia, despite having a population three times the size, the UN’s IRIN news agency said. (more…)

Caring for the displaced in the Burmese jungle – and fleeing with them as the army advances.

Weighed down with 10kg packs of medical supplies – as well as her clothes, food and three young children – Hsa Mu Na sets out from her organisation’s headquarters in Mae Sot, Thailand, for five hours by car, four hours by boat and three days by foot to a conflict-plagued region of Burma where medical care would be nonexistent were it not for her and her colleagues. (more…)

Bangkok — A boat carrying 67 Rohingya refugees claiming persecution in Myanmar, the second such in two days, has landed at Thailand, officials said.

Earlier 91 refugees arrived during the weekend, about two years after a similar incident in which Thailand was accused of inhumanely turning the Rohingya back to sea, CNN reported. (more…)

Bangkok – Burma’s military is pressing on with the privatization of state assets as part of economic reforms. Many critics say the program simply transfers assets to the military government’s allies and maintains its economic control.
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Bangladesh has initiated a dialogue with a Myanmarese company to buy hydropower from Rakhaine State of the neighbouring country.

“Discussion is going on and I myself had talks with the company officials about importing electricity,” Foreign Minister Dipu Moni said at a press conference in Dhaka yesterday.
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Yangon – Asian Wings, a new private airline in Myanmar will be launched Thursday that will provide domestic and chartered services.

Two 70-seat TR 72-500 aircraft have arrived in Yangon for use in domestic flight services that would to cover 11 destinations, Xinhua reported citing the local Weekly Eleven News. (more…)

A London-based rights group is urging the UN Human Rights Council to pressure Burma to address alleged human rights violations when the body reviews that nation’s rights record this week. (more…)

Burma is back in the news, with the looming opening on Monday of a kangaroo legislature in the isolated capital of Naypyitaw. This is the poisoned fruit of a manipulated  election by which the ruling junta of what calls itself Myanmar aimed to buy some rare legitimacy. (more…)

Sanctions are political tools, and so it is not wrong to consider them from a political point of view. That was what I did in the early 90s, hoping that the imposition of sanctions on the Burmese military government would bring about changes necessary for democratization in our country. (more…)

British-born photojournalist Nic Dunlop first came to attention in the late 1990s as the man who tracked down Khmer Rouge leader and head of the infamous S-21 torture centre, Comrade Duch, in rural Cambodia. Dunlop’s discovery of Duch eventually led to his conviction on charges of crimes against humanity, becoming the first of Pol Pot’s henchmen to be sentenced. Later, Dunlop turned his attention to Burma, and has spent more than a decade documenting the regime and its atrocities. The recent film, Burma Soldier, co-directed by Dunlop, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, and co-produced by LeBrocquy Fraser Ltd and Break-Thru, tells the story of Myo Myint, a former Burmese army soldier turned pro-democracy activist. (more…)