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…)

Snr-Gen Than Shwe reportedly reminded military commanders that they must be prepared to launch a coup d’etat if the incoming Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) fails to meet the country’s needs. (more…)

Political prisoners in Burma are being given amphetamine during interrogation in an effort to extract more information, according to a Thailand-based campaigning group. (more…)

Bangkok — Police in Thailand have arrested 91 Rohingya boat people after they landed on the country’s southern coast and are planning to deport them to Myanmar, they said Monday. (more…)

Bangkok – A New York-based press freedom group said Saturday it was concerned about the Thai government’s plan to deport two foreign photojournalists for illegally entering Myanmar. (more…)

Yangon – By Myanmar standards, 2010 was a golden year for tourism. Those working in the sector said they hoped recent political developments might make it easier to attract still more foreigners although there was not much faith in the military regime’s appetite for change. (more…)

Malaysia’s economic boom has been driven by the exploitation of cheap migrant labour, from Burma and Thailand. Underpaid and with no rights, this is their story (more…)

Police and troops have been brought in to help resolve a “tense” dispute between hundreds of Burmese workers and bosses of a pineapple canning factory west of Bangkok accused of mistreatment, underpayment and beating workers’ representatives. (more…)

Bangkok – About half a million people are internally displaced by conflict in eastern Myanmar, where both the state army and rebels continue to recruit child soldiers, a top rights group said Monday. (more…)

The junta cannot be allowed to win its war against the journalists who resist its tide of lies. (more…)

BANGKOK – If Karl Marx was right that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Myanmar may have just entered the farcical phase of its long-running military rule. The first general election held in over 20 years last November and announcement that a new elected National Assembly will be convened on January 31 have not excited many ordinary Myanmar citizens, but have led to wild speculation among foreign pundits about what it all means for the country’s political future. (more…)

Burma, the only nation in the Southeast Asian region without a constitution for 22 years, will soon adopt a constitutional government which will be headed by a president as the Head of State. (more…)

65th Armed Forces Day parade, Naypyidaw, Burma, March 27, 2010 Burma’s military is expected to have a dominant role in the new parliament. (more…)

Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi had an one-hour talk with Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya at the Thai embassy in Rangoon on Friday morning, said officials of her party, the National League for Democracy. “The discussion was quite frank, but we still have no details from it,” said a party official. The personal meeting was the first between Suu Kyi and another country’s foreign minister since her release from house arrest in November.

A man, now 22 years old, has been arrested for desertion from the Burmese military when he was a 14-year-old child soldier and sentenced to three years in prison. (more…)