Yangon, Myanmar — A crescendo of fighting between Myanmar’s army and ethnic rebels has forced tens of thousands of villagers into refugee camps near the Chinese border, according to aid workers and members of the clergy. (more…)

Burma’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to contest a seat in southern Rangoon, the old capital, in an upcoming by-election, opposition sources said yesterday. (more…)

Staff at private schools in Burma who include in their teaching material discussions of topics deemed subversive by the government could face up to three years in prison, according to new rules enacted last week. (more…)

Veteran Burmese politician Tin Oo, who spent years in detention before returning to the country’s political arena last year as deputy leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party, says he will not compete in looming by-elections. (more…)

Journals running front-page photos of the meetings between US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Burmese pro-democracy Aung San Suu Kyi quickly sold out as Burmese readers were caught up in the excitement over Clinton’s visit and the discussions between the two prominent women. (more…)

Teknaf, Bangladesh: Bangladesh authorities have arrested over 1300 Rohingyas along the Bangladesh-Burma border within eleven month of 2011, according to different sources. (more…)

Myanmar has agreed to take back from Bangladesh the Rohingya refugees who have been recently verified by the Myanmar authorities as per agreed criteria. (more…)

South Korea will resume offering loans to Myanmar six years after it halted its development assistance to the Southeast Asian country in 2005 given the regime’s repression of human rights. (more…)

Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama expressed his desire last week to visit Burma to pay homage at the country’s holiest shrine of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon. (more…)

A Calgary-based airline has been fined $25,000 for unlawfully exporting an airplane and aircraft parts to Burma. (more…)

Normalization of US-Burma relations will further strengthen the Asean-centric perspective and bargaining power, especially in the context of overall Asean-China relations. (more…)

Last May, to mark its 100th birthday, the University of Hong Kong held a centenary dialogue via a video link with Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, barely six months after her release from prolonged years of house arrest. (more…)

What it might take for the U.S. Secretary of State to travel to Pyongyang. (more…)

When the inevitable year-end roundup of the years most important news developments unreels less than a month from now, it will no doubt include the images of two women hugging each other, holding hands, kissing each others cheek, having dinner together. The Caucasian woman has her hair bundled up in an uncharacteristic ponytail, a far cry from the stern, formidable authority she normally projects on her globe-trotting assignations. Letting her hair down (or up in this case) attested to the instant sense of casualness and warmth she seemed to have generated with the 66-year-old wisp of an Asian woman she was meeting for the first time. There they were, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first American secretary of state in half a century to be allowed to set foot on Burma, and the Burmese icon of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, welcoming her and taking her hand on a stroll through her home and garden that, until recently, had served as her prison. (more…)

From a distance, the recent landmark visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Burma looks nice and should be welcome. It gives the impression that Burma is closing ranks with the rest of the Asean members and the international community after decades of isolation as a pariah state. (more…)