Word: burma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wrapped him in a blanket and fled through knee-deep water to a temple nearby, where hundreds of people-mostly very young children-now shelter. Kyaw Zin Htay is too weak to struggle or cry when his mother pulls aside the blanket to display his emaciated limbs. He survived Burma's biggest natural disaster in living memory, but his short life will almost certainly end here, on a fly-blown concrete floor in a broken-down temple, waiting for help that might never come...
...place that the cyclone spared was Burma's new administrative capital, Naypyidaw, which was carved out of the jungle by the ruling junta in 2005. Burmese civil servants who had to move from Rangoon to the new capital were given no explanation for the shift. But some local journalists in Rangoon speculated that junta leader Than Shwe had been swayed by soothsayers who predicted that civil unrest and a natural disaster would soon strike the city of roughly 5 million. In September, the monk-led protests made the first part of the prophecy come true; the cyclone fulfilled the second...
...people of Burma take omens seriously. For centuries, the vagaries of weather have been scrutinized by astrologers who divine a relationship between celestial irregularities and earthly mayhem. So when a tropical cyclone tore across the country on May 2 and 3, killing tens of thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless in the Irrawaddy River delta and the city of Rangoon, Burmese couldn't help noting the curious timing: exactly a week later, on May 10, the thuggish ruling junta was set to hold a constitutional referendum, a step toward what the military has called a discipline-flourishing democracy. Then...
Cleaning up after a catastrophe is hard work anywhere. But few places are more vulnerable than Burma, also known as Myanmar, an isolated, desperately poor nation of 53 million. Diseases that fester in the wake of such natural disasters could prove as deadly as the storm. Most galling, a 450,000-strong military that had ruthlessly gunned down dozens of monk-led demonstrators last September was seen as doing little to address the country's worst weather calamity in living memory. Faced with such monumental devastation, the junta has said it would welcome foreign help. On May 6, President George...
...place the cyclone spared was Burma's new administrative capital, Naypyidaw, carved out of the jungle in 2005. No official reason was given for shifting the capital from Rangoon, but locals have speculated that the military had been swayed by soothsayers who predicted that civil unrest and a natural disaster would soon strike the city. Within eight months of each other, both prophecies had come true. "People in Burma are angry about two things," says Aung Zaw, a Burmese in exile who edits a Thailand-based magazine called the Irrawaddy. "They're angry at the military for reacting so slowly...