Word: burma
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...United Football Club's 300 million or so supporters worldwide are two Burmese men whose love of the game spans generations. One is a stout, bespectacled, betel nut - chewing septuagenarian, the other his favorite teenage grandson, and like many of their soccer-mad compatriots they stay up late into Burma's tropical nights to watch live broadcasts from faraway England. So far, so normal. But knowing the grandfather in this touching scene is Senior General Than Shwe, the xenophobic chief of Burma's junta, makes it seem all wrong. Rabidly anti-Western, yet pro-Wayne Rooney, is this the tyrant...
...That English football is one of Than Shwe's surprise passions might seem trivial, but it raises a serious question. With U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying on Sept. 24 that Washington would begin "engaging directly" with Burma's military leaders after 20 years of American censure and sanctions, how well do we really know the junta? "We don't understand it very well at all, although it's not very easy to understand," says Donald M. Seekins, a Burma scholar at Meio University in Okinawa, Japan. Trying to fathom the regime's worldview doesn't mean we condone...
...Loyalty - and Dishonor Than Shwe, the junta's chief since 1992, is Burma's enigmatic but undisputed leader. "He exercises almost absolute power," says Seekins. "Nobody wants to challenge him, at least openly." His origins were humble. Born in a village not far from Mandalay, Burma's last royal capital, he dropped out of high school and worked in a post office before joining officer-training school and rising up through the military ranks, specializing in psychological warfare. Unquestioning loyalty was "the secret of his success," says Benedict Rogers, co-author of a forthcoming book called Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma...
...next superpower, but we sometimes forget that this is a nation that can't make safe milk, and where activists vanish from their homes. Look at how China exerts its new global influence - by backing some of the world's most odious regimes, in North Korea, Sudan and Burma. Most pundits mistakenly praise the Chinese system as blindly as they criticize the American one. Many economists ignore China's immense problems that could undermine Chinese growth in the future...
...Kibwezi, farmers in these other countries have also experienced problems growing the plant. In India, for example, a test project at several agricultural colleges produced seed yields of only 200 grams per plant - a fifth the expected output of one kilogram of seeds per plant. (Read: "Biofuel Gone Bad: Burma's Atrophying Jatropha...