Word: burma
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Just a stone's throw from Burma is a small, mountainous corner of Thailand that might as well be in China. But you won't find portraits of Mao hanging on the walls or Little Red Books being thumbed in the village tea shops. Instead you might find battered copies of Chiang Kai-shek's memoirs, and your server will probably speak Yunnanese...
...scent of spice and the lure of easy money drew traders and settlers from across Europe, the Arab world, India, China, Thailand and Burma. Their diverse traditions still resonate in the heart of George Town's old city. The grand colonial architecture of City Hall, the court buildings and the Penang Museum and Art Gallery cohabits comfortably with ornate Hindu and incense-wreathed Buddhist temples, Chinese clan houses, Muslim mosques and serried rows of peeling and shuttered shophouses. Cultures collide at every intersection. A walk down Lebuh Chulia, a major thoroughfare, will have your mouth watering at the spicy aromas...
...student at Harvard in the late ’90s, I was witness to the folly of those politically-oriented Undergraduate Councils you refer to (Editorial, “A Step in the Wrong Direction,” Feb. 7): the Burma votes, fighting over gender-neutral language, and other meaningless effluvia better left, as you write, to those groups formed to address them rather than the one voice (albeit a hoarse one) for students’ concerns. At the time, however, the Crimson seemed to share a kindred spirit with the council in this respect of favoring political statements...
Among other inane things, the council condemned the human rights records of China and Burma in 1997 and reviled police brutality in the Amadou Diallo case in 2000. While we have no quarrel with the content of these resolutions, they were ineffective in accomplishing anything, both for undergraduates and for victims of human rights abuse or police brutality...
...Burma has long been a pariah state - a target of human rights activists worldwide after the military junta slaughtered democracy protesters in 1988 and voided the 1990 election. Increasingly isolated economically, the regime has dramatically expanded its reliance on forced civilian labor for infrastructure and revenue-generating projects. By 1996 an estimated 3% of Burma's GDP was the fruit of conscripted gangs. In an additional, cruel twist, many of the soldiers themselves - part of a mobilization that expanded the army from 185,000 troops to nearly half a million today - were little more than child slaves. Sein...