Word: burma
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...Last August Jimmy - real name Kyaw Min Yu - was arrested along with other members of the so-called 88 Generation Students for staging street protests against government price hikes. These protests inspired the mass demonstrations led by Burma's monks, which captured the world's imagination a month later. Jimmy is still in jail. His wife Nilar Thein, another die-hard democrat, is in hiding. Their infant daughter has effectively been orphaned by the regime...
...This month millions of Burmese are solemnly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1988 protests. As Jimmy's story shows, the spirit of '88 has not been entirely extinguished. But Burma's dictators have proved far more resilient than its democrats. In the past year alone, the junta has survived two of its biggest challenges since 1988: last year's mass protests and the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which killed nearly 140,000 people when it slammed into the Irrawaddy delta region...
...corruption by Thaksin and certain members of his government. After lengthy probes, it has filed four cases with the courts. They allege that while in office, Thaksin influenced the sale of state land to his wife at a discount, gave a preferential Thai government loan to the government of Burma to buy telecoms equipment from his company, changed the laws on telecommunications concessions to increase his firm's profits at the expense of government telecom agencies, and illegally instituted a government lottery scheme using some of the proceeds as a slush fund for political purposes. Thaksin has repeatedly denied...
...ASEAN's nine other members not to at least arch an eyebrow when Burma signed the charter is nothing short of willful ignorance. Yes, ASEAN did speak forcefully on July 20 when Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo said the bloc's members felt "deep disappointment" that Burma in May prolonged the detention of opposition figurehead and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. But any mention of that negative emotion was excised from the formal communiqué issued by ASEAN the following day. And an initial flurry of excitement caused by Yeo when he said that his Burmese counterpart had told...
...course, ASEAN's kid-gloves approach toward Burma isn't unique. Another item on the agenda at this year's meeting? A treaty of amity and cooperation with none other than North Korea. After buddying up to Burma for so long, ASEAN, it seems, isn't too picky about its friends...