Word: rangoons
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...friend in Rangoon is a busy man. He manages a couple of companies in Burma's commercial capital, helps raise his children and regularly makes merit at a Buddhist temple. He also spends time tending to a plant that he knows is only grown to die. In Dec. 2005, Burma's economically inept junta - one of its leaders once decided to denominate the national currency by multiples of nine because he liked the number - decided that the country's future lay in a shrub called jatropha...
...Burma. For years, an influx of Burmese-made methamphetamine has flooded into neighboring Thailand and China, feeding Asia's chemically induced highs. There are some signs that the Burmese government is trying to stanch the drug flow. In January, a high-profile raid in the Burmese commercial capital, Rangoon, netted a large amount of heroin loaded onto a ship bound for Singapore, according to the Irrawaddy, a media organization run primarily by Burmese in exile in Thailand. But the raid appears to have been galvanized by foreign anti-drug agents, and, as the Irrawaddy points out, it's not clear...
...scene is labeled as a reconstruction. Some are convincingly real, yet others are so simply betrayed as re-enactments by their wooden dialogue that soon I began to anxiously question the authenticity of every scene. I felt moved by a sequence showing protesters gathering on a Rangoon backstreet in defiance of the junta. But when I learned that it had been shot from scratch in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I felt something else: manipulated...
...Burma VJ won the top award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in November and was screened at last month's Sundance Festival. It closes with a raid by secret police on DVB's Rangoon secret headquarters - also a reconstruction, although the events it depicts are real and tragic enough. Three reporters were arrested, others went into hiding. Joshua is now in exile, but the authorities know his name - they tortured it out of a friend - and keep his family under surveillance...
...imagine Joshua was comforted by the reaction of Rangoon's police chief. "DVB are the worst," growls Major General Khin Yi in the closing scenes of Burma VJ. "DVB are the ones who broadcast most of the false news about us." My brave Burmese colleagues couldn't ask for a bigger compliment, or for a better reason to continue their extraordinary work...