Word: shwe
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...intense; last year, Russian, Thai and Vietnamese companies signed exploration deals with the junta. In late December, a consortium of four foreign companies, led by South Korea's Daewoo, inked an agreement with the junta and China National Petroleum Corp. to extract natural gas from Arakan's offshore Shwe fields and pipe it northeast through Burma to China's Yunnan province. The pipeline, along with a plan for a new deepwater port in Arakan where ships laden with Middle Eastern oil can dock and disgorge their valuable cargo, gives China an alternative to the expensive and sometimes dangerous Strait...
...bounty, even as most Burmese struggle just to feed themselves. Roughly one-third of civilians live below the poverty line. Last month, many Burmese, who get their news from clandestine radio broadcasts, were shocked by a BBC Burmese service report that claimed a daughter of junta leader Than Shwe had spent more than $80,000 on a gold shopping spree in the city of Mandalay. Than Shwe himself brooks no dissent. The offense of Saw Wai, the poet who was sentenced to two years in prison? Writing a love poem published in a weekly magazine in which the first words...
...Protests during this anniversary month seem unlikely. But then Burma is a big country and hard to predict: both the 1988 uprising and last year's protests took Burma watchers by surprise. It's even tougher to read the country's secretive military rulers. The chief general, Than Shwe, is 75 years old and by some accounts ailing, but it would be naive to assume that his demise will fracture or enfeeble the military. Over the years, senior Burmese generals have either died (Ne Win in 2002) or been purged (Khin Nyunt in 2004), and each time the military...
...relief and rehabilitation stage of the post-Nargis clean-up "successfully carried out." But the United Nations estimates that roughly half of the storm's victims have still not seen any form of aid more than four weeks after the cyclone. A pledge last month by junta leader Than Shwe to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that the government would no longer impede foreign relief work has still not been fully met. After nearly a month vainly awaiting permission from the junta to deliver relief supplies, four U.S. Navy ships on June 5 departed waters off the Burmese coast...
...legal due process. Authorities also took more from the home than just the comedian. They took his computer, which contained video files of the plight of Nargis survivors. In addition, the security forces seized two DVDs. One was samizdat footage of the diamond-encrusted 2006 wedding ceremony of Than Shwe's daughter; the film highlighted the life of privilege led by the country's ruling elite, even as many Burmese struggle to fill their bellies. The other video was a bootleg of the latest in the Rambo film series, which features the aging hero battling the Burmese junta. Apparently, Hollywood...