News

Illegal Charcoal Trade Wrecks Myanmar’s Bulwark Against Cyclones

The depletion of mangroves in southern Myanmar is impacting local fisheries near the island villages and playing havoc with the mangrove forest that protect the coastline from extreme weather events. The illegal charcoal trade persists due to a lack of law enforcement and oversight in Myanmar ...

Wudan Yan

'We're broken': Rohingya on hunger strike in Saudi detention

Scores of Rohingya detainees inside a Saudi detention centre have gone on a hunger strike for the third time in recent months, activists told Al Jazeera. Almost 650 men, most of whom have been kept at the Shumaisi detention centre in Jeddah since 2012 for not having valid ...

Saba Aziz

Jailed Reuters Reporters, U.S. Border Photographers Win Pulitzer Prizes

Reuters won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, one for revealing the massacre of 10 Muslim Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers and Myanmar security forces, and another for photographs of Central American migrants seeking refuge in the United States. The awards marked the second year in a ...

Daniel Trotta

'The People's Messengers': Myanmar's Satirical Poets Target Censorship

In a classroom on the outskirts of Myanmar’s biggest city, a thin, bespectacled university student led about a dozen peers in boisterous chants of “Censorship is a shame!” and “We don’t believe in censorship!”  It was the final rehearsal of a troupe performing “thangyat”, a centuries-old ...

Part 1 – 5 countries, 13,000 km, 1 goal: Challenge the everyday use of plastic

I was on a 3-month bike ride across five countries of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand , Cambodia and Nepal, to challenge the everyday use of plastic through an activity called Plogging – a mix of jogging and picking up trash.  Dwarfed by the five-feet jumble of trash ...

Abhimanyu Chakravorty

Fading icon? Clash of views over Aung San Suu Kyi’s record — and future

Steel magnolia is a term that comes to Ms Moe Thuzar’s mind when talking of Aung San Suu Kyi. “Daw Suu wouldn’t be Daw Suu without that steely inner core that has been a mainstay of her survival,” says the Myanmar Studies Programme co-coordinator at ...

Derrick A Paulo and Sumithra Prasanna

Nowhere to go: Myanmar farmers under siege from land law

Han Win Naung is besieged on his own land. Last September, local administrators in Myanmar’s southern Tanintharyi region put up a sign at the edge of his 5.7-hectare farm that read “Under Management Ownership – Do Not Trespass”. They felled the trees and started building a ...

Jacob Goldberg

Animated film explains how Myanmar's Telecommunications Law undermines free speech

A short animated film is helping to educate the public about Myanmar’s Telecommunications Law and the ways that it can suppress free speech. Are You Ready is a collaboration between EngageMedia and several digital rights activists in Myanmar. It was first screened in December 2018 in Yangon at the Myanmar Digital Rights Forum. ...

Mong Palatino

The bully playing games with border trade

Restrictions on border trade with China are a big headache for many Myanmar merchants. China officially bans most rice imports from Myanmar, for example, but its border officials often turn a blind eye to the trade. In early February though the Chinese authorities launched a crackdown ...

Sithu Aung Myint

Myanmar parliament to pass gambling bill in May: report

Myanmar’s parliament is expected to approve in May a bill that would authorise the setting up of foreigner-only casinos in the country, the Myanmar Times newspaper reported on Sunday. The parliament is expected to sit again later this month after an April holiday break. Keep reading ...

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