Photo: AP
This Dec. 2009 photo released by the U.S. Marshal's Service shows Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Milan, Michigan
Nigerian Would-Be Bomber Met Radical Yemen Cleric
Officials say US-born Muslim cleric had ties to military psychiatrist charged with shooting 13 at Texas military base
Full story »More Top News
- Al-Qaida Claims CIA Attack Was Revenge
- US to Release Report on Failed Airplane Bomb Plot
- Blast Targets Afghan Provincial Governor
- Attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt Leaves 7 Dead
- Guinea's Acting Military Leader Calls for Opposition Prime Minister
- 2 Militants Killed After 22-Hour Standoff in India Kashmir
- Chinese Cyber-Activists Lend Support to Democracy Activists in Iran
- Nepalese Child Soldiers Released
- Suicide Bomber Strikes in Kashmir as Drones Attack in Northwest Pakistan
- UN Envoy Warns Situation in Afghanistan Could Become 'Unmanageable'
- Egyptian Troops Clash with Palestinians on Gaza Border
 |  | The alleged US plane bomber met a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen and was recruited in London, Yemeni officials say. |
Sudan ethnic clashes kill 140
Contracts for Galileo sat-nav
Contracts worth one billion euros are awarded to build an operational satellite-navigation system for Europe.
| QUOTE OF THE DAY | |
 |  I have urged them [Burmese military leaders] to first of all make it clear about all the electoral systems, and there should be clearly set deadlines for the election.  — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon |
NEWS ANALYSIS Regime Privatizing to Retain Control of Resources |
| By WAI MOE |
| A recent wave of privatization ahead of this year's election is putting ownership of state-owned corporations into the hands of the Burmese junta's cronies. |
Two Receive Death Sentence for Information Leak |
| By THE IRRAWADDY |
| A former military officer and a foreign affairs official were sentenced to death and another foreign affairs official was sentenced to long-term imprisonment in a special court in Insein Prison. |
NEWS ANALYSISLooking for an Election in Burma's Political Fog |
| By BA KAUNG |
| Although Burma's election year has dawned, the country's political scene is still swathed in gloom. |
Mon National Day Billboard Censored |
| By LAWI WENG |
| Authorities have ordered that the Burmese language text be removed from billboards in Mon State commemorating the 63rd anniversary of Mon National Day. |
Ban Notes No Election Date Set by Than Shwe |
| By LALIT K JHA |
| UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says Burmese Snr-Gen Than Shwe should set clear dates for the 2010 election. |
Thai Detention Extended for Alleged Arms Smugglers |
| By JOCELYN GECKER |
| The crew of a cargo plane that left North Korea with 35 tons of weapons last month will remain in Thai prison another 12 days so police can continue investigating the flight that violated UN sanctions. |
Fund raising Burmese film on Cyclone Nargis victims
To raise funds for Cyclone Nargis hit victims some Burmese nationals residing ...
Prison officials foil observing Independence Day
Prison authorities foiled a plan by political prisoners in Myitkyina prison to observe ...
Our attitude and demands on regional demarcation and transformation of our armies
(Research) We hereby present our attitude and demands on regional ...
WFP to continue assistance to Chin State
The World Food Program (WFP) has pledged to offer further help to Chin state in western Burma plagued by rat infestation and ...   |
| Women selling hair ‘to restore livelihoods’ Jan 7, 2010 (DVB)–Trade in women’s hair in Burma has boomed in the last five years as people look for a new way to make ends meet, particularly in the wake of the devastation wrought by cyclone Nargis. - more |
 |
| Shan party eye 2010 elections Jan 7, 2009 (DVB)–A Shan political party that came second in the 1990 elections in Burma has requested a meeting with its imprisoned party leaders prior to elections this year, apparently with an eye to participating. - more |
|
| ILO to be ‘more proactive, not reactive’ in Burma Jan 7, 2010 (DVB)–The International Labour Organisation is looking to change its approach to dealing with issues of child soldiers and forced labour in Burma, with a top-level ILO official to visit the country next week. - more |
|
| Farmers sell livestock to repay loans Jan 6, 2010 (DVB)–Farmers in central Burma forced to repay loans months in advance of their deadline have reportedly been selling off livestock, following threats of arrest. - more |
|
| US senator Webb gives election backing Jan 6, 2010 (DVB)–US senator Jim Webb, the only senior-level US official to have met Burmese junta chief Than Shwe, has said that he supports the junta’s controversial planned elections, to be held this year. - more |
|
| Burma will struggle for attention in 2010 Francis Wade |
|
| Burmese reporter receives 20-year sentence Jan 6, 2010 (DVB)–A Burmese reporter who contributed video material to the Democratic Voice of Burma has been handed a 20-year prison sentence, bringing to 13 the number of imprisoned journalists in Burma. - more |
ျပည္သူလူထု၏ အေျခခံရပိုင္ခြင့္တို႔ကို အာမခံသည့္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပုံ အေျခခံ ဥပေဒ ဆိုသည္မွာ လူထု၏ အခြင့္အာဏာ (Mandate) ကို ရယူက်င့္သုံးမည့္ အစိုးရႏွင့္ ျပည္သူလူထုတို႔အၾကား သေဘာတူခ်ဳပ္ဆိုထားေသာ လူမႈ အခြင့္ အေရး ဆိုင္ရာ သေဘာတူစာခ်ဳပ္ (Social Contract) ျဖစ္သည္။ ယေန႔ (ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာ အာဏာသည္ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားထံမွ တိုက္႐ိုက္ ဆင္းသက္ ေစရမည္) ဆိုေသာအခ်က္ကို အစိုးရအာဏာ ရယူက်င့္သုံး ေနသူ မ်ားက နည္းအမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးျဖင့္ ေမွးမွိန္ေအာင္ ျပဳလုပ္ထားၾကသည္။ ျမန္မာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ တို႔ကမူ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားက ပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာအာဏာကို သူတို႔၏ ဘိုးဘြားမိဘပိုင္ပစၥည္းသဖြယ္ ထင္ရာစိုင္း က်င့္သုံး ေနၾကသျဖင့္ ပို၍ဆိုးေပသည္။ ဥပမာအားျဖင့္ ၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲရလဒ္ကို ပစ္ပယ္လ်က္ အာဏာဆက္သိမ္းထားသည္မွာ ျပည္သူလူထုႏွင့္တကြ ဒီမိုကေရစီ က်င့္စဥ္ကို သေရာ္ေမာ္ကား လုပ္ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
ျပည္တြင္း၌ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေစာင့္ၾကည့္အဖြဲ႔မ်ား ရွိျခင္းအားျဖင့္ ဥပေဒ ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္မႈမ်ားကို ထိန္းေက်ာင္းေပးႏိုင္၍ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ရလဒ္အေပၚ လူထု၏ ယုံၾကည္အေလးထားမႈကို ရရွိေစသည္။ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ လူထု၏ ပူးေပါင္း ပါ၀င္မႈကိုလည္း ပိုမိုအားေပးရာ ေရာက္သည္။ ၁၉၉၀ ေမ (၂၇) ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ တြင္ ‘အစိုးရမဟုတ္ေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္အဖြဲ႔’ မ်ဳိးကို ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခြင့္ မျပဳခဲ့။ ထူးျခားခ်က္မွာ လူထုက စည္းလုံးညီၫြတ္စြာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ တာ၀န္ကို ယူခဲ့ၾကျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ အျခားအေျခအေနတခုမွာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တို႔၏ ဥပေဒမဲ့ ဖိႏွိပ္မႈမ်ား အဆမတန္ မ်ားျခင္းမွာလည္း လူထု၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအသိႏွင့္ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္တို႔ကို ပိုမိုခိုင္မာျပတ္သား လာေစသည့္ အေၾကာင္းဟု ဆိုႏိုင္သည္။ ထိုအခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ပင္ လူထုက ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ၌ မည္သူအား ဆႏၵမဲေပးရမည္ဆိုျခင္းကို ေတြေ၀မႈမရွိဘဲ ဆုံးျဖတ္ႏိုင္ခဲ့သည္။ အမ်ိဳးသား ဒီမိုကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္အား ပုံေအာ မဲထည့္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။
“အငွားက တလ က်ပ္ (၃) ေသာင္း ၀န္းက်င္၊ အေရာင္းက က်ပ္ (၁၈) သိန္း၀န္းက်င္ ...”
“ဂ်ပန္က ေခၚတာနည္းတဲ့အျပင္ ကန္႔သတ္ခ်က္ေတြကလည္း မ်ားေတာ့ ....”
သွ်မ္းျပည္အေ႐ွ႕ပိုင္းထြက္ ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးစြမ္းအင္သံုး လွ်ပ္စစ္မီးထုတ္လုပ္ေရးစက္႐ုံတည္ေဆာက္ရန္ ျမန္မာ့ စီးပြားေရးဦး ပိုင္က ထိုင္းအမ်ဳိးသားမ်ားႏွင့္အတူ ဒီဇင္ဘာလေႏွာင္းပိုင္း၌ ကြင္းဆင္းၾကည့္႐ႈခဲ့သည္ဟုထိုင္းနယ္စပ္ သတင္းရပ္ကြက္ က ဆိုသည္။
