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GLOBAL: It&#39;s not over yet, says UNAIDS

By Plusnews | 31 July 2008

The rate of new HIV infections is slowing in a number of countries, but the AIDS epidemic is not over in any part of the world, and is gaining pace in some.

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Rule of Lords: The price of being a judge in Rangoon

By Awzar Thi | 27 July 2008

The June edition of the New Era Journal, a Burmese-language monthly published in Bangkok, carried a letter from an unnamed senior lawyer practicing in South Dagon, greater Rangoon. According to the author, to be selected for the test to become an apprentice judge these days a lawyer needs to pay the selecting panel 3 million kyat – upwards of US$2,500. The writer lamented that although senior judges know about this they turn a blind eye.

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Thailand&#8217;s &#8220;New Politics&#8221; Charade

By Michael Connors | 11 July 2008

No longer content with the old slogan of “Thaksin dit khuk, Samak ok pai (Thaksin in jail, Samak out), Sondhi Limthongkul, the core leader of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, has called for a “New Politics.” I heard Sondhi’s New Politics speech delivered from the stage on July 4th, near Government House in Bangkok. It was the 41st day of the People’s Alliance for Democracy’s new round of street protests.

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Independent Media Struggle Against Commercialisation

By Milind Kokje | 11 July 2008

Mention 'independent media' and we immediately think of monarchs, political dictators, uniformed heads of state, military junta and similar entities as the main obstacles for media independence. There may be some honourable exceptions, but in general, our past experiences tell us how these types of political systems are anathema to independence in general, and independent media in particular.

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Rule of Lords: Let us not praise coups

By Awzar Thi | 4 July 2008

An Oxford economics professor said in a recent Washington Post article that the best hope for either Burma or Zimbabwe is that military officers might overthrow their respective dictators and leap through a window of legitimacy held open by the free world (“Let us now praise coups,” June 22).

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Rule of Lords: Thailand&#8217;s rights commission in limbo

By Awzar Thi | 28 June 2008

Thailand’s human rights agency has been in limbo since September 2006 when the army took power for the umpteenth time. The National Human Rights Commission was by no means the coup’s biggest casualty. After all, it wasn’t shut down completely, like the parliament and one of the upper courts. But the commission has not fared well since then, and its confused and contradictory response to the military takeover in some ways typified its deeper problems.

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Suu kyi&#39;s quiet birthday masks powerful but peaceful resistance

By Subhatra Bhumiprabhas, The Nation | 19 June 2008

<h2> Today Aung San Suu Kyi will spend her 63rd birthday as a political prisoner in Burma. </h2>

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Rule of Lords: Another troublemaker missing in Thailand

By Awzar Thi | 16 June 2008

The authorities in Khon Kaen probably did not like Kamol Laosophaphant. His campaign to expose corrupt council dealings over state railway land, among other things, reportedly had a group of police ready to beat him up just last year.

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Buddhism, democracy and dictators

By Frank G. Anderson | 20 May 2008

Former American civil rights leader Martin Luther King said, “The Negro’s great stumbling block is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice…who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

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No News Is Bad News

By Roby Alampay | 11 May 2008

EXACTLY four years ago this month, a cyclone, the strongest in 30 years, hit Myanmar. A journalist, writing one month later in The Irrawaddy (a news magazine published by Burmese exiles), wondered how the country’s state-controlled news media could fail to make any mention of a typhoon that the United Nations said killed at least 140 people, sunk vessels and made an estimated 18,000 people homeless.

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Rule of Lords: Casualties of Thailand&#39;s &#39;war on drugs&#39;

By Awzar Thi | 25 April 2008

A lot of talk in Thailand these days is about the prospects for a new "war on drugs," following on from the state-sponsored murders of people supposedly buying and selling amphetamines in 2003.

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Rule of Lords: Thailand&#8217;s army not better than Burma&#8217;s

By AWZAR THI, UPI ASIA ONLINE | 17 April 2008

Many of Burma’s democracy advocates place Thailand’s army in a favourable light when compared to their own. But as their familiarity with the abuse of military power at home vastly outweighs their knowledge of that abroad, their appraisals too are imbalanced and detrimental.

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