Suu Kyi to decide Burma's political future

Aung San Suu Kyi's party to decide Myanmar political comeback

RANGOON (AFP) - The opposition party of Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to announce its return to the official political arena on Friday after years of marginalization by ruling [totalitarian] generals.

Senior members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) are to gather in Rangoon to decide whether to re-register as a political party, after boycotting elections last year -- the first to be held in Burma for 20 years.

• US Campaign for Burma
  
• AUDIO: Burma to Chair ASEAN (The World.org)
• Burma calls for sanctions to be lifted (WSJ), which explains why the military is making a show of treating Suu Kyi well.

Democracy in Burma? The US military would sooner force our version of democracy on Afghanistan through the barrel of a gun -- as Family Guy's Stewie and Private Brian find.

The NLD won a landslide victory in polls in 1990 but the win was never recognized by the then-ruling [military dictatorship] junta.

The party refused to take part in last November's vote mainly because of rules that would have forced it to expel imprisoned members. Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has spent most of the last two decades in detention, was released a few days after the polls and now appears to be planning an entrance to the mainstream political process.

"On the whole I think the great majority of our people will go in for re-registration," 66-year-old Suu Kyi told the BBC on Thursday. More

Kim and the Kardashians for Burma

Thai Elephant steps on Burmese landmine

Elephant tears (Tasos_49/Digifancanon/Flickr)

(Telegraph.co.uk) Soraida Salwala of the Friends of the Asian Elephant conservation group in northern Thailand says the pachyderm's left foot was severely hurt in Sunday's blast in Burma's Kayin state.

Salwala said Tuesday that the elephant named Pa Hae Po was taken by truck to the group's hospital in the Thai city of Lampang and is expected to recover.

The elephant is the 14th such injury to be treated at the hospital since it began operating in 1993. He joins three other landmine victims that remain hospitalized at the facility. Rights groups say both the Burma army and rebels have laid mines during decades of conflict.

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Buddha's Kapilavastu relics to go from India to Sri Lanka

The relics were excavated in the 19th century by Alexander Cunningham, the first director of the Archaeological Survey of India. The place of excavation, now called Piprahwa in Bihar, was known as Kapilavastu earlier [leading to Indian claims that the Buddha was born in India proper rather than in an outlying region, be it in what is now Afghanistan or Nepal]. Indian and Sri Lankan officials on Saturday unveiled a 16-foot tall [statue of the] Buddha in the Sarnath style from the Gupta period, installed at the entrance to the International Buddhist Museum complex...