Burma’s leadership announced it would free 6,359 prisoners, but only 207 political prisoners have been released thus far.
Burma’s Junta: Can a Tiger Change Its Stripes?
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Asia & Pacific
Poets Stand Up
In Paris, poets staged a flash mob outside the Louvre Museum. In North Carolina, they sent poems to their state legislators, calling on them to restore arts education funding to the decimated state budget. In Vancouver, BC, poets cleaned up a beach before their reading. There was a reading in solidarity with the people of Tibet in Pasadena, California, events throughout Mexico City demanding an end to violence, and “an exorcism of fear and helplessness” in Norman, Oklahoma. Poets gathered in Fez, Morocco, and Jalalabad, Afghanistan and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
War on Roaches
Set up the four cuts
cut support cut food cut water cut communications
still see stray guerilla roaches, though all food including edible trash
carefully removed or wrapped
in plastic.
Of Bases and Budgets
At 4 am on September 24, an intoxicated U.S. soldier based at Camp Casey in South Korea broke into the dorm of a high school student, threatened her with a weapon and repeatedly sexually assaulted her. Due to the extraterritoriality of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the South Korean and U.S. governments, Seoul must issue an arrest warrant to the U.S. Forces in Korea (USFK) to transfer the soldier to face Korea’s criminal system.
Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World
Washington, which has focused for years on North Korea’s small but developing nuclear arsenal, has barely been paying attention to the larger developments in Asia. Nor will Asia’s looming transformation be a hot topic in our own presidential election next year. We’ll be arguing about jobs, health care, and whether the president is a socialist or his Republican challenger a nutcase. Aside from some ritual China-bashing, Asia will merit little mention.
The Curse of Cluster Bombs
Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia known as “the most bombed country on earth,” fittingly hosted an international disarmament conference in November 2010. This was a follow-up to an Oslo conference in 2008 when 94 nations signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international treaty to ban all cluster weapons following in the footsteps of the global campaign to ban landmines which came into force in 1999.
Review: The Survival of North Korea
Despite the predictions of many obituary writers, North Korea is still around. It was supposed to collapse with the Eastern European communist regimes, but it didn’t. It was supposed to crumble during the great famine of the mid-1990s, but it didn’t. The hard-line policies of the George W. Bush administration were supposed to do the trick, but they didn’t. The North Korean economy is in lousy shape, the ruling elite is a gerontocracy, and several thousand North Korean citizens vote with their feet every year. But the government in Pyongyang soldiers on.
Pentagon Still Denies Agent Orange Stored on Okinawa During the Vietnam War
The Pentagon’s refusal to acknowledge that Agent Orange was stored on Okinawa endangers the health of both local Okinawans and American service members currently stationed on the island.
U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan Accomplishes Little More Than Pushing China’s Buttons
In a rare show of bipartisanship, Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and John Cornyn (R-Tx) jointly introduced legislation demanding that the administration sell F-16s to Taiwan.
Confronting Agent Orange
Agent Orange, the notoriously toxic defoliant first used by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, has long been known to cause liver cancer, birth defects, leukemia, and other illnesses in people exposed to it. Although the U.S. military hasn’t actively used the chemical since the 1970s, a number of forgotten victims are still suffering the nightmare of its contamination.