Myanmar Jarred by Peace Laureate at Military Parade

BANGKOK — Myanmar’s military asserted its role in the country’s politics at a ceremony on Wednesday that featured a prominent guest, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, whose presence among the generals would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

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Washed Away

This review in the NY Times by Cheryl Strayed  is deeply affecting...Will be getting this book...Uvealblues

Sonali Deraniyagala’s extraordinary memoir, “Wave,” opens on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, as the author putters around a Sri Lankan beach-side hotel with her family. By chapter’s end she’s pantless, half-drowned, bleeding, bruised and numbly resistant to what she’ll soon be forced to know: The five people she loves most in the world are dead. Her two young sons. Her husband. Her parents. All of them killed by a force she can’t yet comprehend, though she was caught up in it and nearly killed by it too. She only knows that “something came for us.” It was, as she and the world will soon learn, a tsunami of epic scale that took an estimated 230,000 lives across a dozen countries.

So begins the most exceptional book about grief I’ve ever read. In prose that’s immaculately unsentimental and raggedly intimate, Deraniyagala takes us deep into her unfathomable loss.
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That she allows us to experience that same alertness without smothering us in sorrow is the miracle of this beautiful book. I was thunderstruck by Deraniyagala’s loss, yes, but most of all by her ability to reveal the whole “outlandish truth” of her grief, to write about a tragedy so bewilderingly complete that, nearly a decade out, “it still seems far-fetched, my story, even to me

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James Brown doing miso soup commercials

EMBED-James Brown's Japanese Miso Soup Commercials - Watch more free videos
via HolyKaw

The Tragedy of the Tsunami in Japan

This picture says it all...
Uvealblues

In Tsunami’s Wake, Much Searching but Few Are Rescued

BurmaVJ:Live Reporting from a Closed Country

Tonight on HBO will be a highly acclaimed documentary on Burma--home of some of  the kindest people I have ever met...

Myanmar Dissident Testifies at Trial

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The government of Myanmar formally lifted the house arrest Tuesday of the pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but she remained in detention facing charges that could bring her a five-year prison term, her lawyer said.

The house arrest was due to expire on Wednesday, but Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had already been moved on May 14 to Insein Prison, where she is on trial on a charge of violating the terms of her detention by allowing an American intruder to spend the night at her home.

“She is free from that detention order, but really she is not free,” said her lawyer, U Nyan Win.

If she is convicted in court, he said, she would probably remain in prison rather than being given a new term of house arrest.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, has been held under house arrest for 13 of the last 19 years. Her latest six-year term of detention was about to reach its legal limit and many analysts had viewed the trial as a means to extend it.