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Myanmar Emerges: We Never Agree (VIDEO)

During five decades of military dictatorship in Myanmar, dissident speech was a crime punishable by long years in prison. In response, defiant, highly literate political dissidents turned to the arts to express their opposition. 

Myanmar Emerges: Resource Righteousness (VIDEO)

Resource Righteousness follows 38-year-old farmer Yee Yee Win, whose land lies at the edge of the Wanbao copper mine. After a violent crackdown on protesters last November, Yee Yee Win decided to sue Myanmar’s president, U Thein Sein. In a country with a human rights record like Myanmar, the fact that Ye Ye Win is not in jail shows progress. But, she says, not nearly enough.

Myanmar Emerges: Dreams to Dust (VIDEO)

Dreams to Dust follows 15-year-old Ko Ko Aung, who lives on the fringes of Myanmar's largest copper mine. Ko Ko Aung wanted to be a doctor, but was forced to drop out of school to help his family make ends meet. He now scrapes together a living forging copper from earth he steals from the mine.

Myanmar Emerges: Poisoned Hope (VIDEO)

Myanmar Emerges is a year-long GlobalPost investigation into challenges facing Myanmar's nascent democracy. Part One of the series, The People vs. The Power, examines the battle between villagers and a Myanmar and Chinese government-backed mining company they say is stealing their land and ruining the environment. On November 29, 2012, the Myanmar government responded to a peaceful protest by firing smoke grenades with white phosphorus munitions. More than 100 monks and civilians were burned, some as young as 16 years old. Poisoned Hope looks at the ongoing protest, and the damage it's done to the reputation of nobel peace prize laureate Aun San Suu Kyi.

Myanmar’s mine raiders: Living on stolen dirt

When the quarry guards show up, you run like hell. You drop your sacks of pilfered dirt and scramble down the steep rim of the copper mine. When you reach the base, you keep running, bounding over pools awash in sulfuric acid. Be careful: Plenty of boys before you have tumbled in and snapped limbs. Do not look back. Do not stop sprinting until you slip unseen into the village.

Testing Myanmar’s reforms: At Letpadaung mine, villagers stand up to generals

As Aung San Suu Kyi arrived to mediate a mine controversy, police fired phosphorus grenades at monks, testing the Nobel Laureate’s power.

Myanmar Emerges: Poisoned Hope (VIDEO)

Myanmar Emerges is a year-long GlobalPost investigation into challenges facing Myanmar's nascent democracy. Part One of the series, The People vs. The Power, examines the battle between villagers and a Myanmar and Chinese government-backed mining company they say is stealing their land and ruining the environment.

Myanmar Emerges: We Never Agree (VIDEO)

During five decades of military dictatorship in Myanmar, dissident speech was a crime punishable by long years in prison. In response, defiant, highly literate political dissidents turned to the arts to express their opposition. 

Cause of Thai refugee camp fire that killed 38 Burma refugees still a mystery

Victims were ethnic Karen refugees who fled a decades-long conflict in Myanmar.
Myanmar refugee camp Thailand fire 2013Enlarge
Myanmar refugee boys walk at their destroyed camp at the Mae Surin camp in Mae Hong Son province on March 24, 2013. Thai rescue workers picked through the ashes of hundreds of shelters for Myanmar refugees, after a ferocious blaze swept through a camp in northern Thailand killing 38 people. Around 100 people were injured. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

Thai border forces are still investigating the cause of a March 22 fire that killed 38 people and displaced over 2,000 more in the Ban Mae Surin refugee camp. According to local police under the authority of Colonel Naruchit, 300 of 400 witnesses have been questioned since the blaze.

Sally Thompson, Executive Director of The Border Consortium, which works with refugees on the Thai-Burma border, said three theories regarding the cause of the fire have emerged.

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'Heaven and hell' side by side in Burma

HLAING THARYAR, Myanmar — A sprawling slum clings so close to the Pun Hlaing Golf Estate that errant drives from the tee can sometimes land on the thatched roofs of the shacks where 30,000 desperately poor people live amid squalor, open sewers and widespread disease.
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