Respect

I want to be fair and give respect where it is due. In a previous post, I was somewhat critical of the coffee making skills at Hazel, Mae Sot’s first western style coffee shop.
However, last week I moved into a flat two doors down from the coffee shop and have been [...]

The Philippines: Champion of democracy in ASEAN

Like many countries in Asia, the Philippines has not found the road to democracy to be a particularly smooth one. But, comments by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo at the ASEAN summit in Singapore about Burma show the country is emerging as the democratic conscious of ASEAN.
Domestic politics in the Philippines is a chaotic business, with the [...]

Sanctions, smanctions

As if life in Burma wasn’t tough enough, Canada has announced what Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier has called ‘the toughest sanctions in the world’. In addition to existing Canadian sanctions against Burma, Ottawa is introducing a ban on all imports and exports from Burma except for humanitarian goods, and a ban on new investment [...]

Are we in danger of forgetting the saffron revolution?

It has been a little over six weeks since we all watched in horror the pictures from Yangon and Mandalay as Burma’s military brutally suppressed peaceful monk led demonstrations.

Many of the early pictures were taken with camera phones belonging to passers by. The absence of international media and tight state control of the local press [...]

Non-profit 2.0

About eight or nine years ago, during the crazy days of the dotcom bubble, when I was a struggling freelance technology journalist, I came up with an idea that we would today refer to as social networking.

That’s right, back before Facebook, MySpace or even Friendster, when Google was nothing more than Yahoo’s search [...]

Time for ASEAN to step up

If the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) wants to have any meaningful future role on the international scene, it has to get serious about Burma.For the grouping’s ten members ( Brunei, Burma Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) the junta has become a major embarrassment.

Furthermore, economic instability in [...]