The Kachin Independence Organizations, one of the cease-fire groups within Burma, has censored an environmental report due to be released by the Pan Kachin Development Organization here in Chiang Mai. The report assesses the impacts of development, particularly logging, on the environment of Kachin State.

The KIO, which won forestry and mining concessions in its cease-fire agreement with the junta, fears the report may harm its image and relationship with the junta.

The KIO is also one of the cease-fire groups which are refusing to lay down their weapons at the behest of Rangoon, expressing distrust in the junta's promises of protection and development.

The KIO can stand up to the junta with its guns, and call the generals dishonest, but they're worried an environmental report may damage the relationship?

Exploration is well under way by Daewoo of the natural gas feilds off the coast of Arakan State in western Burma. Arakan State borders Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal, and is home to the Arakanese (Rakhine) and the Rohingya, Burma's muslim minority. Read about it here: History of Arakan State.

For the last several months, I've been editing stories via email every day for Narinjara News, covering Arakan State. The stories are brief, and come plainly stating news that should all rights be shocking. Its been through bits and peices in these articles that I've learned about this place and the people there. Its only been with today's article on the Shwe Gas project, and my subsequent decision to finally google something, that the sequence of news events as they've been coming to me have seemed to coalesced into a disturbing pattern.

Daewoo stands to earn an annual profit of $100 million from the project. Here's what the people of Arakan state have gotten lately:   more »

The news from Burma's been pretty busy lately, but some of us have been to busy cleaning up to blog. You can get your news updates here.

Chiang Mai was inundated with floods, again, last week. The first flood hit early in August, and was reportedly the worst in 40 years, with the Ping river reaching about 4.75 meters. About three weeks ago we had another, smaller, flood. Then this past week there was another one, even worse, with the river hitting 5 meters. Luckily, sort of, we had more warning and did not actually lose anything. Except the nice new paint job we did after the first flood. The government even gave us a goody bag of supplies, with some prawn mama noodles, toilet paper, sardines, and soy milk. Mmm..thanks Mr. Thaksin, but can I just have the 100 baht in cash next time?   more »