By AP / Robin McDowell

(THABYUCHAING, Myanmar) — Buddhist mobs carrying swords and knives swarmed Zaw Lay Khar’s village again and again, clashing with Muslims and burning their homes. When she saw about 40 attackers approaching her home, she fled with her daughter but had to leave behind her 94-year-old mother.

“They set the house on fire. There was nothing we could do but run. We didn’t have time to help her,” she said Thursday near her charred home, in the village of Thabyuchaing in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state. The attack had been two days earlier, but smoke still rose from the ruined buildings.

Reuters By Jared Ferrie

THANDWE, Myanmar (Reuters) – The Buddhist mob mutilated and burned Khin Naing so severely his son couldn’t recognise the body, one of series of attacks that suggest a resurgence of a monk-led movement in Myanmar accused of stoking violence against Muslims.

Flies were buzzing around the bloodied patch of earth outside a ransacked mosque in Tha Phyu Chai village where police removed Khin Naing’s body after he was hacked to death by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.

“He couldn’t run fast enough from the Rakhine people,” said his son, Tun Tun Naing, 17, who emerged from hiding to identify his father’s corpse from what remained of his charred clothing.

Prague Daily Monitor

Prague, Oct 3 (CTK) – Burmese dissident Min Ko Nain, who spent 16 years in solitary confinement under the rule of the military junta in the country, Thursday arrived in Prague where he will receive the human rights prize Homo Homini from the People in Need group.

Min Ko Nain was only released from prison last year, but he has fought for the improvement of the situation in Burma since then.

He told CTK that there was still not democracy in Burma, but its inhabitants have a measure of freedom.

Min Ko Nain was granted the prize in 2000 when he was still imprisoned.

The Burmese military regime imprisoned him for the first time in 1989 when he was involved in student protests against the ruling junta.

By KYAW PHYO THA / THE IRRAWADDY

RANGOON— It happened one night in the summer of 1989. Mutineers invaded their party headquarters at a border town near the Burmese-Chinese frontier in northeastern Shan State.

In an outburst of anti-party feeling, they took full control on the central armory and smashed the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao Zedong hung on the walls of the office in Panghsang. They destroyed Communist literature and kicked out their aging leaders to China.

After more than four decades of armed struggle against Burma’s central government, the Communist party of Burma (CPB) fizzled out.  Within one month, one of Asia’s longest Communist insurrections, a perpetual headache to the Southeast Asian country’s government since 1948, came to an end.

By SAMANTHA MICHAELS / THE IRRAWADDY

RANGOON — Following pledges to enhance military ties with Burma, the United States has maintained a block on military assistance to President Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government for its use of child soldiers in armed conflict, US officials said on Thursday.

Burma is one of five countries that will not receive US military assistance in 2014 under the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA), which places restrictions on security assistance and commercial licensing of military equipment for governments found to use child soldiers.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the sanctions would affect Burma, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Sudan and Syria.

By Kim N. B. Ninh and Matthew Arnold

With a much-heralded democratic transition underway in Myanmar, the future holds the potential for impressive gains but also significant challenges. Among the latter, decentralization and state-local relations as mandated by the 2008 constitution are emerging as a critical issue for both the country’s stability and long-term development. A history of highly centralized governance, subnational conflicts, and ongoing disputes over the constitution, however, mean that the implementation of decentralization in Myanmar is likely to be a contested and convoluted process.

BY KHIN MAUNG WIN

Buddhist mobs have been attacking Muslims in the Asian nation

THANDWE, Myanmar (AP) — Terrified Muslim families hid in forests in western Myanmar on Wednesday, one day after fleeing a new round of deadly sectarian violence that erupted even as the president toured the divided region. The discovery of four bodies brought the death toll from the latest clashes up to at least five.

Tuesday’s unrest near the coastal town of Thandwe, which saw Buddhist mobs kill a 94-year-old woman and four other Muslims and burn dozens of homes, underscored the government’s persistent  by Instant Savings App” href=”http://www.salon.com/2013/10/02/myanmar_muslims_hide_amid_deadly_sectarian_clashes/”>failure to stop the sectarian violence from spreading.

Rights groups say President Thein Sein, visiting the region for the first time since clashes flared there last year, has done little to crack down on religious intolerance and failed to bridge a divide that has left hundreds of thousands of Muslims marginalized and segregated, many of them confined by security forces in inadequately equipped camps for those who fled their homes.

BERNAMA PADANG BESAR, Oct 3 — The General Operations Force and police detained 21 illegal immigrants during a border patrol at 8.30 am here today. The Perlis Immigration Department deputy director Hazmi Sulaiman said they were all men, between 15 and 42, and comprised...