Burma

New York’s Grand Central Station is a gathering point today for people who are coming into town from a little farther away than usual: Burmese dissidents, writers, monks, and musicians are convening to protest the military junta of Senior General Than Shwe. Human Rights Watch has organized a petition and an art and photo installation in Vanderbilt Hall that includes "saffron revolution" monks coming in by train from Utica in the afternoon and closing prayers from the All Burma Monks Alliance at 6 p.m.

At a Tuesday meeting of the International Freedom to Publish Committee (a publishing industry group dedicated to free expression) in New York, Maureen Aung-Thwin handed out pages from Flower News, a Rangoon-based newspaper that had been marked up by Burmese government censors. Burma is the world’s second most censored country, according to a 2006 CPJ report. But you don’t have to read Burmese to understand what’s going on here. The red marks speak for themselves. Aung-Thwin is the director of the Burma project at the Open Society Institute and one of the world’s leading experts on that country.