It's not easy getting through to Burma at the moment. The military dictatorship there has been doing everything it can to cut off the country's links with the outside world, including shutting down the Internet and mobile-phone networks. So I was elated when I finally managed to complete a long-distance call to Kyaw Win (not his real name). Win, whose number in Rangoon was given to me by some Burmese exiles, is a veteran of Burma's pro-democracy movement. He's a member of what's known as the "88 Generation"—activists who took part in massive protests that shook the country back in 1988.

That makes him a particularly interesting person to ask about what's happening in the country right now. Over the past two days the news for the current anti-government movement hasn't been encouraging. By most accounts the regime's soldiers and police have largely succeeded in neutralizing the Buddhist monks who gave such a powerful impetus to the opposition when they joined street protests earlier this month. The security forces have cordoned off monasteries, confining some monks inside and arresting hundreds, if not thousands, of others. Many demonstrators have been beaten and detained; dozens of people (no one knows the precise number) have been shot. And the government's success in curtailing the flow of information to the outside world has also made its work easier. Small wonder that some media accounts are making it sound as though the government has already triumphed.

If activists like Win are any indication, though, Burma's opposition isn’t dead yet. The monks may have been checked for the moment, he says, but protesters have still been taking to the streets of Rangoon in what he calls "guerilla demonstrations," with small groups melting away when challenged by the military and then reappearing elsewhere. Meanwhile, he says, the opposition is preparing for a new stage of defiance by making plans for a general strike. Just days ago, according to Win, representatives of the monks and the pro-democracy movement formed a "steering committee" to coordinate the next round of protests. They plan to call upon civil servants and technical personnel to join in a nationwide strike. That approach is designed to capitalize on widespread popular indignation over the government's brutal treatment of the monks. "Don't worry about our future," he says. "People know their duty, they know what they should do."

Continued

I have a question, and I'd welcome any responses from readers who might have an answer. Earlier this month the American evangelical Christian leader Franklin Graham and some of his colleagues flew on a chartered Boeing 747 from Charlotte, North Carolina to Pyongyang. It was billed as the first direct flight from the U.S. to the North Korean capital in half a century, and I have no reason to doubt that's true. Grahama's charity, known as Samaritan's Purse, brought 75 tons of humanitarian aid (valued at $8 million) - a response to the recent bout of flooding that has triggered the latest in the North's long string of national catastrophes.

What I'd like to know is whether Graham was combining that entirely worthy gesture with a bit of practical politics.

This Saturday may be the one rare day when bicyclists rule the road, at least in selected parts of 100 Chinese cities. Manuela Zonensein, who recently returned to Beijing to find Chinese going car-crazy, explains why:

A dozen years ago, my adolescent mind could hardly grasp China's reality. That was my first trip East, and I came away with important wisdom still with me at present. Dumplings are delicious. Clothes and sneakers are disgustingly expensive in New York. And the world might be less inclined toward conflict if bargaining were an art form permitted everywhere and pursued as enthusiastically as it is here.

But one thing I was entirely unable to comprehend in 1995 was this: how on earth did swells of bicyclists successfully navigate the tide of pedalling wheels along China's city streets? Unfortunately, I may have returned to Beijing a little too late to find out.

Vladimir Putin has a problem. He's forbidden from standing for a third consecutive presidential term by Russia's constitution. But he wants to retain at least the option of returning to power after he steps down. The solution? To find someone reliable to serve as a caretaker president until Putin can stage a triumphant comeback. That person might be newly-appointed prime minister Viktor Zubkov, or it could be someone else from Putin's inner circle. By all accounts, Putin himself hasn't made up his mind.

But, as Yulia Latynina points out in a must-read commentary in today's Moscow Times, things arent quite so simple in the "modern-day Mordor" of Moscow.

Taiwan's ruling and opposition parties are notorious for their endless bickering, including food fights that disrupt parliament sessions. Now there's a new front in the war: footwear.

Both parties hit below the belt in the leadup to dueling political rallies last Saturday, asking supporters to conform to a dress code. Opposition Kuomintang supporters were told to sport traditional Taiwanese blue and white slippers, or "tuoxie", the better to promote a "with the people" image. (The party's major weakness is being seen as too China-friendly and out of touch with grassroots Taiwanese, especially in the south.)

Poor Shinzo Abe. The Japanese prime minister's announcement that he's stepping down marked the end of an ignominious year. His term has been marked by just about every kind of political misfortune you can imagine – corruption scandals, crossed signals, stunning errors in political judgment, and just plain chaos. In the end, though, his fate was determined by the same weakness that has claimed so many illustrious victims before him: support for President George W. Bush and America's war on terror.

 (photo: Reuters)

Wait a minute – wasn't Japan supposed to be one of the few pro-American countries left on the planet? The place where polls consistently show majorities expressing support for U.S. policies?

Well, yeah – but only up to a point.

Yesterday's news that Apple had sold more than a million iPhones in less than three months--after dropping its price by one third to $399 last week--felt pretty anticlimactic. So, Apple's newest most covetable device is flying off the shelves? So what?

Actually, says one of the world's leading Internet security experts, David Perry, who stopped by Newsweek's London office yesterday, the iPhone's record sales are a "very big deal." While we're all thoroughly accustomed to PC viruses--which are now being circulated at the rate of 15,000 per day, compared to just 5 per month in 1990--to date there has yet to be any major cell phone virus.

Thijs Niemantsverdriet writes from the Netherlands about European Muslims and 9-11:

"In Arabic, the usual meaning of the word ‘Islam’ is not ‘peace’, but ‘submission’. Submission to the ideas and values of Arab tribes from the seventh century." This is not a sentence from Norman Podhoretz’s latest book. It is the opening statement at a press conference that was held earlier today in The Hague, Holland. The heads of several European ex-Muslim Committees gathered to sign a ‘Declaration of Tolerance.’ A wave of so-called committees has swept over Western Europe in the past few months: first in Germany, then in Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Great Britain.

At first glance, the cause of the ex-Muslims sounds sympathetic and important. Muslims, they argue, should be free to renounce their faith without being repudiated by their families or receiving death threats from radical Islamists – something that, alas, happens all too often. In short, they should enjoy the same basic rights as European Christians.

Yet here something strange happens to these ex-Muslims. As soon as they go public on their fall from faith, they seem prone to an unstoppable process of radicalization – towards outspoken anti-Islamism, that is.

Why does landlocked Bolivia have a navy?

Why not? Doesn't Brazil have a justice system? 

It's one of the oldest jokes on Latin America, and one that Brazilians know only too well. So this continent-sized nation wasn't exactly holding its breath last month when the Brazilian Supreme Court took up the corruption charges against former government higherups, who stand accused of trying to buy off half of the nation's congress.

Nick Hayes is an intern in our London bureau. He normally arrives to work on time, but not today. Here he tells us why: 

I just got a taste what life must have been like in Britain in the 70s -- when strikes erupted on a regular basis and angry workers engaged in running battles with the government of the day. Transport for London, the company that runs London's famous underground system, failed to come to terms with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. The result has been chaos on the subway since Monday afternoon -- and this could stretch to the end of the week.

If affirmative action in the United States has you confused, imagine what it's like in Brazil, where everything is muddier. Half a millennium of mingling by Africans, Europeans and Indians gave this New World nation a hundred faces and more colors than Crayola. (One famous national census turned up 136 terms by which Brazilians classified their complexion, from "dawn white" to "cinnamon.") The record-keepers, hoping to tidy things up, reduced the official lexicon of racial types to just five: white, oriental, indigenous, black and pardo (brown). But to this day, most Brazilians simply shrug and say they are a mixed-blooded people.

Blurry as that seems, this fluid self-image has been key to the country's identity. Now, thanks to an aggressive new brand of racial politics, the picture is about to change.