Myanmar/Burma’s oppressive junta pulled off two feats this week: first they cooked the elections ensuring a front party win the elections with 80 percent (well, at least they did not say 98 percent like Paul Kagame) of the vote, and then announced a new flag for the country. Okay, so it looks suspiciously like Ghana’s “Black Star” flag. Same colors, but the star is white. Reuters, which has an Africa News Blog but not a Europe News Blog (that’s just news) tried to “analyze” the decision and fails to pass a slew of offensive, objectionable stereotypes off as clever:

Are Myanmar’s generals closet Rastafarians, or is their adoption of the pan-African colours associated with Ethiopian emperor Haile Salassie a tacit acknowledgement that half a century of army diktat has transformed the once-prosperous Asian state into an African-style basket-case?

For real.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.