Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – More than 700 acres of farmland in Taunggyi in southern Shan State have been marked off with stakes and banners by authorities, leading to local farmers’ fears that their land will be confiscated.

About 120 farmers signed an appeal letter sent to the president’s office in Naypyitaw, the Agriculture Ministry and the Shan State government on Monday, asking the government to project their property.

The letter said, “We humbly ask you to protect our farmland which is the lifeline of our livelihood.” The farmers grow wheat, garlic, strawberry and pigeon pea on their land.

(DVB)By KO HTWE
Published: 25 January 2012

Environmental activists in Burma have sought to capitalise on a recent decision by the government to suspend a massive coal-fired power plant in the country’s south by demanding a moratorium on all existing and planned coal projects.
The 4,000 MW plant in Tavoy would have produced enough power to support construction of a 200 square-kilometre industrial complex and buoy neighbouring Thailand’s energy needs. But after widespread grassroots opposition at the likely environmental and health impacts of the project, the government in early January scrapped the plan.

Tuesday, 24 January 2012 13:30 Mizzima News
(Mizzima) – Environmentalists are calling for a full moratorium on all existing and planned coal-fired power plants in Burma, following the announcement early this month that a proposed 4,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Dawei was terminated.
 
The coal-fired power plant near Tigyit village. Photo: PYO
Burma’s Minister of Electricity No.2 Khin Maung Soe announced that the plant in the Dawei Special Economic Zone would be cancelled due to the potential environmental impacts.

လက္ရွိအစိုးရမွ မဂၢါဝပ္ ၄၀၀၀ ထြက္ရွိမည့္ ထား၀ယ္ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုးလွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပးစက္ရံု တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ကို ရပ္တန္႔မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း
ဇန္န၀ါရီလအေစာပုိင္းတြင္ ေၾကျငာခဲ့ ျပီးေနာက္ သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ဆိုင္ရာ လွဳပ္ရွားသူမ်ားက လက္ရွိျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္လည္ပတ္ေနေသာ ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုး
လွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပး စက္ရံုမ်ား အားလံုး ႏွင့္ အျခားေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုးလွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပးစက္ရံုတည္ေဆာက္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားအားလံုးကို ရပ္ဆုိင္းရန္ေတာင္း ဆိုသည္။

30 Mar 2011 By Francis Wade

 Four years ago a World Bank report landed on the desk of the Chinese health ministry containing shocking statistics on pollution-related deaths in the country, so much so that Beijing promptly engineered the removal of a third of it over fears that the findings, if they went public, could spark “social unrest”. Around 750,000 people die each year of pollution-related illnesses, the report said, many of whom fall victim to China’s distinction as the world’s leading coal consumer. The findings were smothered for years, with the final report, “Cost of Pollution in China”, resorting to abstract gauges such as the economic burden of premature deaths, rather than the cold, hard figures.

Written by PYO | August 29, 2011

MIG 29 Jet photo http://mmmilitary.blogspot.com/

MIG 29 Jets – produced in Russia – were deployed by the Burmese Army as a threat against the Shan State Army North (SSA-N). As reported by Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN) on 13 July 2011 two MIG 29 Jets, and on August 9 2011 four MIG 29 Jets flew over the SSA-N - Burmese Army battlefields.

Written by PYO | August 22, 2011

The World Youth Day in Taunggyi organized by young people from various youth groups in Shan State was interrogated by authority.

The event took place at the stadium of Pa-Oh National Day in outskirt of Taunggyi on 12th August 2011; a remarkable event to show the solidarity of youth in Burma.

Despite wreaking havoc on the health of local villagers and the environment, Burma's military regime is doing nothing to reduce the impact of the Tigyit power plant and mine

Toxic waste and ash from Burma's largest coal-fired power plant and the nearby lignite coal mine are devastating the health of local communities and could displace up to 12,000 people, say Burmese researchers.

According to a report released by the Pa-Oh Youth Group, the Tigyit Power Plant is producing up to 150 tonnes of toxic fly ash daily and is enveloping nearby villages in the southern Shan State in a toxic cloud, causing widespread health problems.