There isn't much to laugh about in Myanmar these days. Ask some of its most famous comedians.
In 1996, brothers Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw, two of the Moustache Brothers, a trio known for its jokes about the omnipresent secret service, were sentenced to five years of jail and hard labor after making fun of the country's ruling generals during a rally at the home of democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Their crime? "Spreading false news."
A campaign subsequently launched by Amnesty International helped win the release in 2001 of the aging performers and secured government approval to resume performing. Only there was one caveat: They were effectively barred from performing in the Myanmar language, which meant that the majority of their audience would have to be tourists.
Others have not been that lucky, however.
Mg Myit Tar, a comedian and singer, was banned from performing after making a crack on state television about the country's frequently shut-down university system.
While hosting a music show on state-run television, he interviewed a girl singer of high school age and congratulated her for finishing her education -- a pointed reference to the regime's frequent closures of universities.
Meanwhile, one comedian who made off-color jokes about the generals -- and who shared a name with the junta leader -- was blocked from working after she refused to change her name.
"Most of the jokes in our country satirize the government and its corrupt system," said Maung Thura, a stand-up comic barred from the stage since May for giving an interview on the BBC, in which he criticized the regime's rules on Thangya -- performances that traditionally poke fun at society and politics.
Myanmar's brand of humor would seem innocuous in most societies, like a joke now making the rounds that Thura told about a discussion between an Englishman, an American and a man from Myanmar.
"Our man who had no legs could climb Mount Everest," brags the Englishman, to which the American replies, ``Our man sailed across the Pacific with no hands."
"That's nothing," the Burmese then chimes in. "Our country has been ruled for 18 years by a group of men who have no heads."
Such cracks are enough to land comedians among Myanmar's more than 1,100 political prisoners, according to the US-based Human Rights Watch.
The organization says the ruling junta "continues to ban virtually all opposition political activity and to persecute democracy and human rights activists."
Although the regime denies human rights violations, the crackdown on comedians is part of a larger government effort that seemingly scrutinizes everything from obituaries to cartoons for any hint of dissent -- and imposes harsh punishments on supposed offenders.
That hasn't stopped the wisecracking.
In Myanmar, quietly traded jokes run the gamut from the claim that generals' wives acted as bookies during the soccer World Cup to the observation that the daily power cuts only give teenagers greater opportunity for hanky-panky in the dark.
Comedians refuse to be silenced and have now turned to foreigners to expose the abuses that are being perpetrated by the junta.
"Tourists are our Trojan horses," Lu Maw, the third partner in the Moustache Brothers, told a Western journalist last year. "Through tourists, the rest of the world can learn of our plight."
"Burmese people love to laugh," says another comedian. "But if I can't speak, jokes will still spread. The people will make them up themselves."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other