Pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi had a rare meeting with a minister from the ruling junta yesterday, a Myanmar official said.
The opposition leader, who is currently detained under house arrest, was in talks with Aung Kyi, the labor minister and official liaison between Suu Kyi and the government, the official said on condition of anonymity.
“Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Aung Kyi are meeting now at the state guest house. They met at about 1pm,” he said.
The pair last had a meeting in January last year, and the matters under discussion yesterday were not immediately clear.
It emerged last week that Suu Kyi, who has spent much of the last 20 years under house arrest, wrote to military regime leader Than Shwe offering suggestions about how to get Western sanctions against the country lifted.
“I don’t know clearly what they discussed but I think it will be related to her letter,” her lawyer Nyan Win said on hearing of yesterday’s meeting.
Suu Kyi and Aung Kyi met for about 45 minutes, he said.
The Nobel laureate’s easing of her stance on sanctions, after years of espousing punitive measures against the ruling generals, came as the US unveiled a major policy shift to re-engage with the junta.
Although Tuesday it held its highest-level talks with Myanmar in nearly ten years, the US has warned against lifting sanctions until the junta moves on democracy.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000