Jason Motlagh, for the Pulitzer Center

BANGKOK - The Thai government has finally matched its strong rhetoric with action by surrounding "red shirt" demonstrators and cutting off food and utilities to force them out of their protest site in the heart of the capital.

The move appeared to be backed up by the shooting on Thursday evening of Major General Khattiya Sawasdipol, a high-profile protest leader and renegade army general in an apparent assassination attempt. Within hours, however, the plan to isolate the protesters seemed to stall in another show of lack of determination.

Sporadic gunfire and several grenade blasts occurred after the shooting and one protester was killed during clashes late on
Thursday night. But on Friday things became much more serious as troops clashed with the protesters, firing rubber bullets, live ammunition and tear gas in an attempt to seal off their encampment that, according to news reports, had yet to succeed.
Khattiya, also known as Seh Daeng, was shot at about 7pm while talking to a group of international journalists at one of the protest barricades at Lumpini Park. He remains on life support at a nearby hospital.

First he dropped off the map for 13-months, only to emerge in March from the Chinese gulag after an international outcry.   

Now the human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng vanished again, after a visit to Urumqi, the capital of the East Turkestan/Xinjiang region of western China, where he had been visiting his father-in-law.

In a tiny room with no door, in a village with no roads, a drugged woman ties thousands of knots to weave a rug worth $5,000 for others to walk on.

BY ANNA BADKHEN | Foreign Policy

OQA -- The wooden loom takes up the whole room, clay wall to clay wall, south to north. In the southern end of the room, two women sit cross-legged on top of the first few inches of the carpet they started weaving this month.

Fine clay dust dances in the light that seeps into the room through the entryway, a woozy approximation of a rectangle.

A prominent Tibetan writer has been detained, after he and a group of Tibetan intellectuals
based in Xining wrote an online open letter criticising government corruption in earthquake relief efforts:

High Peaks Pure Earth has translated two blogposts from the Xining-based Tibetan website www.sangdhor.com. The first blogpost reports the arrest of a prominent Tibetan writer and intellectual called Shogdung  (or Zhogs Dung, his pen name, meaning "morning conch") on April 23, 2010 and was posted online on April 25, 2010. The second blogpost is an open letter to victims of the earthquake in Kham.

Jason Motlagh
Virginia Quarterly Review
The burn ward at Herat regional hospital is the best public facility of its kind in Afghanistan. It was opened with American aid money to handle the influx of women setting themselves on fire to escape domestic abuse, a countrywide phenomenon most acute in the hardscrabble villages of the western plains. The first time I visited the hospital, in the spring of 2007, a dozen teenage girls were crowded into a dank hallway of the former building. Some were covered with third-degree burns, wrapped mummylike in gauze dressings, still breathing but condemned to die. Two years later, their desperate stories were overshadowed by the grim reason for my return visit. On May 4, 2009, the American bombardment of two villages in a Taliban-controlled area of Farah Province, about 170 miles to the south of Herat, had yielded heavy civilian casualties. Word soon reached me back in Kabul that several victims had been transported by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Herat for emergency treatment.

Vast gas desposits off the coast of western Burma have proven a curse for the thousands of people deemed by the ruling junta to be standing in the way of its development. The construction of a multi-billion dollar pipeline connecting the Bay of Bengal gas fields to southwestern China has caused militarisation and displacement on an alarming scale, as the army looks to 'secure' the route and thus the capital generated from what is known as the Shwe Gas Project, little of which will benefit Burmese people.

Rights groups have warned of "systematic" and "shocking" human rights violations along the pipeline's trajectory that include forced labour and forced displacement. Yet the Burmese government continues to aggressively expand its energy sector, with the vast majority of produce siphoned off to neighbouring countries. This, despite Burma suffering from daily power shortages.
read more at Democratic Voice of Burma

rom Abu Muqawama reported by Amil Khan

Dechen Pemba of High Peaks Pure Earth

China is increasingly rattled about unrest in Kyrgyzstan, fearing that it will stir up protests in its restive Muslim region of Xinjiang or East Turkestan.
Beijing said it was was "deeply concerned" about the situation and a declared that: "China ... hopes the country will restore peace soon and maintain stability."

"China hopes that relevant issues will be settled in a lawful way," a spokesman said, signalling Beijing's deep anxiety that local anger at its repressive measures will turn bloody once again.

by High Peaks Pure Earth

A concerted new attack has been made on Yahoo email accounts of journalists and activists whose work relates to China.
The attack has focused on Uighur activists in particular and compromised accounts include those of the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group that China accuses of inciting separatism in the frontier region of Xinjiang which Uighurs call East Turkestan.

"I suspect a lot of information in my Yahoo account was downloaded," the group's spokesman, Dilxat Raxit said. An email account, he set up in Sweden, has been blocked for a month.

By CHOE SANG-HUN
SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea, one of the world's most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies. The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
read on