The government-owned daily newspaper “New Light of Myanmar” has announced that a rare white elephant, a 38-year-old female standing over two metres tall, has been captured in Maungtaw, in the state of Rakhine. Analysts have underlined the fact that for some Myanmar people the white elephant is a symbol of political change, thus connecting it with the upcoming elections set to take place in October.
For others, better acquainted with the superstitions of the ruling junta, the news has a more worrying meaning.
A report by the Democratic Voice of Burma has alleged that the Myanmar government is developing a secret programme to create nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles: a “Great White Elephant”, a magical symbol of power. It's to be hoped that the project remains just a symbol. But it may turn out to be one of the worst monsters populating the Asian imagination thanks to the government’s cooperation with North Korea.
The real mystery of this latest act of lunacy by the military junta is not if they can make weapons of mass destruction, but why. For a dissident exile in Bangkok, this is proof that the generals are nothing more than a bunch of psychopaths living in fear of invasion. Others see it as a move controlled by the Koreans. Yet others see it as a much more complex strategy to gain control over the region. In the meantime, the new planes made for the top junta chiefs have also been named “White Elephant”.



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Drug use in the richest countries of the world is stable, but is on the up in developing countries, where methamphetamine is increasingly widespread. This from the 2010 World Drug Report, produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The standout factor that emerges from the report is that the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs are now almost indistinguishable, in both marketing and financial terms, from those of other basic commodities. Drugs seem to be becoming a metaphor for the global market.
The other factor is the rise in the use of methamphetamine in developing countries. Speak to a taxi driver in Jakarta, a bricklayer in Shanghai or a factory worker in the textile factories all over Asia and they will tell you exactly why: stimulants are crucial to sustaining heavy workloads.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:14.6MB) .

The U.S. Department of State has published the 2010 report on human trafficking.
According to the report, 12.3 million men, women and children around the world are forced into work or prostitution, with the traffickers earning up to 32 thousand million dollars per year. In some cases the victims are literally kidnapped or reduced to slavery. In the majority of cases they are forced to sell themselves to escape ethnic persecution, war and subhuman living conditions.
All of this means that that initial figure could be increased ten-fold to give a more realistic idea of the numbers of people that are The Wretched of the Earth.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:22MB).