Yangon - Myanmar has rejected a demand by Bangladesh to stop offshore oil exploration in a disputed area in the Bay of Bengal, state media reports said Friday.

The Myanmar government announced it would continue exploration in the Rakhaing offshore block AD-7 despite Bangladesh's claim to the area, according to state-run TV and newspapers.

Myanmar claimed the AD-7 block was within the special economic zone of Myanmar territorial waters and that the demand by Bangladesh was unlawful and wrong.

Dhaka - Bangladesh has resolved to protect its sovereign territorial waters in the Bay of Bengal where it claims Myanmar authorities allegedly intruded for oil and gas exploration, officials said Thursday.

A high-level meeting of government and military officials in Dhaka reviewed the situation in the Bay of Bengal over Myanmar's presence in the disputed waters.

Yangon/Singapore - Many young women in Myanmar's (Burma's) Irrawaddy delta region have stopped wearing their hair traditionally long, word goes.

Too many of them died in the metre-high floods brought on by Cyclone Nargis, because their hair got entangled in tree branches, or were strangled by their own hair as it wrapped around their neck.

Whether that is true or not is hard to verify. But hundreds of thousands were traumatised by the worst natural catastrophe the country has ever seen.

More than 138,000 lives were lost during the cyclone in May, and some 2.4 million people lost their belongings, while about 800,000 homes were destroyed.

Dhaka - A high-level Bangladesh delegation is scheduled to fly to Myanmar Wednesday to hold talks aimed at resolving a dispute over oil and gas exploration in the Bay of Bengal, a top foreign ministry official said Monday.

Bangladesh's foreign secretary Md. Touhid Hossain will lead the delegation at the dialogue with his Myanmar counterpart and other high ranking officials to "defuse the situation" over the exploration, the official said.

Yangon - Trade between Myanmar and China increased 60 per cent in the past fiscal year, ranking China the second-largest trading partner for the country after Thailand, news reports said Monday.

Trade between Myanmar and China reached 2.4 billion dollars for the year that ended March 31, compared with 1.5 billion the previous fiscal year, Myanmar's prime minister, General Thein Sein, said last week in Nanning, China at a summit between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member

Yangon - The military junta in Myanmar has removed barricades from the house of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in the city of Yangon, witnesses reported Sunday.