Bangkok - A Mandalay court has sentenced six opposition leaders to prison terms of up to 13 years on charges of threatening national "tranquility" and stirring up hatred ,anti-government sources said Saturday.

The six senior members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) were arrested in September and October last year in a nationwide crackdown on dissent following the Buddhist-monk-led protests in Yangon.

An army crackdown on the demonstrations, dubbed the "saffron revolution," left more than 30 dead and scores missing.

Bangkok - The upcoming Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Beijing provides an ideal opportunity for Asian and European leaders to pressure Myanmar to improve it's poor human rights record, New York-based Human Rights Watch stated Thursday.

"Since Burma's [Myanmar's] rulers have stonewalled on the efforts by the UN to bring about real change, its up to ASEM ministers to send a message that sham political reforms are unacceptable," said Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Yangon - Myanmar's state media on Tuesday blamed a bomb blast that killed a 26-year-old man over the weekend on the victim himself, described as a former Buddhist monk who had participated in the September 2007, "saffron revolution."

Thet Oo Win died in a bomb explosion at his home in Shwepyitha township in Yangon at 5:30 pm on Sunday.

A police investigation into the incident found various bomb-making paraphernalia including a 9-volt dry cell battery fastened with a wire, a damaged pieces of lithium battery, six electric detonators and ammonium nitrates at the victim's home, claimed The New Light of Myanmar, a military mouthpiece.

Bangkok - A Chinese-led consortium with a concession for oil exploration on Myanmar's Ramree Island has left hundreds of local islanders landless and unemployed and their environment befouled, a human rights group said Tuesday.

Blocking Freedom, a report compiled by the environmental and human rights group Arakan Oil Watch, said a consortium led by the China National Offshore Oil Company Ltd (CNOOC Ltd) left behind such a trail of abuses and environmental contamination on Ramree Island that outraged locals attacked their facilities last year.

The report was the first to be released on Chinese onshore oil exploration activities in Ramree Island, Myanmar's largest island, in Arakan State, now called Rakhine. 

Yangon - The portrait of a painter with a rope around his neck and on a red background was too much for the government censors in Myanmar.

"Absolutely not!" they told the artist in the country's main port city of Yangon, when he complied with the law and sought official permission to exhibit the painting at an art show.

And there the canvas still stands, without a frame, without admirers, without a buyer.

Aythaya, Myanmar - In the morning mist, vintner Hans-Eduard Leiendecker checks on the rows of vines that he meticulously planted.

Only when saffron-clad Buddhist monks approach in a single file does one remember that they are not in Leiendecker's hometown, the Moselle town of Bernkastel in western Germany, but in tropical Myanmar.

Aythaya Vineyards is the brainchild of Bert Morsbach, who relocated from Thailand years ago, where he manufactured surf boards.

Almost 10 years ago, he leased a plot of land at an elevation of 1,300 metres near Inle Lake, about an hour's flight time north-east of Myanmar's main port city of Yangon.