Gianni Falcone, diarioacido

The bilingual blog Lanna Action for Burma spearheads the women's panty-protest movement against the government of Burma:

· Post Your Panties for Peace! Global action Beginning 16th October The Burma military regime is not only brutal but very superstitious. They believe that contact with a woman’s panties or sarong can rob them of their power

So this is your chance to use your Panty Power to take away the power from the SPDC!

Post or deliver your panties to the closest Burmese Embassy ongoing from 16th October.

Myanmar Embassy
132 Sathorn Nua Road
Bangkok

Here's a list of contact addresses -- street, phone, fax and email -- for Burmese embassies around the world, including Washington, D.C. and the U.N. Mission in New York.

The Irrawaddy News Magazine is all over Burma Crisis 2007, with video links on its homepage.

It reports “Panties for Peace” Campaign Wins Wide Support,

Liz Hilton, a supporter of the Lanna Action for Burma and a member of the Empower foundation, said that by sending underwear to the men of Burma’s overseas embassies women would be delivering a strong message to the regime.

“The SPDC is famous for its abuse of women, so this can be a very strong signal from women around the world supporting the women in Burma,” she said.

“Many feel there’s little we can do. It is like living next to domestic violence when we see the military government brutal crack down in Burma. We can hear that fighting in the next-door house or in the same village. We have tried to talk, we have tried to do many things. But we need to express our feelings.”

In another unusual popular protest action, people in Rangoon are hanging pictures of Than Shwe around the necks of stray dogs. It’s a very serious insult in Burma to associate anybody with a dog.

...“The people of Burma are doing what they can inside [the country],” said Liz Hilton. “We should do whatever we can outside. Most of us are not politicians, we are not powerful people. But women do have the power of their panties—let’s use that.”

In this photo released by the Democratic Voice of Burma, Buddhist monks stand in front of riot police as they demonstrate in Yangon Myanmar on Wednesday Sept. 26, 2007. Security forces fired warning shots and tear gas into swollen crowds of demonstrators in Myanmar's biggest city Wednesday, while hauling away defiant Buddhist monks into waiting trucks, the first mass arrests since protests in this military dictatorship erupted last month. (AP Photo/Democratic Voice of Burma)

Also at that blog: SPDC…Where are the monks…the nuns…the demonstrators…?

... thousands of monks were taken away on trucks to where??? The military have continued raiding homes and arresting anyone believed involved in the demonstrations. Monks and others arrested are telling the stories of torture and brutality. People are dying in custody…their bodies quickly cremated.
The regime says it has released thousands but who has seen this??? Yesterday three more pro-democracy leaders were arrested...

Wikipedia on SPDC:

State Peace and Development Council s the official name of the military regime of Burma (also known as Myanmar). It seized power by force instead of taking part in the election of 1990 which resulted in overwhelming support for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD).

The regime has been accused of brutal persecutions of minority ethnic groups, opposition groups, students and human-rights activists. It has also brought a level of stability in the country through this authoritarian rule...

The Washington Post reported Saturday Bush Sets New Sanctions Against Burmese Military Junta,

President Bush yesterday ratcheted up pressure on the military junta in Burma in response to its violent crackdown on democracy protests, imposing a new round of sanctions and calling on China, India and other regional powers to help force the ruling generals to "stop their vicious persecution."

"The people of Burma are showing great courage in the face of immense repression," Bush said in a statement televised live from the White House as first lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice looked on. "They are appealing for our help. We must not turn a deaf ear to their cries.

The president directed the government to freeze any U.S.-controlled assets held by 11 senior Burmese officials, and he widened the net with an executive order expanding sanctions to those who assist such officials or the Burmese government, starting with 12 individuals and entities. He also ordered tighter restrictions on the export of goods such as high-performance computers to Burma. ...

Everybody's trying to hit them where it hurts.

Flickr for the masses: Flickr To Add Online Photo Editing Tools

TechCrunch reports,

Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the http://www.crunchbase.com/company/picnik">Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).

Bad food is cheaper than good food: Blame the farm bill, says Michael Pollan in the Times. The author of The Omnivore's Dilemma explains it:

... the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Life makes you tough: The wussification of American children. SFGate. The experiences we had that today's kids won't, in the name of fear.