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Geopolitics

In Burma, Muslim Minority Burned Out Of Their Homes

AFP, ASIANEWS, IRRAWADDY (Burma), REUTERS, AL JAZEERA (Qatar),

Worldcrunch

A crisis is building in western Burma where one of the world’s largest groups of stateless people, the Muslim Rohingya, are being burned out of their villages by Buddhist Burmese nationalists.

Since Sunday, several people have been killed and hundreds of homes have been burned. Thousands of Rohingya refugees are flooding into already existing refugee camps near Sittwe, the capital of the western state of Rahkine, Reuters reports.

The violence has now spread to the town of Kyaukpu, where two multi-billion-dollar oil and gas pipelines to China begin. AsiaNewsin Burma reports that the government newspaper New Light of Myanmar acknowledged that 1,039 houses in eight villages" were set afire.

Burma, which the ruling regime calls Myanmar, appears to be emerging from years of authoritarian rule into a tentative democracy. The country is mostly Buddhist and considers the 800,000 Rohingya, some of whom have been in Burma for generations, as illegal immigrants from Bengal, now Bangladesh and India.

The Rohingya were deprived of their Burmese citizenship in 1982. Since Bangladesh has also refused to accept them or help them, the Rohingya have lived a marginal existence, and are one of the most persecuted peoples in the world, according to the United Nations.

In June and July, the rape and murder of a Buddhist girl set off violence that killed 80 people and left 90,000 people homeless, almost all Rohingyas.

Anti-Rohingya rallies have been held in Mandalay and other Burmese cities, according to Al Jazeera. Buddhist students protested in Sittwe and “openly demanded” for Rohingya to be expelled from the university and from the city and its surrounding area, according to the AFP reports. The local Burmese magazine Irrawaddyquoted a Sittwe student leader as calling for an end to “studying with terrorist Bengalis.”

The president of Burma, Thein Sein, told AFP this summer that it was impossible for Burma “to accept the illegally entered Rohingya, who are not our ethnicity.” But in recent days Sein has acknowledged that the country will face an “international backlash” if it does not allow aid for the group, reports AsiaNews.

Burmese Nobel Prize winner and long imprisoned opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for not speaking out on the issue, the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungreports.

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Society

Italy's Right-Wing Government Turns Up The Heat On 'Gastronationalism'

Rome has been strongly opposed to synthetic foods, insect-based flours and health warnings on alcohol, and aggressive lobbying by Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government against nutritional labeling has prompted accusations in Brussels of "gastronationalism."

Dough is run through a press to make pasta

Creation of home made pasta

Karl De Meyer et Olivier Tosseri

ROME — On March 23, the Italian Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, Francesco Lollobrigida, announced that Rome would ask UNESCO to recognize Italian cuisine as a piece of intangible cultural heritage.

On March 28, Lollobrigida, who is also Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's brother-in-law, promised that Italy would ban the production, import and marketing of food made in labs, especially artificial meat — despite the fact that there is still no official request to market it in Europe.

Days later, Italian Eurodeputy Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of fascist leader Benito Mussolini and member of the Forza Italia party, which is part of the governing coalition in Rome, caused a sensation in the European Parliament. On the sidelines of the plenary session, Sophia Loren's niece organized a wine tasting, under the slogan "In Vino Veritas," to show her strong opposition (and that of her government) to an Irish proposal to put health warnings on alcohol bottles. At the end of the press conference, around 11am, she showed her determination by drinking from the neck of a bottle of wine, to great applause.

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