Asia is the flavour of the week in the magazines this week and two countries captured media attention—though for differing reasons. The first was, of course, Myanmar, for the draconian measure that the ruling military junta took to nip democracy’s budding ambitions. After the country cut itself off from the rest of the world to stem news from dispersing both within and outside, the international media scrambled to get real news out of the land of the Irrawaddy, to distinguish between witness accounts, hearsay and pure fiction. Time’s Andrew Marshall was in Yangon, and wrote a diary over the days when the brief uprising took place (Blood, robes and tears: A Rangoon diary). He saw monks, their mouths red with betel-nut juice, demanding that Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners be released. Then he was witness to the brutal clampdown on the protesters, when monasteries were raided, monks beaten up, taken into custody. The rebellion was quashed, but says Marshall, it’s not all over yet. “.The junta’s victory could prove Pyrrhic. Buddhism matters in Burma. The regime has spent years cultivating its image as the religion’s protector. That image is now shattered. The generals’ assault on a revered institution might yet cause cracks in the army’s ranks. ‘Soldiers are humans,’ says a Burmese analyst in Rangoon with close ties to the military. ‘Some monks told the soldiers they would go to hell one day,’ he told AFP. ‘The soldiers cried, because they knew this was true’.” The other Asian country, in focus because the ruling dispensation is beginning its National Congress on Monday, is China. Everything to do with China invites critical analysis these days. And as the Communist Party sits to ruminate on policies, the Economist turned its attention to the various development initiatives, especially in the neglected countryside there. What is discovered was not flattering for China (Missing the barefoot doctors). In all schemes, well intentioned no doubt, there were lapses that added to the people’s woes. “The changes are a temporary salve, at best. In the case of the medical-insurance scheme, the biggest beneficiaries are the richest peasants. The poorest are just as likely to choose to die at home rather than risk deeper impoverishment of their families by venturing into hospital. The measures also do next to nothing for a huge section of the rural population that has moved to the cities in recent years. The ship is not weathering well.”Meanwhile, after Newsweek’s story last week on this being the year of biosciences, The New Yorker reports this week on an interesting neurological experiment (Silent minds). Jerome Groop says British neuroscientist Adrian Owen established that brains of patients in the vegetative state are as capable of comprehending human speech as normal brains. “First, he took brain scans of thirty-four healthy volunteers who were instructed to picture themselves playing the game for at least thirty seconds. Their brains showed activity in a region of the cerebrum that would be stimulated in an actual match. He then repeated the experiment using a vegetative patient, a woman who had been severely injured in a car accident. The woman had to be able to hear and understand Owen’s instructions, retrieve a memory of tennis—including a conception of forehand and backhand and how the ball and the racquet meet—and focus her attention for at least thirty seconds. To Owen’s astonishment, she passed the test. ‘Lo and behold, she produced a beautiful activation, indistinguishable from those of the group of normal volunteers,’ he said.”
