The military in Myanmar, also known as the Tatmadaw, recently threatened legal action against media organisations found to have reported unverified stories involving security issues and armed conflicts.

Since sanctions by the United States (US) and European Union (EU) were lifted, Myanmar has enjoyed relatively strong economic growth. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Myanmar’s economy has grown at an average of 7.5 percent between 2012 and 2017.

Myanmar's army accused rebels on Friday of attacking and killing "some" of its soldiers, the first skirmish acknowledged by the military in the wake of its unprecedented ceasefire with ethnic armed groups.

Ever since Myanmar undertook a series of political, economic and administrative reforms in 2011, the country’s economy has steadily improved. According to data from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Myanmar is enjoying some of the highest growth rates in the region.

The Rohingya crisis receives most of the global media’s attention currently due to the scale and magnitude of the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding there and rightly so. However, there is another deadly ongoing conflict in Myanmar. This conflict is between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the government of Myanmar and has often been dubbed “the forgotten war” for that very reason.

Fleeing Rohingya Muslims sold ration books to help pay hundreds of dollars to traffickers in order to flee squalid Myanmar camps by boat, only to be stopped at sea and forced back destitute, the refugees told AFP on Friday.Images of hungry and thirsty refugees huddled on boats have stirred memories of a 2015 crisis, when thousands of fleeing Rohingya were stuck at sea as a trafficking trail south collapsed.Some 120,000 of the stateless Muslim minority have languished in camps in central Rakhi

Between June 2017 and April 2018, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Humanitarian Health carried out a study on almost 400 migrant women from Myanmar between the ages of 15 and 55, who were married to Chinese men and experienced childbearing in the five years they were in China. The study, supported by the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand (KWAT), found that almost 40 percent of them were victims of forced marriages.

Faced with dwindling tourist numbers from the West, Myanmar is pulling out all stops to woo visitors closer to home. It has relaxed visa rules to visitors from China, South Korea and Japan and aims to bring about half a million of them over to Mandalay this year.Beginning 1 October this year, the country has waived visa requirements for visitors from Japan and South Korea for one year, as a trial run. Visitor growth from these two countries had been stagnating for a while.

The repatriation plan between the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments to return Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar has been postponed indefinitely again amid growing concerns on the wellbeing of returning refugees. Last month on 30 October, the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments reached an agreement to begin the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh this month.

Ever since the military-backed government of Myanmar embarked on a series of political reforms back in 2011, the country’s political landscape has never been the same. The political reforms carried out by Myanmar’s then government included the release of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission, general amnesties for more than 200 political prisoners and many others.