RECENT NEWS, OPINION, ANALYSES & RESOURCES

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Learn of the plight of our Afghan sisters & brothers from the headlines of the
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

towards Global Sisterhood Network operations and to support feminist struggles in South Asia and the Middle East

Australia: BigPharma and Government maintain HPV vaccine safety even as casualties continue to mount

Afghanistan: US military, N. Alliance warlords & Taliban extremists - the triple barrier to democracy

France:  Sarkozy’s "burqa bashing” exploits Muslim women’s bodies for his anti-Islam political agenda

Iran: A time for hate-obsessed neo-cons, staining an inspiringly brave uprising, to pull their heads in!

Vietnam: 36 year-old US promised compensation for ongoing human & environmental Agent Orange war crimes still unmet

China: One child policy-linked kidnapping of children swings from boys to girls

UN: Nobel Peace Laureates demand freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi & all fellow political prisoners held by Burma's military junta

Read also "Global Outrage" over Suu Kyi’s latest persecution from within corridors of political power destined to turn into "Global Hypocrisy"

Ireland: Long overdue begging of forgiveness on bended knee from Benedict XVI, sole course to save the Catholic Church after revelations of horrific child abuse

Read also: A snowball's chance in hell of Benedict XVI's cheque to pay for Church’s abuse of Irish children?

US: Drawing lines in the sand, and holding President Obama accountable, in the search for Reproductive Justice

Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty: Dr. Anarkali Honaryar, women's rights activist, named Afghanistan's Person Of The Year

UK: Obscene greed in political corridors turns Westminster into a trough which would make 4-legged pigs vomit

New York May 2, 2009: Death of Marilyn French, inspiring feminist author who corrected prevailing histories which had denied women their past, present and future

Fiji: Women, sidelined & ignored by military coups, seek implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325 to restore their multi-racial democracy

Iceland: Voters reward Johanna Sigurdardottir’s feminist leadership on economics & paid sex

Medical Research: Delaying menopause - another perilous ploy to justify the stem cell market

Easter 2009: From opposite sides of the globe Cardinal Pell and Archbishop Nichols, heir-apparents to the Throne of Peter, echo Benedict XVI's flawed condom gospel

North India: Radio-active US missiles dropped in Afghanistan a suspected source of high levels of uranium detected in 150 children with deformities

Afghanistan: Hamid Karzai joins the Taliban, tribal structures, & the West's flawed policies in denying the country’s women dignity, equality and freedom

Malalai Joya, supreme feminist courage in the face of perils imposed by War Lords, the Taliban & US occupation

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Iraq: Victims of cowardly US-led coalition air raids 39 per cent children & 46 per cent women

Pakistan:  Honour Killing books reveal a face of patriarchy with inherent violence against women 

Africa: Forget 'green washing'! Today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-led Alliance is ‘poor washing’ to impose GM-agriculture across a hunger-ridden continent

Read also: (AGRA), the same vested interests which foisted chemical-dept crop monocultures onto Asia in the 50s and 60s

 Instead, Human Rights Watch calls for women's land rights to reduce starvation & improve the lives of African women & children 

International Women's Day Issues Around the World in 2009

Plus ça change: The same issues [unemployment, rising prices, democratic representation, and peace versus war]  that moved women to first rally in 1910 resonate in India and globally in 2009

Pakistan: Talibanization, a la Afghanistan, another repugnant episode in the history of the nation's women 

India: Women subjected to unconscionable levels of male violence, both on the street & domestically 

Read also: India a major destination & transit point for the 10,000 women & children sucked into slavery daily [bought for  and sold for  in multi-million dollar atrocities]

Afghanistan: A dose of Karzai rhetoric as women and girls remain deprived of basic human rights 8 years post-Bush Jnr's invasion

Read also:   Unlike Taliban atrocities, US-NATO ‘liberating missile bloodbaths' for Afghan civilians hidden from world eyes

Haiti: : Government inertia towards poverty-stricken young girls & women raped by criminal gangs

US: Gap in poverty rates between men & women wider than anywhere else in the Western world

Britain: Westminister’s females fail to inspire the coming generation of women to enter politics 

Iraq:  Monstrous corruption, written in the blood of our Iraqi sisters a brothers, with $50-125bn earmarked for reconstruction landing in US military & contractor pockets

Israel's 2009 Seige on Gaza: A Time for Peace, A Time for Women

Israel:  Women's Organisations demand peace talks and an end to missiles & tools of death

Manila:  Isis International echoes global call of women for women to build a just and sustainable Palestinian-Israeli Peace 

 Turkey: Middle East’s First Ladies call for Israel to halt military invasion & blockade in Gaza

Melbourne:  Thousands rally to condemn Israel’s genocidal litany of war against Palestinians in Gaza

Gaza: Added to Israel’s 2007 blockade, current military assault catastrophic [read "genocidal"] for innocent civilians 

Horrific war injuries to civilian adults & children in numbers almost too large to comprehend: The endless and intense bombardment from Israeli air, ground, and naval forces have missed no targets, not even the hospital

With US complicity, Israel inflicts terror reminiscent of regimes which dare not be named - the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee

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Reports from around the world on the 2008 Campaign to Eliminate Violence [chiefly men's] Against Women

Road to Copenhagen: Feminist Perspectives on Climate Change

Overdue: A new climate deal based on human progress and [gender] justice 

Stop the Blame: A powerful history of population control injustices - the interplay between race, population, eugenics and the environment - and an essential resource for policy makers and students of women's studies, the environment, and postcolonial politics

  Fire regime of climate change set to make the financial crisis look like a garden party

and other must reads:  Vandana Shiva: Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity

and Ariel Salleh [Editor]: Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology

 2009 Literature and Cinema by Feminists

Megan Mylan's SMILE PINKI scoops 2009 short documentary Oscar

  Outstandingly researched "Shock Doctrine" wins Naomi Klien the inaugural University of Warwick award for creative writing

    Asoka Bandarage: The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy

Germany: Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (The Milk Of Sorrow), addressing a dark era of brutal misogyny in her country, awarded the Golden Bear at 2009 Berlinale

US: : Megan Doneman’s “Yes Madam, Sir“, a documentary on the life of Kiran Bedi, India’s feminist super cop and prison reformer, wins Best Documentary award and the Fund for Santa Barbara's Social Justice Award at the 2009 Santa Barbara Film Festival

Australia:  Pastor Danny Nalliah, divine retribution zealot, blames Victoria’s lethal bushfires on State’s decriminalisation of abortion

Nepal: Uma Singh, inspirational feminist journalist, brutally murdered for her courageous truth

 Iceland: Time arrives for brilliant Johanna Sigurdardottir to lead the nation to economic recovery

Women adopt core principles of feminist economics to undo Iceland's man-made financial crash

Switzerland:  Davos 2009 devoid of women while the usual brotherhood dithers to solve today's man-made economic chaos

Davos 2009 sticks with dehumanising, aggressive and militaristic male economic gospel to repair the man-made global financial mess

 Benedict XVI in Africa:  Walking allover the world's poorest women with his latest venemous & misconceived "deadly gospel" on condoms and the spread of HIV-AIDS

Vatican: Benedict XVI's credibility right down the drain in 2009 after January dances with "no-gas-chamber" and "divine retribution" extremists

Read also: Benedict XVI sparks just outrage, and disgraces his own Church, by welcoming anti-Semitic bigot back into his fold

and  Benedict XVI: Rather than just a silly old man, a very nasty piece of work busy  demeaning other religions to prove Christianity’s ‘superiority’

and note too from Brazil: A dose of Vatican injustice for pregnant child's mother & abortion doctors, but not for the child's rapist step-father

Benedict XVI marring the spirit of Christmas with more of his vitriolic obsession with homosexuality

 Read also: Benedict XVI's coded intolerance wilfully ignores value of gays to church chain of command [As too in his obsession with homosexuality absurdly equates non-heterosexuality with paedophilia, while ignoring the significant contributions of gay women and men to social justice movements in every corner of the globe]

And Benedict XVI OKs vicious & unreliable personality assumptions to screen priesthood candidates

Gaza: Disaster of Israel's making Read also: Surgical strikes and green zones which sanitize Israel, India and the US's killing fields

Australia: December 10, 2008, one of literature's greats, Dorothy Porter, loses battle with cancer

UK: In the South-East female unemployment up by 141% in 2008 & by 39% in January 2009

Pernicious myth of men getting fleeced by divorce exposed by their ex-wives' poverty

Africa: While men grow cash crops or migrate to cities for paid work, women face toil against all odds to grow 80 per cent of continent's food 

India:  Muslim women from urban Andhra Pradesh depart poverty when given access to credit

78,000 maternal deaths annually due to abysmal rural health care, child marriage & nutrition forsaken for husbands and sons 

 Police part of Violence against Women as assault & murder of women, & female foeticide rates, rise in Punjab, Haryana 

Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not our 9/11 

Read also from P. Sainath: To ape Bush Jnr’s 9/11 response against Pakistan would repeat history both as tragedy & as farce

and from  V.R. Krishna Iyer: Amidst Mumbai bloodbath lives at a railway station less media-important than those at the luxury Taj

Mothers dying like animals & buried as unceremoniously as when they are born 

Women "routine" victims of domestic violence, but Domestic Violence Bill remains delayed

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US: Economic crash deepens domestic violence peril of women & children

Malaysia: Threatened with imprisonment under Mahathir for her 1995 truth, Dr. Irene Fernandez finally acquitted in 2008

Burma: Without affordable contraception & legal abortion, poor women prey of back alley abortionists

Washington DC: Fast track Barack Obama into the White House and ditch Bush Jnr's incompetent - borderline criminal - bailout, alongwith his lameduck administration

Italy: Death of Miriam Makeba, fearless global songstress in the struggle against Sth Africa’s apartheid regime, following a concert in Caserta, close to Naples, on November 10 2008

Afghanistan: Amidst the trappings of globalised modernity, pregnancy still slaying country's females, the majority mere children themselves, like flies

  Innocent victims, most women & children, of Bush Jnr-imposed militarism & Taliban resurgence

Patistan: Outrage as notorious misogynists, Mir Hazar Khan Baitarani & Israrullah Zehri, elevated to Ministers in Coalition Government

Read also by Rafia Zakaria: "These developments testify to the reality that while feminism, burdened by its scepticism of anything universal, may be silent, unabashedly universal patriarchy screams as loudly as ever"

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2008 Reach All Women in War's Anna Politkovskaya Award to Afghanistan's Malalai Joya

2008 Courage Awards to three brave women journalists: Aye Aye Win from Burma, Farida Nekzad from Afghanistan, and Sevgul Uludag from Cyprus

  Champions of independent journalism, peace-building and social justice honoured in 2008: Krishnammal and Sankaralingam Jagannathan, and their organisation LAFTI (Land for the Tillers' Freedom, India), Amy Goodman (USA), Asha Hagi (Somalia) and Monika Hauser (Germany)

India:   Deccan Development Society launches Asia’s first all-women community radio station in rural Andhra Pradesh

US: A strong feminine influence behind the Barack Obama victory the peace-loving world applauds

  Bush Jnr & Co-fascists at the double to further wreck regulations on the environment, civil liberties & abortion rights, among others ­ few for the good

Father of all bailouts for capitalism’s greediest, but zilch [Sweet Fanny Adams] for the global starving 

  Want more of Bush Jnr‘s war-mongering lies? Vote for the Make-Believe Maverick John McCain!

After both ignoring and silencing Brooksley Born’s "Economic Wisdom", Greenspan & Co‘s arrogance in turn created credit chaos

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo orders end to AIG’s obscene partying on Dubya’s bailout with taxpayer’s money

"The Bailout", a cooked up “no choice” emergency to enact fascist economic policies

  Sept 27 - Nov 17, 2008, Haymarket Books-sponsored "Resisting Empire Tour" by acclaimed authors

Rwanda:  Women driving the economy and filling ranks of Government

Australia:  John Howard-Philip Ruddock cruel and costly "Pacific Solution" also a death sentence for Afghan asylum seekers

UK:  Women Against Rape condemn Dame Helen Mirren & Criminal Justice System's "rape tolerance" 

Burma: On the 13th Anniversary of her latest detention, esteem for Aung San Suu Kyi grows still stronger

Post-cyclone Nargis catastrophe, men rape, rob & murder Delta women

Forced to immigrate by Junta-imposed deteriorating political & economic conditions, Kachin women, some as young as 14, trafficked as brides into China

Pakistan: Latest "Honour Murders", defended by legislator in name of culture and tradition, the tip of a misogynist iceberg

Race to the White House: Abysmal report cards for Sarah Palin leave triple dose of egg on McCain’s face while  McCain himself gripped in a dangerous militancy which mocks any talk of peace

PLUS the not to be missed by Gloria Steinem: Palin, McCain's token woman, shares nothing other than a chromosome with Clinton

as neither by  Arianna Huffington: Sarah Palin, McCain’s code name, dressed up in a skirt, lipstick, & Tina Fey glasses, for another term of Bush Jnr's failed policies

and by Jessica Valenti: Palin a disaster for both the US & women’s rights despite Republican spin painting her as a feminist

 and by  Catherine Deveny: Palin, a Gun-toting, God-fearing proof that we are at the mercy of morons

and by Naomi Wolf: Sara "Evita" Palin is Rove & Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their "Made in the White House Fascism"

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Australia: High Court ruling gives surety & confidence to women prosecuting against their trafficking into sex slavery

India:  Thousands of abducted children annually trafficked in the guise of adoption or into sex slavery

: Arundhati Roy: Azadi - It's the only thing the Kashmiri wants. Denial is delusion

In the interests of Monsanto et al., pressure mounts to dismantle the 1986 Environmental Protection Act

South Africa: Resisting Monsanto’s Bt-Maize, Stalkborer becomes farmer's Super-Peril in an unprecedented environmental disaster

Afghanistan: Malalai Joya’s hopes & fears living under US-led occupation and US-sponsored warlords & puppet Karzai

Paramount that RAWA remains underground in efforts to combat Bush Jnr’s failed “liberation” of girls & women

With famine on the horizon, time to dump the dumb aid-agency strategies spreading poverty and insecurity

Brave women defy all odds to exhibit their abstract & contemporary art in India

Prison sentences of up to 20 years rub salt into wounds of female victims of male rape

US: Bush Jnr Administration planning to extend its international contraceptive denials to home soil

Read also from Michael Moore:  A gut-wrenching thought that in 6 steps the Democrats could put McCain in the White House

August 6, 2008: Memories of Hiroshima/Nagasaki serve to remind that Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair also belong in the dock alongside accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic

Burma: Women's liberation hindered by Junta’s ousting of women from politics & cultural patriarchy

Australia, World Youth Day 2008: Shamed Catholic Church in damage control, further tainted by Cardinal Pell's auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher & Benedict XVI's disappointingly gratuitous words of apology for "Black Collar Sexual Crime"

Read also: Benedict XVI's double insult of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers seeking a rescind of church doctrine that played a role in the genocidal onslaught of millions of indigenous people worldwide

Despite Catholic Church's role in cruel attempted assimilation of First Australians, pompous Benedict XVI arrival for whites-only

Cardinal George Pell's pathetic denials of cover-up, & denial of justice for victims of Catholic "black collar" sexual  abuse, prompt calls for his resignation, and demand action from Benedict XVI

Read also:  Father of two school girls raped by Melbourne priest demands morally & socially bankrupt Cardinal Pell begs forgiveness

Kitsch souvenirs [none bargain-priced] to reimburse Catholic Church for Papal visit costing Australian taxpayers $160M

Egypt: Sons & daughters of the poorest exploited & poisoned in country's mainstay cotton industry

Afghanistan:  Bush Jnr's "other war" of spiralling violence, and loss of security & dignity, for civilians

India:   Bhopal's long suffering victims of Union Carbide's lethal gas leak still fobbed off at every level

Quest for economic & nuclear power, demotes human dignity to national back burner

Campaign of misogynic and frivolous objections to Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act

Military Crimes against Humanity

Accusations grow louder against Bush Jnr & neo-con cronies, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair & John Winston Howard

Read also: The farce of Condoleezza Rice leading UN Security Council debate on rape as a weapon of war

Move over truth! Women are the first casualties of war!

Ethiopia: Bush Jnr ally Govt executes burnt earth, rape & starvation war against Ogaden civilians in the country's east

Philippines: Bush Jnr-sponsored Arroyo regime guilty of gross & systematic abuse of human rights, economic plunder & transgression of the Filipino people's sovereignty

 Climate Change, Natural Disasters and Global Food Security

  While billions condemned to starvation & death, Bush Jnr’s spin conceals the corporate roots of global food shortages and World Bank perpetuates agricorporate violence and threat to climate change by hoisting poisonous fertilisers on Third World farmers

Rome:  While UN FAO fraternity dither, and global food prices anticipated to soar, Monsanto et al. laugh all the way to the bank Read also: Escalating food prices have worst impact on women

India: Supreme Court appointee to Genetic Engineering Approval Committee  calls for 3-4 year moratorium on GM crops, together with chronic toxicity studies, and total reviews of India's experience with Bt cotton and the approval of Bt cotton in India

Australia: Want a truly ethical cappuccino? Then remember to ask where the milk comes from!

  Framing consumption in 10 ways that move beyond Al Gore's shopping cart

Australia: Indigenous climate change emergency, but takes British media to herald sinking Torres Straight Islands

Burma: Buddhist monks for cyclone Nargis survivors, Junta’s uniformed for media photo-ops, Junta cronies for quick cash from inflated prices of essentials

Cyclone Nargis kills 134,000, and should coincide with Aung San Suu Kyi's freedom

But as international aid finally flows   so too national & international outrage as Junta illegally extends Aung San Suu Kyi's incarceration

as  Aung San Suu Kyi, victim of the junta and a global virus [read *the world's cowardly silence*]

Read also: Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's Prisoner of Conscience byJustin Wintle

China: Cruel and myopic one-child policy bites again, deepening grief after mega-Sichuan Quake

2008 Awards to Courageous Women Carrying Forward the Feminist Struggle

New York: 2008 Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty to Somali's Hawa Aden Mohamed for her efforts with women & girls affected by violence

Australia: Federal Govt awards $2M to anti-war, anti-discrimination, pro-migrant Women Groups, including the Muslim Women's National Network of Australia, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and Young Women's Christian Association, to promote their leadership and advocacy

 Further 2008 Literature and Cinema by Feminists

a) Reading Resources

Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt [Editors] - Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism

Maude Barlow: Blue Covenant

  Kathleen Maltzahn: Trafficked

  Donna Dickenson: Body Shopping - The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood

   Elizabeth Royte: Bottlemania How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

  Shirin Ebadi: Refugee Rights in Iran

  Arundhati Roy: The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy

  Betsy Hartmann: Deadly Election

  Jennifer Temkin & Barbara Krahé: Sexual Assault and the Justice Gap: A Question of Attitude

The World Health Organisation and nuclear power - The great Chernobyl cover-up

#50: Flagging an Invisible Difference in a Cost-Benefit Analysis of Depo-Provera

b) Cinema Resources:

Meena Nanji: View From A Grain Of Sand (A documentary on Bush Jnr’s unfulfilled promises of peace, democracy and liberation for Afghanistan’s women)

  Nupur Basu: No Country for Young Girls (Love in the time of foeticide)

  Aida Schlaepfer: Gangs of Baghdad

July 3-July 26 exhibition by 6 London-based women artists celebrates 80th anniversary of 1928 Equal Franchise Act

Read also: Britain's brothels provide thousands of trafficked females to meet booming numbers of men after paid sex

Canada: 1992 Bush Snr Executive Order enables US to lead fight against mandatory GM labeling

 Burma Women's League calls on the UN for criminal prosecution of junta for conscripting women as sex slaves, and the gang rape, mutilation, and murder of women and girls
 

Yellow roses [and chains] mark the beginning of Suu Kyi‘s 64th year, as junta brutalises her well-wishers

Egypt: Double feminist victory with enacted laws against female circumcision & under-18 years marriage

Iran:  Morality savages whitewash their deadly torture of Ms Bani Yaghoub as suicide

  US indulging in widespread bullying to ensure ban on cluster munitions remains toothless

Turkey: Directorate for religious affairs, Diyanet, spews the ridiculous [from "cover-up" to avoid perfume] on women's morality

Wales: Bush Jnr henchman, bullyboy Bolton, heckled & almost nabbed in citizen's arrest at the Hay Festival for his war crimes

US:  Obama the Feminist choice: ‘No Way José’ to anti-choice, anti-healthcare, pro-war Republican McCain

Abject neglect of sexually assaulted women soldiers despite their nine-fold increase in post-traumatic stress disorder

Subsidised biofuel creates flourishing corn market in the US, but takes food from mouths of the world's poorest

China:  In one city alone 200,000 surveillance cameras disguised as lampposts, & system all set for export

Nepal: Hisila Yami. Minister within Interim Govt, promises to prioritise women's rights

Mexico: Patriarchy renders 2007 Federal Law to protect women against male violence toothless

Read also: With social protest a crime in the fascist nation, justice relegated to the phantom drawer

Australia: Continuing to bury Howard's flawed conservatism PM Rudd appoints feminist Quentin Bryce as country's first woman Governor-General

Report of older single women’s "extreme risk of poverty" may see aged pension overhaul

Yemen: Where females are the abused illiterate sex and domestic slaves of men

Iraq: Taken to the cleaners for its oil by Bush Jnr and his corporate cronies

A nation ruined by the war criminal trinity of Bush Jnr, Tony Blair and John Howard

 Male “kiss & tell” bragging via cell phone-cameras fuels honour killing epidemic

Women live in terror as result of Bush Jnr’s cowardly invasion & subsequent sectarian chaos

Read also: Bush Jnr's war in the name of "Women's Liberation" leads to barbaric male assault of women

Afghanistan:In the land of Bush Jnr's puppet Hamid Karzai, women & girls left only with death by fire to escape the violence & make voices heard

Child health & environmental problems linked to US's depleted-uranium missiles

Human Rights Watch New York says Afghan MP Malalai Joya’s suspension illegal. Karzai Government should instead be arresting those threatening her life 

Read also: Malalai Joya’s ousting from country's "Zoo Parliament“ unconstitutional

Pre-2001 the Taliban flogged women. Today Bush Jnr’s Northern Alliance proxies rape women

India: Gay Pride hits the streets of Delhi, Bangalore & Kolkata to overturn 19th-century-old prejudice

Transgenerational victims of Union Carbide's methyl isocyanate leak forsaken by Govt & Union Carbide's now owner Dow Chemicals

 Haryana's "murders in the name of honour" propped up by State silence & Public fear

Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 covers violence beyond the physical

Pointlessly when culprits rarely arrested, Govt planning tougher female foeticide penalties

Read also: Government failing to target medical fraternity violating sex-selective abortion law with impunity

Vatican:   Benedict XVI: In damage control [again] to appease tensions over Good Friday slur during US visit

 Rubs salt into wounds, placing Church & own "suffering" ahead of sexual abuse victims'

followed by: Bush Jnr's thanks, a la gigantic 81st birthday bash, for his second term in White House

but Stumm about the war while hobnobbing with Bush Jnr’s war criminals & torturers

Burma:  National League for Democracy vetoes Junta's draft constitution vetoing Aung San Suu Kyi