This article was published in The eXile on December 28, 2005. The Putin regime’s latest moves to tighten controls over foreign NGOs are being portrayed in the West as yet more proof of Russia’s savage authoritarianism and anti-Western paranoia. While…

So what does Myanmar’s population look like? Its last baby boom happened in the 80s, when the fertility rate was 4.0 to 4.7 – that’s four or five kids per mother. Today it’s just over two kids. This means people born before the mid-90s pose more danger to the regime than any generation after them.

Those people hit twenty during the last decade, and, sure enough, massive protests suddenly broke out in 2007 after 19 years of relative tranquility. Media sources never failed to mention that the protests were “monk-led,” but no one seems to have caught the significance of that.