YANGON (Reuters) –
Myanmar’s military government has allowed the party of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to reopen regional branch offices that have been closed since May 2003, a party spokesman said on Thursday.

“So far as we have heard, about 100 branch offices have been reopened across the country, effective Wednesday,” said Nyan Win, a spokesman for the National League for Democracy (NLD).

The government closed down NLD branch offices after an attack on Suu Kyi’s convoy by pro-regime elements on May 30, 2003. Scores of NLD followers were killed, according to her supporters.

Nyan Win gave a guarded welcome to the government’s move.

“Yes, it’s a positive step,” he said. “I think they want us to take part in the election, but we still haven’t made up our mind about this. We still need to talk it over among the top leaders, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.”

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It took just minutes for Naila Farhat to be transformed from a bubbly 13-year-old with plump rosy cheeks, full lips and a sweet smile into a half-blind, disfigured survivor of acid violence. A spurned suitor, Irshad Hussein, and his friend, Farhat’s science teacher Mazhar Hussein, ambushed the girl on her way home from school in 2003 in the Pakistani town of Layyah in Punjab province, and splashed corrosive liquid on her face. “I felt it burning. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could hear them laughing,” she says. “I wanted justice.”

For the next six years Farhat doggedly pursued her case through the courts, attending every session despite the trauma of being in the same room as her tormentor. The schoolteacher was not charged after he allegedly bribed local police and fled – a familiar occurrence, according to women’s rights activists, who say that some police are unwilling or unable to nab offenders. But Irshad Hussein was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment and ordered to pay damages of 1.2 million rupees (almost $15,000). He appealed, convincing a High Court to reduce his sentence to four years and 1.1 million rupees, with the proviso that if he agreed to pay the fine, his jail term would be voided and he would be released. (See pictures of Pakistan beneath the surface.)

Undeterred, Farhat – with the support of the Acid Survivors’ Foundation (ASF) – went to the Supreme Court last November, where the original sentence was quickly reinstated, making her the first woman to ever win an acid attack case in Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

The landmark decision helped shame the Pakistani government into action on the issue. In his ruling, Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry urged the adoption of national legislation to prevent and punish acid attacks by controlling the sale of the substance and imposing harsh sentences on perpetrators. Coupled with years of lobbying by women’s rights activists, the result was the Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act recently submitted to parliament. (See photos of Pakistan’s vulnerable North-West.)

Accurate statistics on acid attacks in Pakistan are hard to come by – activists are unable to operate in war-torn areas of the country, and fear of retribution and social stigma haunts victims and their families – but such attacks are dismayingly common. The perpetrators are most often relatives or rivals, sometimes for the same woman’s affections, or, in non-gender-based attacks, opponents provoked by property disputes or other disagreements. Around half the victims of the disfiguring attacks are women, according to ASF chair Valerie Khan, while 26% are men and the remainder are children (most often injured as collateral damage rather than specifically targeted). She estimates that there are around 150 attacks a year nationwide. Shahnaz Bokhari, chief coordinator and clinical psychologist at the Progressive Women’s Association in Rawalpindi, says her organization has counted 8,000 burn victims, including those injured in attacks by acid as well as kerosene and stoves, from 1994 to the present. “And that’s just from Rawalpindi, Islamabad and a 200-mile radius. I am not talking about in Pakistan [as a whole],” she says. Both activists estimate that only some 30% of acid cases are reported. Acid is a readily available and inexpensive weapon; it costs less than a dollar a liter and is often used for household cleaning or for cotton processing in rural areas.

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WASHINGTON – Legislation to give additional months of unemployment benefits to people who have been out of a job for more than half a year has won key GOP support that means it will soon pass the Senate.

The sweeping bill also would prevent doctors from absorbing a crippling cut in Medicare payments and extends health insurance subsidies for the unemployed through December.

Eight Republicans voted with Democrats to defeat a GOP filibuster of the measure, setting up a final vote later today.

The bill also extends a variety of tax breaks for businesses and individuals that are popular with senators in both parties.

The $66 billion cost of providing the extended unemployment checks is added directly to a budget deficit expected to hit $1.6 trillion this year.

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One enters a movie like “Our Family Wedding” bracing for cheesiness.

As a genre, wedding films are typically about as cloying as two-hours worth of kitten videos on YouTube. Add in the equally checkered history of stridently ethnic movies, and you might want to start asking moviegoers to remove their belts before entering the theater.

But as Rick Famuyiwa’s “Our Family Wedding” — which combines both elements — moves along, the fingers in front of one’s eyes (usually a shield reserved for horror films) slowly part. The realization dawns that Famuyiwa has made a mostly charming movie despite its cliche milieu.

The performances help.

And the center is America Ferrera (as Lucia) and Lance Gross (as Marcus), a young couple in college in New York who return home to their families in Los Angeles to break the news that they’re engaged.

Neither family — one Latino, the other black — much likes the decision. Lucia’s father, Brad Boyd (Forest Whitaker), and Marcus’ dad, Miguel Ramirez (Carlos Mencia), quickly become rivals.

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WASHINGTON – Legislation extending unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless appears poised to clear a key hurdle in the Senate Tuesday, its momentum helped by about 60 popular tax breaks for individuals and businesses that expired at the end of last year.

The measure also prevents doctors from absorbing a crippling cut in Medicare payments, extends health insurance subsidies for the unemployed and gives cash-starved states help with Medicaid, the federal-state program providing health care to the poor and disabled.

The unemployment insurance alone — to provide weekly unemployment checks averaging above $300 to people whose core 26-week benefit package has run out — will cost $66 billion through December. In some states people are eligible to receive benefits for up to 99 weeks.

The bill demonstrates the difficulty Democrats face as they focus on jobs. It doesn’t include new ideas for boosting jobs, but instead reprises elements of last year’s $862 billion economic stimulus bill, which is earning mixed reviews from voters. Simply extending those provisions has produced a far more expensive measure than a separate so-called jobs bill that Democrats hope to soon send to President Barack Obama. That measure would boost highway spending and give tax breaks to companies that hire the unemployed and could clear the Senate for Obama’s desk this week.

At a gross cost of about $148 billion, Tuesday’s measure illustrates the extraordinary cost of the unemployment safety net as the economy inches out of the recession. Democrats say the unemployment benefits inject demand into the economy and say renewing the tax cuts helps preserve existing jobs.

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