Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was personally informed of her continued imprisonment by officials from the Home Ministry who entered her villa prior to the announcement, the official said.
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The extension was issued despite a Myanmar law that stipulates no one can be held longer than five years without being released or put on trial.
The junta faced a deadline to extend Suu Kyi's house arrest for another year or release her. Members of her National League for Democracy were marching from the party's headquarters to her home when riot police shoved the group into a truck.
It was not immediately clear where the truck was headed or exactly how many people were detained.
According to this YouTube, "Dust In The Wind" has been adapted as a song of protest by Burmese refugees living along the country's border (it's YouTube, so take it with the appropriate grain of salt):
"I'm quite confident we will be able to overcome this tragedy. I've tried to bring a message of hope to your people," Ban said earlier as he made an offering at the country's holiest Buddhist shrine, the Shwedagon Pagoda.
"At the same time, I hope your people and government can coordinate the flow of aid, so the aid work can be done in a more systematic and organised way," said Ban.
"The United Nations and the whole international community stand ready to help you overcome this tragedy."
Meanwhile pressure is building on the military regime to do far more to help the victims of the cyclone, and not all of the pressure is coming from outside the country:
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is en route to Myanmar today, but already his presence in the region seems to have had an affect:
"We have received government permission to operate nine WFP (World Food Program) helicopters, which will allow us to reach areas that have so far been largely inaccessible," Ban told reporters in New York on Tuesday before departing for Southeast Asia. His announcement was not immediately confirmed by officials in Myanmar.
"I believe further similar moves will follow, including expediting the visas of (foreign) relief workers seeking to enter the country," Ban said, warning that relief efforts to save survivors of the May 2-3 Cyclone Nargis had reached a "critical moment."
"We have a functioning relief program in place but so far have been able to reach only 25 percent of Myanmar's people in need," he said.
"For the vast number of Americans, if they just gave to some disaster far away and then another disaster happens, in their mind that's clumped as 'faraway disaster,'" Strahilevitz says. "So they will feel, 'I just gave to a faraway disaster.'"
It's no secret that Americans are feeling less fortunate than in previous years. Escalating gas and food prices, the mortgage crisis and a recent "economic recovery" that only positively affected the most wealthy among us have left families seeing their household budgets shrink.
But as tough as we have it, it is nothing compared with what millions of people are going through right now in Myanmar:
MSNBC reports that Americans have given $12.1 million to charities for Myanmar relief efforts, far short of the $1.92 billion the US gave to assist the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami.
No one event triggered this devolution, but it undeniably was pushed along many times by the moral relativism of the last 50 years, when most of society's widely accepted norms were undermined by the quicksand of nonjudgmentalism; when the concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, were abolished in favor of differences that were to be respected if not celebrated, and codified when necessary to surmount widespread public opposition.
Paradoxically, people and institutions whose beliefs do not permit them to tolerate the most abhorrent differences were judged to be evil. Through rigid enforcement of increasingly fascist speech and thought codes, relativists turned America into a nation of lip-biters who with their silence condoned as normal behaviors and beliefs that are irrefutably unnatural and inherently immoral.
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No, the [recent California Supreme Court] ruling merely answered homosexuals' purely emotional plea for cultural acceptance by giving civil unions their proper label - "marriage" - the will of Californians, as democratically expressed twice, and the dark societal consequences be damned.
--Editorial in the May 17, 2008 Waterbury Republican.
Anyone who regularly reads my blogs probably thought to log in and find the latest news from Myanmar, or of the earthquake in China.
But today I want to write about something that underpins almost every headline here and abroad: human suffering. The answer on how to understand human suffering has been written about and expounded upon by far more eloquent and profound people than me. Everyone from Martin Luther King, to Gandhi, to the Dalai Lama agrees that compassion is the ultimate answer.
On Monday, Fu Guanyu dropped off her young son, Wang Zhilu, at his grandparents' house so she could go to work. Minutes later, the earthquake hit.
She rushed back home and saw their apartment building in ruins. She says soldiers came right away to help, but they had no equipment.
Two days later, the heavy machinery is on the way. As an excavator clears a path, Fu and her husband Wei Wang search the debris, calling for their son.
After a long while, the workers stop. They have found bodies.
The NPR story concludes, tragically, with the rescue worker informing the parents that three bodies were found: the grandfather, holding his two year old grandson in his arms with his wife clutching his back.
Some of the worst of humanity, serial bomb blasts in the Indian city of Jaipur, killing 80, injuring 200:
Asia Times Online attempts to analyze the event, including the possibility that this is state-sponsored terrorism used as a type of cheap negotiation tactic.
First, breaking news this morning. There has been a 7.8 earthquake in China that has left four schoolchildren and one adult dead:
Chinese President Hu Jintao has called for "all-out" efforts to rescue victims of an earthquake measuring 7.8 that has hit south-western China.
The quake struck 92km (57 miles) north-west of Sichuan's provincial capital, Chengdu, at 1428 (0628 GMT).
The children were killed, and more than 100 others injured, when primary school buildings collapsed in the Chongqing area, a large municipality near Sichuan province, Xinhua added.
Another person is reported to have died when a water tower collapsed in the city of Mianyang, in Santai County.
The Bangkok Post gives further details of the magnitude of the quake:
Government and local officials said the quake struck at 2:28pm local time (1:28pm in Thailand) in Wenchuan county, Sichuan province. It was felt in cities hundreds of kilometres away, including Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, in addition to Bangkok.
"Major tremors" were felt by residents of cities closer to the epicentre, including Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, and nearby Chongqing, the official news agency Xinhua said.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Myanmar coverage of the disaster caused by Cyclone Nargis has been driven underground, with journalists ducking the police. If there was a Pulitzer Prize given out for YouTubes, this would be my choice:
I just logged on to CNN this morning. The front page story was, "Is it time to invade Myanmar?" with a link to Time Magazine's top story of the similarly titled, "Is it time to invade Burma?"
What the F*** are they saying??? And, do any of these sociopaths remember a little country called AMERICA and the debacle also known as KATRINA? Have any of these war mongers lifted a finger to help with that mess? Would an invading army from a foreign nation actually have HELPED that situation?
What is going on in this country and why does no one seem to notice the hypocrisy of fake concern and the futility of bombing the crap out of a country in order to bring peace and prosperity?
YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar said Friday it was not ready to let in foreign aid workers, rejecting international pressure to allow experts into the isolated nation where disease and starvation are stalking cyclone survivors.
One week after the devastating storm killed tens of thousands, Myanmar's ruling generals -- deeply suspicious of the outside world -- said the country needed outside aid for those still alive, but would deliver it themselves.
The foreign ministry announcement came as a top UN official warned time was running out to move in disaster experts and supplies to prevent diseases that could claim even more victims.
Instead, the ministry said some relief workers who arrived on an aid flight from Qatar on Wednesday had been deported.
Al Jazeera has an exemplary in-depth analysis of this tragedy, including an extended round table featuring UN Humanitarian Chief John Holmes, Bo Hla Tint, spokesperson for the Burmese Government in Exile and Marie Lall of the Asia Programme at Chatham House:
