Myanmar

(Reuters) -Opponents of military rule in Myanmar cancelled traditional new year festivities on Tuesday and instead showed their anger with the generals who seized power through low-key displays of defiance and small protests across the country.

The United Nations human rights office said it feared that the military clampdown on protests since the Feb. 1 coup risked escalating into a civil conflict like that seen in Syria and appealed for a halt to the “slaughter”.

YANGON (AP) — At least 82 people were killed in one day in a crackdown by Myanmar security forces on pro-democracy protesters, according to reports Saturday from independent local media and an organization that keeps track of casualties since the February coup.

Friday’s death toll in Bago was the biggest one-day total for a single city since March 14, when just over 100 people were killed in Yangon, the country’s biggest city. Bago is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of Yangon. The Associated Press is unable to independently verify the number of deaths.

YANGON (AP) — Security forces in Myanmar cracked down heavily again on anti-coup protesters Friday even as the military downplayed reports of state violence.

Reports on online news outlets and social media said at least four people were killed in Bago, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of Yangon, in an attack by government troops and police that began before dawn and continued sporadically until after dark.

The Bago Weekly Journal Online said a source at the city’s main hospital, whom it didn’t name, believed about 10 people had been killed.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — An information blackout under Myanmar’s military junta worsened Thursday as fiber broadband service, the last legal way for ordinary people to access the internet, became intermittently inaccessible on several networks.

Authorities in some areas have also started confiscating satellite dishes used to access international news broadcasts.

Protests against the Feb. 1 coup that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi continued Thursday despite the killing of 11 people by security forces a day earlier.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Anti-coup demonstrators in Myanmar, adept at finding themes to tie together protests nationwide, took to the streets on Sunday holding painted eggs in a nod to Easter.

In the biggest city of Yangon, one group marched through the Insein district chanting and singing protest songs and cradling eggs bearing the slogan “Spring Revolution.” Many of the eggs also bore a drawing of the three-fingered salute, a symbol of resistance to the Feb. 1 coup.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — The civilian death toll in the crackdown by the Myanmar junta has reached 550 since the Feb. 1 coup, a human rights group said Saturday.

Of those, 46 were children, according to Myanmar’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. Some 2,751 people have been detained or sentenced, the group said.

Threats of lethal violence and arrests of protesters have failed to suppress daily demonstrations across Myanmar demanding the military step down and reinstate the democratically elected government.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Protesters in Myanmar on Thursday marked two months since the military seized power by again defying the threat of lethal violence and demonstrating against its toppling of the country’s democratically elected government.

Security forces have escalated violence and routinely shot protesters but have been unable to crush the massive public resistance to the Feb. 1 coup. International condemnation and sanctions imposed by Western nations on the military regime have failed to restore peace.

(Reuters) -Myanmar activists burned copies of a military-framed constitution on Thursday two months after the junta seized power, as a U.N. special envoy warned of the risk of a bloodbath because of an intensified crackdown on anti-coup protesters.

Myanmar has been rocked by protests since the army overthrew the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1 citing unsubstantiated claims of fraud in a November election.

Suu Kyi and other members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) have been detained.

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Opponents of Myanmar’s military government declared the country’s 2008 constitution void and put forward an interim replacement charter late Wednesday in a major political challenge to the ruling junta.

The moves, while more symbolic than practical, could help woo the country’s armed ethnic militias to ally themselves with the mass protest movement against the military’s seizure of power in February.

(Reuters) - Myanmar’s deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi appeared in good health in a video meeting on Wednesday, one of her lawyers said, as the United States ordered its non-essential embassy staff to leave after weeks of violence over a Feb. 1 coup.

The detained Nobel laureate, who has been held in custody since the military seized power, had wanted to meet lawyers in person and did not agree to a wide discussion by video in the presence of police, lawyer Min Min Soe told Reuters by telephone.