"Give Us 24-Hour Electricity"

From the Gulf Times:

Protests against chronic power shortages spread to Yangon late Tuesday, . . . following rallies in Myanmar’s second city Mandalay which saw several opposition party members briefly held by police.

People in the country formerly known as Burma are testing the boundaries of their freedom under the quasi-civilian government which took power last year after the end of decades of outright military rule.

Two short but noisy demonstrations involving a total of 150 people took place in front of Sule Pagoda in the heart of Yangon, the focus of uprisings in 1988 and 2007 which were brutally crushed by the military.

Activists and former political prisoners at the second—and larger—of the protests shouted “give us 24-hour electricity” for around 10 minutes before the crowd dispersed on the police’s request, a reporter said.

Myanmar suffers crippling power cuts, with six hour blackouts commonplace in Yangon and outages three times as long in Mandalay, where around 1,500 people on Monday protested as news of the rallies spread on Facebook. “We can’t have a good quality of life without electricity, which is the basis for development of the country,” said 21-year-old protester Shew Yee in Yangon. . . .

AFP: "Myanmar Power Shortage Protests 'Spreads to Yangon,'" via Energy Shortage.