* 64-year-old Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's famous dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner, lives on a lakeside road in Yangon that's blockaded by police. She is barred from communication with anyone outside her compound; her telephone line was cut several years ago, and her attorney says that she has no TV or Internet. Outside her compound, small changes are happening in her country. Yangon residents used to be lucky to have electricity for eight straight hours, but work is under way for a natural gas pipeline that the country's ruling generals say will end the city's years of crippling blackouts. The ruling military junta in Myanmar is planning its first elections in two decades. From The New York Times: "Analysts say that the elections are not likely to be fully competitive or fair, but that they could move the military to decentralize some of its power." The elections would be the first since 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party won in a landslide victory that the generals ignored. Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar at Macquarie University in Australia, said the elections might precipitate economic change, and compared the situation in Myanmar to Indonesia’s transition away from socialist rule in the 1960s.
* Among the ruins in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: the now-collapsed Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, which contained a 1940s mural painted by great artists from what is referred to as the Haitian Renaissance: Philomé Obin, Castera Basile, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, and Prefete Duffaut. From The New York Times: "Their images of verdant, fruit-colored tropical heavens had helped turn a politically volatile nation into a tourist destination, and art itself into an export industry."
* Pianist Lang Lang, conductor Christoph Eschenbach, and the Schleswig-Holstein Orchestra will take the stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Sunday as part of a fund-raiser for earthquake victims in Haiti. However, most of the money will go to rent for the hall, marketing for the event, and to Carnegie Hall personnel involved in production of the concert; according to the New York Times, even if the $200,000 worth of tickets sell out, Haiti would receive fewer than $8,000. A UNICEF spokesman, Christopher de Bono, said: “It’s an enormous profile raiser. The fact that the donation may not have six zeros after it doesn’t mean it’s not worth making, that’s for sure.”
* UCLA researchers have determined that the practice of domesticating dogs probably originated in the Middle East, not East Asia as previously thought. Geneticists have been able to "reconstruct the entire history of the dog, from the first association between wolves and hunter-gatherers some 20,000 years ago to the creation by Victorian dog fanciers of many of today’s breeds." (The New York Times)
* In the first episode of "Life," the Discovery Channel's follow-up to its acclaimed nature series "Planet Earth," viewers can see strawberry dart frog tadpoles come to life.