YANGON, Myanmar – Myanmar’s military junta rang in the New Year by dramatically raising the annual fee for TV satellite dishes in an apparent move to limit access to the foreign news channels that beamed in global criticism of its recent crackdown on pro-democracy protests.

The license fee has rocketed from US$5 to $800 – an unaffordable sum to most people in Myanmar. It is equivalent to about three times the annual salary of a public school teacher.

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PRWatch is keeping an eye on Tony Blair:

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has agreed to become a part-time adviser to the global financial services firm JPMorgan Chase where, the Financial Times reports, he “will use his experience and contacts to provide political and strategic advice to the US bank and participate in some client events.” Blair resigned as leader of the parliamentary wing of British Labor Party in June 2007. While the fee for the position has not been disclosed, a New York recruitment firm suggested that it “was likely to be more than $1m (£500,000) a year.” Blair stated that he was looking at accepting “a small handful” of similar positions with other companies.

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Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers speaking about the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Well, yes, usually.

But it’s sometimes funny as well.

Yesterday’s article in The Times by Tim Reid and Tom Baldwin from New Hampshire, reported on a Democratic debate on Saturday where the rivals fell into arguing which one of them represented real change. John Edwards joined forces with Barack Obama, asserting that, unlike the former First Lady, both he and Obama were “agents of change”.

Hillary Clinton responded angrily, in the most heated moment of the night. “I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change. I’m running on 35 years of change.”

Earlier in the day, Bill Clinton, working non-stop to save his wife’s campaign, told a crowd in a school gymnasium in Amherst: “She’s a change-maker, the best I ever saw.”

Hey, you got to smile.

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AllAfrica.com report on two booksellers, Egyptian citizens in Sudan who have been charged with insulting Islam. A Sudanese court sentenced Abdel Fattah El-Sadany (30 years old) and Mahrous Mohammed Abdel-Azim (30 years old) to imprisonment for six months on charges of insulting the Islamic religion on the grounds that they had distributed a book about Al-Sayeda Aisha (the Prophet Mohammed’s wife) during their participation in the Khartoum International Book Fair.
The defendants were given “one of the fastest trials in history” – were found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison. The defendants did not have a lawyer.

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The Washington Post offers five books to throw across the room. Top of the list is Atonement.

I don’t think I’ve ever had any actual heroes. However, when I was 5 or 6 Winston Churchill’s name still struck gold: we kids in playground & street accepted as an article of faith that he was the warrior-god who had delivered us from the Nazi hordes. And the day after my parents took me to see the film Hans Christian Andersen, Danny Kaye sat himself down at a neighbouring table in our favourite Italian restaurant & I got his autograph. For a while, I remember, I felt blessed & touched by greatness. Then there was the time when the Queen smiled at me from her passing car as I struggled at the front of the roadside crowd with the family dog in my arms. For a week or two I speculated about the possibility of a call to the palace so that she might get a closer look.

But somehow, over the years, neither rock-and-roll nor film nor football yielded up the gilded hero for me. Somehow it was always apparent that, however pronounced the talent, the pretender still sat on lavatories, bathed naked & had difficulty with simple sums.

The reader’s report struggles to swim against this current but also has to take it into account. It’s a bit like being an admissions officer at the world’s most selective institution: even the Nobel prize for literature is no guarantee you’ll get in.

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Mr Eugenides and a whole lot more of us wonder if this spells the end of the ID card fiasco:

Millions of litres of ink have already been expended on this catastrophe by people more expert than your scribe (not to mention funnier websites). Suffice it to say, in this regard, that when 25 million records, including 7 million bank account details, can be downloaded onto a CD by a “junior official” – unencrypted, mind you – and stuck in the internal mail, for fuck’s sake, we are well beyond satire. It was when Darling moved to reassure people by revealing that the discs were “password protected” that I started weeping with laughter. (Let’s hope the password wasn’t 1234, eh?)

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Anne Fadiman’s essay in Guardian Online examines the seductive delights of coffee.

Having observed the frisky goats, the imam of a nearby monastery – a sort of medieval Carlos Castaneda – roasted the berries in a chafing dish, crushed them in a mortar, mixed them with boiling water, and drank the brew. When he lay down, he couldn’t sleep. His heartbeat quickened, his limbs felt light, his mood became cheerful and alert. “He was not merely thinking,” wrote Jacob. “His thoughts had become concretely visible. He watched them from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a team of horses.” The imam found that he could juggle a dozen ideas in the time it normally took to consider a single one. His visual acuity increased; in the glow of his oil lamp, the parchment on his table looked unusually lustrous and the robe that hung on a nearby peg seemed to swell with life. He felt strengthened, as Jacob put it, “by heavenly food brought to him by the angels of Paradise.”

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against “terrorism” has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. More . . .

I’m expecting a raid. When the police come to my house, they’ll find a shelf full of books glorifying terrorism. In The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, by Carlos Marighella, they’ll find detailed instructions on waging war against the state. Among the Red Army Faction communiques they’ll find statements like this: “Either a pig or a man, either survival at any price or a fight to the death.” There are books with practical details about bomb-making, hand-to-hand combat, chemical weapons and poisons. When they analyse my hard drive, they’ll realise I’ve looked at all sorts of material, on sites maintained by unsavoury people – jihadists, racists, religious cults.

Harri Kunzru, wondering who is knocking