Aung San Suu Kyi

WASHINGTON - Coming off his victory on the home front, President Obama is headed abroad for a quick trip through a trio of Southeast Asian countries, a tour aimed at highlighting what the administration views as seeds of foreign policy successes. In a three-day tour that starts Sunday with stops in Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, Obama will tout democratic reforms, opening markets and human rights advances in the region as affirmation for his dual goals of shifting focus from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region and ramping up diplomatic engagement with formerly isolated nations.

YANGON, Myanmar - Ko Paul had been warned that the old Yamaha piano in the upstairs sitting room of the dilapidated lakeside mansion was in bad shape. Tropical climates aren't great for pianos. Heat warps their sound boxes, humidity swells their pin blocks, reducing string tension, and termites savor an easy meal. But this one was worse than the piano tuner expected that day in 2009. "Pretty much everything had to be changed, the pins, the dampers, all the hammers," he said in a coffee shop in Yangon.

NEW DELHI - President Obama will visit Myanmar this month, the White House said Thursday, as his administration seeks to bolster democracy and strengthen ties with nations in the region. The visit will be part of a three-country tour Nov. 17-20 that will include stops in Bangkok, Thailand, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where the president will attend an Asian summit, the White House statement said. In Myanmar, Obama will meet with President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Though a visit to Myanmar carries political risks, most notably by staking presidential prestige on a government still dominated by generals with a brutal past, it dovetails with the administration's support for Myanmar's nascent democracy.

President Obama will meet Wednesday with Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi, the White House said. The human rights advocate and member of the Myanmar National Assembly is visiting the U.S. for the first time in two decades, after a lengthy series of house arrests from 1989 to 2010. Her tour includes a meeting with the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and leaders on the Hill, who will award her the Congressional Gold Medal. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was initially awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2008 during a house arrest imposed by Myanmar's military junta.

WASHINGTON - Myanmar's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, met privately with President Obama after accepting Congress' highest honor in an emotional ceremony Wednesday, signs of the stunning shift in U.S. relations with the onetime pariah Asian nation over the last year. The Obama administration not only welcomed the former political prisoner and Nobel laureate, but it offered a gesture of goodwill by easing sanctions against Myanmar's leaders, as Suu Kyi has urged since she arrived Monday on a 17-day U.S. tour, including a visit to Los Angeles.

Myanmar's pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has extolled Buddhism for allowing her a sense of inner freedom during her 15 years of house arrest. She's also said that Buddhist precepts can guide her country's democratic transition, encouraging reconciliation with the military instead of anger and revenge. But the more nationalistic face of this Buddhist tradition, brought into focus by recent violence directed against Rohingya Muslims in the western state of Rakhine, could yet derail democratic reforms in Myanmar (also known as Burma)

"Titanic 3-D" will be the first movie to play in Myanmar in more than a decade as 20th Century Fox has struck a deal to release the film in the Southeast Asian nation that is slowly opening to the world. Fox said Monday that it has struck a deal with Mingalar Co., a local importer that operates eight single-screen theaters, to open "Titanic 3-D" on Aug. 17 in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. While it's not clear exactly when the last American movie was seen in Myanmar, Fox said in a statement the wait has been "decades.

The world moves at the speed of life. Hollywood, not quite as fast. The discrepancy is usually not an issue, but in the case of two politically minded films coming to theaters this month - the documentary "The Island President" and the feature "The Lady" - the gap between real time and movie time has lent the movies two very different postscripts. "The Island President" from director Jon Shenk ("Lost Boys of Sudan") follows Mohamed Nasheed,  president of the Maldives, as he fights to stop or at least slow global warming; if it's left unchecked, scientists predict, his low-lying island nation will be submerged by the end of the century.

Burmese expatriates in Southern California love to talk about their homeland - its natural beauty, its people, its history. But, even after they leave Myanmar, many fear talking about the politics of the country also known as Burma. The election to parliament Sunday of Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi may begin to change that, some said. The election that resulted in a claimed victory for Suu Kyi and at least 10 other members of her party, the National League for Democracy, was the ruling junta's latest step to try to persuade the international community to ease crippling economic sanctions imposed in protest of the military's brutal grip on the Southeast Asian country.

The people of Myanmar got their first taste of democracy in two decades Sunday, with unofficial results showing they had elected popular opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to parliament in the process that ushered in a new era for the long-isolated Southeast Asian nation. Despite Suu Kyi's larger-than-life presence in Myanmar, also known as Burma, the apparent victory marks the first time she will hold office; she was under house arrest during general elections in 1990 and the tainted elections of 2010.