Myanmar

Julie Green was visiting friends in Myanmar last summer when she trekked to Shwedagon Pagoda, a 2,500-year-old Buddhist temple in Yangon. "It was raining like crazy, and most of the time I sat in the extended hallway that lead to the pagoda and talked with the local residents," Green said. At dusk, however, the rain stopped and spotlights turned on around the gilded temple. "It was amazingly beautiful," she said. The Huntington Beach resident used a Canon EOS 50D. View past photos we've featured . To upload your own, visit our reader travel photo gallery . When you upload your photo, tell us where it was taken and when.

The Obama administration restored full diplomatic relations with Myanmar, moving swiftly to reward the military-backed government for reforms that include a cease-fire with ethnic insurgents and the release of political prisoners. The move Friday came only six weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made a historic visit that highlighted Washington's attempts to reengage with a strategic Asian nation that remains under strict sanctions for its dismal human rights record.

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi praised Washington's newly declared support for her country's recent political reforms, but she emphasized the importance of remaining on good terms with the nation's powerful longtime patron, China. After a meeting Friday that capped Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's landmark visit, Suu Kyi said that, with U.S. backing, "I am confident that there will be no turning back from the road toward democracy. " Speaking to journalists on the porch of the lakeside house where she was detained by the government for 15 years, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate also underscored that Myanmar wanted to maintain "good, friendly relations with China, our very close neighbor, and not just with China but the rest of the world.

On a landmark visit to Myanmar, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday said the U.S. would ease aid restrictions and consider further steps to improving relations with the country's autocratic rulers if they continued down a path of political and economic reform. Clinton described her meeting with Thein Sein, Myanmar's president, as "candid, productive," but cautioned that while the "measures already taken may be unprecedented and welcomed, they are just the beginning.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Myanmar on Wednesday for a landmark three-day visit to the long-isolated nation focused on encouraging further political reforms, assessing recent progress and providing a road map for forging closer ties with the United States and Europe. But the highest priority of a meeting with Myanmar's foreign minister, according to a senior State Department official traveling with Clinton, will be to seek assurances that the Southeast Asian nation will halt purchases of missile technology from renegade North Korea.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's impending visit to Myanmar represents a dramatic shift in policy toward a state infamous for repression, an opening that demonstrates a new U.S. focus on Asia by building ties to a strategically important country bordering China. When she arrives Wednesday for a three-day visit, Clinton will be the most senior U.S. official to visit Burma — as the country long was known — since generals seized power in 1962 and largely closed it to the outside world.

President Obama's decision to send Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on a groundbreaking trip to long-isolated Myanmar next month signals U.S. confidence in a recent flurry of political reforms by the repressive regime that has ruled the country for five decades. For three months, administration officials have hailed signs of democratic change but questioned the motives of the ruling military elite, which has jailed its opponents and engaged in human rights abuses to maintain political control of the resource-rich but impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

President Obama announced Friday that he is sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar next month, citing progress made by the government in releasing political prisoners, loosening media restrictions and opening its repressive political system. Obama, in a brief statement during a series of summit meetings in Bali, Indonesia, said Clinton will be the first secretary of State to visit the country in half a century and will make the case that Myanmar's leaders must keep moving toward a more open, democratic government.

The Obama administration was encouraged by Myanmar's recent release of some prisoners under a "humanitarian" amnesty but wants to see more reforms before the U.S. considers lifting economic sanctions on the impoverished nation, officials say. The military government in the Southeast Asian nation has appeared more flexible with political opponents in major cities, but violence has continued against ethnic minorities in the rural north and east, Derek...

Myanmar released fewer prisoners Wednesday than some activists and relatives expected, deflating hope that the regime was trying to dramatically improve its battered human rights reputation. Between 120 and 300 detainees were set free out of a total of 6,359 granted a "humanitarian" amnesty that coincides with a religious holiday and a trip to India by President Thein Sein. The number was difficult to pin down immediately because of staggered release times at prisons across the country, also known as Burma.