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YANGON (Myanmar): Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party refused to take its new seats in parliament Monday because of a dispute over one word in the lawmakers' oath, reported The Associated Press.

However, party officials played down the problem and said they expected it to be overcome by early May,

According to the report, the National League for Democracy party objects to phrasing in the oath that says they must "safeguard the constitution," a document they have vowed to amend because it gives inordinate power to the military and was drafted during an era of army rule. The lawmakers want the word "safeguard" replaced with "respect."

Analysts say President Thein Sein needs the opposition in parliament to show the world that his administration is serious about change in the Southeast Asian country, which was ruled by the military for nearly half a century.

Since last year, his government has overseen a wave of widely praised political reforms, including the April 1 by-elections that earned Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi a parliamentary seat after years of repression and house arrest.

Later Monday, the European Union is expected to announce the suspension of most sanctions against Myanmar for a year while it assesses the country's progress toward democracy. The United States and other countries also have pulled back on some sanctions.

Suu Kyi and 42 other elected lawmakers from her party were absent as the latest assembly session got under way in the capital, Naypyitaw, on Monday. The party had said it would not join until the oath issue was resolved.

Opposition spokesman Nyan Win told The Associated Press that he believed the dispute would be solved within 10 days, and other party officials have said there is support within Thein Sein's government to change the oath.

The party was "not disappointed" with its current inability to sit in the assembly, Nyan Win said. "We are cooperating with the government, so the problem will be overcome."

The report said the oath is in an appendix to the military-backed constitution, and it is unclear whether it can be changed without the approval of 75 percent of parliament. The subject was not on the agenda in Naypyitaw on Monday.

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Suu Kyi Party Refuses Myanmar Seats Over Oath Row

Posted: Apr 22, 2012 at 2051 hrs IST Bhopal NCW chairperson Mamta Sharma, whose remark that the word 'sexy' should not be taken in a negative connotation sparked a controversy, today said she had not withdrawn her statement and "stands" by it.

"I have not withdrawn my statement and I stand by it.

With time, the meaning of such words also changes," Sharma told reporters on the sidelines of a programme organised by an NGO here.

"Today nobody can watch television programmes at home with his/her family, but nobody said anything about it," she said.

Sharma also said she did not endorse West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's announcement of launching a news channel and a newspaper.

The NCW chief had drawn the ire of women's rights activists over her remark at a function in Jaipur in February, that the word "sexy" meant "beautiful and charming" and should not be taken in a negative sense.

"I was positive in my approach so I said that. One should take it in a positive sense," she said.

Earlier, referring to rising instances of crime, Sharma said that Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are the only states in the country where "maximum" atrocities are committed against women.

The state government's ignorance on this issue was "highly unfortunate", she said. About the programme, she said about 400-500 women have highlighted the various crimes, including rape, committed against them and NCW had taken a cognisance of the same.

The National Commission for Women will write to the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, chief secretary and the DGP asking them to ensure that appropriate action is taken in this regard, she said.

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Stand-by-my-statement-on-the-word-sexy-NCW-chief

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Word order By Lewis H Lapham

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse. - Emperor Charles V

But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data streams out of which we've learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS, and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect - from Google, YouTube, and Facebook - the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan's noticing 50 years ago the presence of "an acoustic world", one with "no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis", a new "information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever". He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that "we become what we behold," that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

Media were to be understood as "make-happen agents" rather than as "make-aware agents," not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.

To account for the transference of the idioms of print to those of the electronic media, McLuhan examined two technological revolutions that overturned the epistemological status quo. First, in the mid-fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of moveable type, which deconstructed the illuminated wisdom preserved on manuscript in monasteries, encouraged people to organize their perceptions of the world along the straight lines of the printed page. Second, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the applications of electricity (telegraph, telephone, radio, movie camera, television screen, eventually the computer), favored a sensibility that runs in circles, compressing or eliminating the dimensions of space and time, narrative dissolving into montage, the word replaced with the icon and the rebus.

Within a year of its publication, Understanding Media acquired the standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed him "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov." Although never at a loss for Delphic aphorism - "The electric light is pure information"; "In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin" - McLuhan assumed that he had done nothing more than look into the window of the future at what was both obvious and certain.

Floating the fiction of democracy In 1964, I was slow to take the point, possibly because I was working at the time in a medium that McLuhan had listed as endangered - writing, for The Saturday Evening Post, inclined to think in sentences, accustomed to associating a cause with an effect, a beginning with a middle and an end. Television news I construed as an attempt to tell a story with an alphabet of brightly colored children's blocks, and when offered the chance to become a correspondent for NBC, I declined the referral to what I regarded as a course in remedial reading.

The judgment was poorly timed. Within five years The Saturday Evening Post had gone the way of the great auk; news had become entertainment, entertainment news, the distinctions between a fiction and a fact as irrelevant as they were increasingly difficult to parse. Another 20 years and I understood what McLuhan meant by the phrase, "The medium is the message," when in the writing of a television history of America's foreign policy in the twentieth century, I was allotted roughly 73 seconds in which to account for the origins of World War II, while at the same time providing a voiceover transition between newsreel footage of Jesse Owens running the hundred-yard dash at the Berlin Olympics in the summer of 1936, and Adolf Hitler marching the Wehrmacht into Vienna in the spring of 1938.

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Word order

While many L.A. Times Festival of Books attendees retreated to the shade to listen to readings at the Poetry Stage on Saturday afternoon, others, many of them children, were making their own poetry in a nearby booth hosted by Kaya Press.

You can roll the dice to make poems, Michelle Detorie of Eohippus Labs explained to one of the girls who was attracted to the craft table set up in the back of the booth. Detorie showed her dice with words on them and showed her how to play.

Detorie also explained how to make a poem scape by using small figurines to create a scene and then translating it into a poem.

PHOTOS: Festival of Books

Kaya Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher of Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic literature that recently relocated to USC. Being new to the campus and the community, Patricia Wakida of Kaya Press said the organization used its booth to make as many friends as possible. They invited many local independent publishers, including Eohippus Labs and Les Figues Press, to share their booth space in providing activities at the festival.

Kaya Press also asked them to provide pages of their publications to use in an activity where people can collect the pages they like and take them to the binding station in the back of the tent to make their own anthology. Other publishers represented include Boxcar Poetry Review, Dancing Girls Press, Siglio, Corollary Press and Sur + Press.

The booth's Smokin Hot Indie Lit Lounge is a space for people not just to buy literature, but where people can make literature explained Detorie, as another young girl asked if she could use the typewriter setup for an activity.

FULL COVERAGE: Festival of Books

The literary activities in the booth also include a pinned-up Los Angeles literary road map, where people can pin see their homes' proximity to many independent presses; a station to make poetry bracelets; and a station to make poetry paper airplanes.

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Festival of Books: Kids roll the word dice to create poetry

Check, but not checkmate, was the verdict on Chelsea throwing a bucket of cold London rainwater on Barcelona's bonfire on Wednesday night. There was begrudging praise for such a monumental defensive performance but still the belief that, as Diaro Sport put it, the "Nou Camp will have the last word".

Click HERE to view 'Chelsea Chess' graphic

To what extent Barcelona fans shared the optimism of the newspapers they were reading after their first defeat in 15 games was a different matter. In most post-match polls on which team now had the tougher task of turning round their first-leg defeat Real Madrid (beaten 2-1 in Munich on Tuesday) or Barcelona supporters leaned towards giving Jose Mourinho's side the best shot at a Champions League comeback.

Back in 2009, many supporters believed it was their destiny to lift the trophy, especially when Andres Iniesta scored in the last minute at Stamford Bridge to knock out Chelsea in the semi-final. Now those fans believe their team having failed to score with 24 shots in 90 minutes are destined to fail.

The Catalan sports press did its best to argue to the contrary, suggesting that Chelsea will not be able to hold out against Lionel Messi and company for 180 minutes. Especially with the second 90 minutes being at the Nou Camp where the pitch is officially two metres wider and one metre longer, but always feels bigger to visiting sides who are dragged all over the place.

The post-match statistics were astonishing but just as Pep Guardiola had given them short shrift after the game, so they were overwhelmed by the images that dominated the inquest into Barcelona's defeat. One picture of Messi with the ball at his feet but with four Chelsea players for company appeared in almost every daily paper.

Another had him as the only Bara player in frame with eight blue shirts around him it was Messi surrounded, alone and powerless to combat a defence that with Matrix-style agility had time and again flung itself into the path of Barcelona shots.

While picking through the bones of Barcelona's failure to score, there was plenty of credit for Chelsea's resilience, too. Didier Drogba might have appeared on the cartoon on the back page of Diario Sport knee-deep in four-leaf clover but there was an acceptance that there was nothing lucky about the performances of John Terry, Gary Cahill and Ashley Cole.

The England left-back "closed-down his wing", pointed out Marca, "Alexis, Alves, Pedro and Cuenca all tried and failed to get past him". Terry's performance was described as a "recital" in the Catalan daily La Vanguardia.

"Watching him play is like opening an encyclopedia on central defending. Just as Messi always runs forward," it said, "Terry always runs back believing that he will be able to intervene. And with Cahill alongside him, the finest moments of his partnership with Carvalho came to mind."

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Lionel Messi and Barcelona taken to task by Chelsea, but 'Nou Camp will have last word'