PHUKETWAN recognises the importance of Asean with the Economic Community approaching and marks what's happening around the region with a new column, Asean Today.



AP A Singapore Airlines plane has collapsed as an engineer conducted routine landing checks before a scheduled flight from Singapore to Hong Kong. The airline said in a statement the nose gear of an Airbus A330-300 ''retracted while the aircraft was undergoing a landing gear system check.''

straitstimes.com One prostitute, who has been soliciting at the park for seven years, adds that it is mostly foreign workers who ask for their services. The transvestites are usually Malaysians working full-time jobs in Singapore, moonlighting to save money for sex-change operations.



nationmultimedia.com Tension between police and local residents in Phuket province that escalated into a riot at a local police station appeared to ease, after an inquiry panel was formed to look into the death of two young men during a police hot pursuit.



bloomberg Singapore and Malaysia have sent aircraft to Palembang in South Sumatra to help Indonesia fight forest fires in parts of the country, which have caused haze and deteriorated air quality in neighboring nations.

dpa Malaysian police are investigating a report that plane wreckage with a Malaysian flag painted on it was found on a southern Philippine island, a news report said. The alleged aircraft wreckage, with human remains inside, was spotted at one of the islands of the southernmost Philippines province of Tawi Tawi, which borders Malaysia's eastern state of Sabah, according to the Star newspaper.



straitstimes.com Early estimates by the Joko Widodo administration indicate that the haze crisis could set Indonesia back by up to 475 trillion rupiah (S$47 billion) - no chump change to a government already grappling with a sliding rupiah and sluggish growth.



mb.com.ph Australia is in talks with the Philippines about the possibility of that country accepting asylum seekers, currently being held on remote Pacific islands, who had tried to reach Australia by boat, the immigration minister said. A similar plan to resettle asylum seekers in Cambodia has faltered, with just four having moved there since the country reached a similar agreement with Australia last year.



theguardian.com Bizarrely, 117 Hmong refugees from Laos who had relocated to America died unexpectedly in their sleep in the late 1970s, and perplexed researchers posited the existence of Sunds - sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome. The displaced Laotians, without access to their support networks and the shamans and rituals they usually employed to drive tsog tsuam away, were under considerably more physiological stress - perhaps what triggered the cardiac arrhythmia that killed them.



pressreleaserocket.com Nixon: Years of bombing in Vietnam achieved 'zilch'



salon.com Two weeks ago, a mini-scandal rocked the New York literary world. Gawker revealed that Andrew Roberts, the New York Times Book Review's choice to review the authorised biography of Henry Kissinger, had in fact been Kissinger's original choice to write the authorised biography. Kissinger's Shadow is like Dr. Strangelove, but on paper. It shows you how scary Kissinger's reign truly was, but never lets you forget the farce that was the man.



pbs.org The elections represent a step forward for free speech in the country, as more residents embrace social media. Long shut off from the outside world, the country's Internet use has rocketed from 2 percent of the population to 35 percent over the last several years.



asiaone.com His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah, the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam and Chancellor of Seri Begawan Religious Teachers University College (KUPU SB), has called on religious education teachers to take on the responsibility of countering social ills that have been ''attacking'' Bruneians.