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.



bangkokpost.com Bali hopes to draw one million Chinese tourists this year, thanks to a visa-free policy offering to China and other countries which is already in effect.

AP More than 300 migrant fishermen who had been enslaved on trawlers for years rode those same vessels to freedom after a daring rescue from a remote Indonesian island where they had lived in fear of being beaten or killed by their captors.

theage.com.au After just six months as President of Indonesia, Joko ''Jokowi'' Widodo faces a crisis. Hampered by a lacklustre cabinet and an obstructionist legislature, his administration seems unable to stop a corrupt police conspiracy to destroy the country's anti-corruption agency.

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dailymail.co.uk A dual NZ-British citizen jailed in Burma for using an image of the Buddha to promote his bar has been ''abandoned'' by the British Foreign Office, according to human rights campaigners.

gazette.live.uk Phil Blackwood, who lived in Middlesbrough until his family moved to New Zealand when he was four, was sentenced to two-and-a-half-years' hard labor by a Burmese court last month after posting the mocked-up image of the Buddha wearing DJ headphones on Facebook.

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nationmultimedia.com Migrant workers are heading home to Cambodia in droves as they prepare to celebrate the Khmer New Year, which occurs at the same time as the Songkran Festival. More than 80 percent of the Cambodian workers living in Thailand will return to their homeland during the Khmer New Year period to reunite with their loved ones.

japantimes.co.jp Military aid, alongside arms sales and billions of dollars of investment, have strengthened China's ties with Cambodia, and analysts see it as part of a push to extend regional influence, including in the disputed South China Sea.



reuters Hundreds of people in the north of the main Philippine island of Luzon left evacuation centers and returned home after a typhoon weakened significantly as it made landfall, although officials still warned of heavy rain and rough seas.



bloomberg Vietnam may be forced to water down a new law designed to shore up its pension system after tens of thousands of workers protested against the changes in a strike that lasted nearly a week.



news.yahoo.com Malaysia's jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was granted a furlough Sunday to attend his father's funeral, soon after he began a five-year prison sentence on sodomy charges that he says are politically motivated.



straitstimes.com The National Museum of Singapore will extend its exhibition on the life and work of Mr Lee Kuan Yew till May 24.