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.



nytimes.com A wooden fishing boat carrying several hundred desperate migrants from Myanmar (Burma) was spotted adrift in the Andaman Sea between Thailand and Malaysia on Thursday, part of an exodus in which thousands of people have taken to the sea in recent weeks but no country has been willing to take them in.

cnn.com A top Malaysian official says the surge of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh seeking asylum in his country and neighboring Indonesia in recent days is unwelcome - and his government will turn back any illegal arrivals.



bbc.com "There is only one reason,'' Bangkok-based Rohingya expert Chris Lewa told the BBC. ''Muslims in Burma's westernmost state of Rakhine face such extreme oppression that they feel they have no option but to leave - in many cases by any means necessary.''



smh.com Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has confirmed that a small number of refugees from Nauru are in the process of being transferred and resettled in Cambodia, as the Abbott government faces another High Court challenge on the legality of detaining asylum seekers in a third country.



usatoday.com The number of people who died in a fire at a footwear factory in the Philippines increased to 72, police said. The fire started just before noon on Wednesday and raged for over five hours on the outskirts of the capital, Manila.



theguardian.com Indonesia's president Joko ''Jokowi'' Widodo extended the country's partial forest-clearing moratorium on Wednesday, the day of its expiration, leaving largely intact a policy civil society groups had demanded be strengthened.



channelnewsasia.com Five Iranian boats fired shots across the bow of a Singapore-flagged vessel in the international waters of the Gulf, the captain of the ship confirms. No one was injured.



time.com It's easy to forget now, 40 years after the Fall of Saigon and freshly removed from the prospect of Iraq and Afghanistan lapsing into ''another Vietnam,'' that there was a time when many believed that escalation in Vietnam was the right thing to do.
http://time.com/3850301/the-right-war-vietnam-history/



rfa.org Veterinarians in Laos are vaccinating more than 1000 cattle in a suburb of the capital Vientiane, after hundreds of the animals died from a recent outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, according to the head of government's livestock and fisheries department.



thedailystar.net Two migrant workers returned from Brunei penniless early today after they were cheated by two Bangladeshi recruiting agencies with the promise of lucrative salaries abroad.