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.



AAP Police have arrested a convicted Australian pedophile in northeast Thailand after detecting unusual transfers of funds from Australia. Trevor Yardley, 71, from Western Australia, was detained at a house in Udon Thai, 470 kilometres northeast from Bangkok, by Royal Thai Police.



calvinayre.com Tourism authorities in the country are already setting up plans to entice over 700,000 Chinese visitors this year, a number they expect to rise up to two million a year by 2020, The Phnom Penh Post reported.



theguardian.com Indonesian officials have said seven hikers have died and two others suffered severe burns after being caught in a forest fire on a mountain on the island of Java. The group was climbing on Mount Lawu when the incident took place on Sunday, local disaster agency official Agung Lewis said.

abc.net.au International efforts to douse raging Indonesia fires will fail and South-East Asia could face several more weeks of choking smoke until the rainy season starts, Malaysia's environment minister has warned. ''Unless there is rain, there is no way human intervention can put out the fires,'' said natural resources and environment minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar.



straitstimes.com Three cities in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao have been blanketed by thick haze believed to have come from raging forest fires in Indonesia's Kalimantan region.



channelnewsasia.com The Singapore team helping to fight haze-causing fires in Indonesia has so far performed 47 water-bombing operations and put out 35 hotspots, said Dr Ng Eng Hen. The team was deployed to Palembang nine days ago with the Republic of Singapore Air Force's Chinook helicopter.



thesundaily.com Malaysia's tourism sector is now the sixth largest contributor to the national economy, contributing a total of RM161 billion (14.9 percent) of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2014. In spite of a year of tragedies, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak said the country's tourism industry still managed to attract 27.44 million tourists, with RM72 billion in tourist receipts to boast in 2014.



wsj.com Economists say growth could accelerate if the US and 11 other Pacific Rim nations ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a landmark trade deal concluded earlier this month. The deal would eliminate certain tariffs between members, mostly benefiting developing nations such as Vietnam and Malaysia, whose growth depends heavily on exports.



ft.com If you believe the official trade data, China's import of gems, jade and other precious stones from Myanmar ballooned to $12.3bn last year, up tenfold from just $1.2bn in 2013. Yet such figures are likely to reveal an increase in transparency as much as in the trade in precious stones.

reuters Banks in Myanmar bought hundreds of millions of dollars in the black market this year, banking sources said, in a resurgence of an unregulated trade that flourished under military rule and has raised fears among foreign investors of backsliding on reforms.



huffingtonpost.com If there is one word to describe the LGBT community in Laos, the landlocked nation sandwiched between Thailand and Vietnam, it might just be ''invisible.'' Homosexuality is not criminalised in Laos. The country's laws, however, are silent on LGBT rights.