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 Malaysia launched high-level talks with its neighbors to try to solve the deepening problem of refugees stranded in boats off Southeast Asia's shores, but there appeared to be no quick solution to the crisis. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman met with his counterpart from Bangladesh, Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali, ahead of a meeting with the Indonesian and Thai foreign ministers scheduled for Wednesday, officials said.

channelnewsasia.com Mohamad Ajis is about four years old. He was said to be travelling with his mother - a Rohingya Muslim - a month ago on one of smuggling routes, from the Bay of Bengal across the Andaman sea to southern Thailand. Tragically, his mother died in the mosquito-infested jungle near the Thai-Malaysian border.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/rohingya-boy-survives/1853454.html



theguardian.com The Indonesian navy prevented a suspected migrant boat from entering the country's waters at the weekend after the arrival of hundreds of Rohingya and Bangladeshi people and has stepped up patrols in the area, the military said. Four warships and one plane were now patrolling off the coast of Indonesia's western province of Aceh to stop migrant boats from entering, up from one warship and a plane about a week ago.

bbc.com The Indonesian city where about 1500 migrants have landed after being abandoned at sea says it urgently needs help to care for them. The mayor of Langsa, in Aceh province, told the BBC that finances were tight. Only those whose boats sink or who reach land are being given shelter.

Analysis: Jonathan Head, BBC News, southern Thailand It is hard to imagine any governments taking a more hard-hearted stance than that in Southeast Asia towards the migrant boats off their coasts.



independent.co.uk Manu Abdul Salam, a young Rohingya woman and one of 800 boat people to reach the Indonesian village of Langsa, said, ''If I had known that the boat journey would be so horrendous, I would rather have just died in Mynanmar [Burma].''

theatlantic.com Those Rohingya who are rejected from foreign ports are destined, then, to float indefinitely. A religious minority in a country that's 90 percent Buddhist, many of the 1.1 million Rohingya live in a state of apartheid, clustered in concentration camps that are largely disconnected from the outside world. The US has made little effort to apply real diplomatic pressure on Burma.
http://goo.gl/lVgHRD

afp Muslim boatpeople fleeing dire conditions in Buddhist-majority Myanmar are entitled to ''human rights,'' a spokesman for Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition urged, in strikingly bold comments on the plight of the deeply-marginalised group. ''If they are not accepted (as citizens), they cannot just be sent onto rivers. Can't be pushed out to sea. They are humans. I just see them as humans who are entitled to human rights,'' Nyan Win told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting between political parties and President Thein Sein in Yangon.



philstar.com The international group Human Rights Watch urged President Benigno Aquino III not to turn a blind eye to the plight of the ''boat people.''

reuters A fire that killed 72 people in a rubber slipper factory in the Philippines on Wednesday has shone a spotlight on what trade unions say are the often unsafe working conditions in Southeast Asia's fastest-growing country.



voanews.com Cambodia has some of the world's worst mental health statistics - largely due to the effects of Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Yet mental health services remain underfunded and - in the words of the World Health Organisation - ''critically neglected.''



wnd.com ''I've been waiting 40 years for this film!'' was a common refrain among the Vietnam War veterans and the South Vietnamese Americans who gathered to witness their powerful story finally making it onto the big screen at the wildly popular premiere of 'Ride the Thunder: A Vietnam War Story of Victory and Betrayal' - and now the cutting-edge film is expanding with showings in at least four states in May.



channelnewsasia.com Four koalas on loan to Singapore from Australia will make their first public appearance on Wednesday, announced the Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS).