PHUKETWAN recognises the importance of Asean with the Economic Community approaching and marks what's happening around the region with a column, Asean Today, that will cease when Phuketwan closes on December 31.



tempo.com.ph The Community comes into being at the end of this year, 48 years after Asean was organised in 1967 by five countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. These five were joined by Brunei in 1984, Vietnam in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997, and Cambodia in 1999. It may be sometime before the Asean achieves anything like the European Community with its common currency. It is enough for now that the first basic steps have been taken for integration in such areas as tourism, aviation, human resource development, trade financing, communications connectivity, and electronic transactions.



khmertimeskh.com Russia will help Cambodia develop a nuclear power plant to overcome the Kingdom's massive reliance on electricity from Thailand and Vietnam, under an agreement signed during Prime Minister Dmitry Medvdev's visit. The significance of the deal was highlighted by Thursday's nationwide blackout when supplies from Vietnam failed, prompting Prime Minister Hun Sen to make a late night Facebook video address to the nation to explain the outage had not been caused by a terrorist attack.

cambodiadaily.com The future of disposable packaging is banana leaves, according to the government and Unesco, which launched a campaign to ''Make My Country Plastic Bag Free.''



dissidentvoice.org Of course, Americans have had plenty of inspiration as they've sacrificed their souls upon the alter of American Exceptionalism. Their government has waged a nearly non-stop series of wars for corporate profit since Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Anyone paying a lick of attention knows that every one of these wars were waged for the benefit of Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse, and that official government explanations are only believed by fools.



abc.net.au Ms Suu Kyi does her best to wear the almost impossible expectations lightly. She spent 15 years under house arrest and chooses her words carefully - but often delivers them with sharp wit and brevity. The election was a huge test for Myanmar and it does seem the country is on a more hopeful path.

aljazeera.com The Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF) has accused the army of bombing schools and Buddhist temples, firing on civilians, and raping women in Shan state, where armed groups have fought government forces for years. Since October 6, the army has shelled six villages, shot and wounded three people, and fired on 17 villagers who are now missing, according to activists.



onegreenplanet.org On their Facebook page, Elephants Asia Rescue and Survival asked the unanswerable question: ''What possesses man to be so cruel? . . . (The elephants') lives are a misery. They are stabbed repeatedly with huge sharp hooks, pulled and squeezed by their ears. Tourists take rides even with the elephants' foreheads covered in bloodied wounds.''



smh.com.au A British man is being questioned by police over the alleged rape of an 18-year-old woman from New South Wales in Bali for ''schoolies''. Denpasar crime division police chief Reinhard Habonaran Nainggolan said the teen filed a report with police on Friday against the 25-year-old British citizen.



The number of Group B Streptococcus (GBS) infections have more than doubled in Singapore with some 355 cases reported year-to-date. The spike that started in July has been linked to the consumption of Chinese-style ready-to-eat (RTE) raw fish dishes and Type III GBS disease, specifically due to Sequence Type (ST) 283, according to Singapore health officials.



valuewalk.com Beijing's rhetoric after an incident with a US warship sailed to the South China Sea suggests that Chinese decision-makers could resort to more ''concrete and forceful measures'' to counter the US Navy, according to Zhang Baohui, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.