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.



thediplomat.com Malaysian defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein reiterated his country's desire to establish an Asean peacekeeping force as the chair of the grouping this year. According to the Malaysian newspaper The Star, in an address to the defense ministry before beginning his visits to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, Hishammuddin said that he is in the process of visiting every one of the nine other Asean countries and that one of the things he would discuss would be the formation of an Asean peacekeeping force.

ibtimes.co.uk An oil-rig worker, who was sacked from his job after saying he believed he saw the MH370 flight crash into South China Sea, says the official search for the doomed plane in the Southern Indian Ocean is in the wrong place. Mike McKay, 57, stands by seeing the Boeing 777 plummet into the China sea on that fateful night on March 7 while he was based on the Songa Mercur oil rig - off the Vietnamese town of Vung Tau.



wunc.org A new study finds a disturbing trend in the battle against malaria. There are highly effective drugs called artemisinins - and now resistant malaria is turning up in parts of Myanmar, the reclusive country also known as Burma, where it hadn't been seen before.



theguardian.com Kazantip festival - an international dance music event that originated in the Crimea - should have been in full swing, with thousands of revellers making the trip to Koh Puos, an island on Cambodia's central coast, for 10 days of carefree partying. However, festivalgoers found the bridge to the island blocked by police after Cambodian authorities decided to cancel the event due to fears over ''indecent tourism''.



dw.de A shooting at a McDonald's in the Philippines left a German dead and wounded a Frenchman and an Indian in what appeared to be random violence, local police said. The pre-dawn shooting followed a heated argument between two unidentified Filipino men and a 32-year-old Indian and his French friend.



forbes.com Once buttoned down Singapore legalised casinos, it became acceptable for respectable destinations in Asia to have them,too. ''Before the success of Singapore, gaming was considered a fairly sleazy business in Asia,'' Spectrum Asia chief executive Paul Bromberg says. ''After Singapore, other jurisdictions considered establishing or expanding their gaming industries - Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, now Japan.''



theguardian.com Indonesia has reaffirmed its intention to execute two Australian drug smugglers, despite continuing high-level diplomatic efforts from Australia to prevent their deaths.

nytimes.com Over the past decade, Indonesia was so determined to erase the tainted legacy of Suharto, the strongman forced to resign in 1998, that it established one of the world's more effective anticorruption agencies. Now the future of that agency, the Corruption Eradication Commission, known as the K.P.K., is under serious threat in a standoff with the police and President Joko Widodo.



thediplomat.com Why do we continue to revisit the Vietnam War, or any historical event? Because we hope that the disastrous experience will hold lessons for future strategic decisions. The best that might be argued about the Vietnam War is that it established, for US allies, that the United States would expend tremendous amounts of blood and treasure for areas that Washington didn't really care about.



huffingtonpost.com Prominent LGBT members of Congress assailed the Obama administration for including Brunei and Malaysia - two nations deeply hostile to gay communities - in major trade talks.



christiantoday.com According to UCANews.com, five Christians were sentenced last week to nine months in prison for allegedly violating Laos's governing medical practices. The case, which was filed in June last year, accused the five Christians for being ''illegal doctors'' for praying for the health of a dying woman.