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.



reuters A key suspect in the plotting of last month's deadly bombing in Bangkok was last tracked via multiple flights to Turkey, Thai police said, and Malaysia announced it had made three arrests related to the attack.

AP Thailand's military government has detained a reporter for an English-language newspaper as part of what appears to be a fresh crackdown on critics of the ruling junta. A spokesman for the junta, Col. Winthai Suvaree, acknowledged that Pravit Rojanaphruk, a journalist forThe Nation newspaper, was taken into military detention on Sunday.



thediplomat.com Malaysia and Thailand have agreed to build a wall along their common border next year amid growing concerns about human trafficking. The 640-kilometer Malaysia-Thailand border has long been the site of transnational crime, including the rampant smuggling of weapons, drugs, and people.

bbc.com The Malaysian government is spending 20bn ringgit ($4.6bn) on boosting shares and is cutting taxes for manufacturers. Malaysia has seen the ringgit lose 20 percent of its value against the dollar this year and a nine percent fall in its stock market.



voanews.com As part an ongoing agreement with Australia, a second group of refugees is scheduled to arrive in Cambodia from the Pacific Island of Nauru next month. The United Nations Refugee Agency says the deal undermines the principles of the refugee convention to which both nations are a signatory.



irrawaddy.org The hard fact is that Burma's military is not going to retreat from the nation's political sphere anytime soon. The top generals have learned hard lessons from their regional neighbors, especially Thailand and Indonesia, about how to keep their guard.



techinsider.io No country has such a robust water-saving system already in place as Singapore, where half the land area is equipped to capture rainwater in gutters, barrels, tanks, and reservoirs. The most sophisticated of those systems is at the Changi Airport. Between 28 and 33 percent of all water used in the airport comes from captured rainwater, which is stored in two reservoirs.

wsj.com Singapore buries only a fraction of its trash. This nimble, wealthy city-state crammed on an island three and a half times the size of Washington, DC, sends only two percent of its solid waste to landfill, burns 38 percent of it to generate electricity and recycles the remaining 60 percent. It's a model that other cities would do well to emulate.



The Canadian Press Prosecutors in Indonesia have filed an appeal of a court decision which cleared a Canadian teacher of child sexual offences in the country, the man's family said. Neil Bantleman had been serving a ten-year prison sentence when the August ruling resulted in his release, although he remained under a travel ban.



rfa.org Lao authorities have failed to properly account for the disappearance almost three years ago of civil society activist Sombath Somphone, who was last seen in police custody at a checkpoint in the capital Vientiane, and must commit themselves to a ''real and renewed'' effort to find him, rights groups and Sombath's wife said at a conference in Bangkok.



wsj.com Vietnam is again building up ties with other countries to help its territorial claim in the South China Sea, this time dispatching the chief of its ruling Communist Party for talks in Japan this week.



state.gov Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues Catherine Russell will travel to Manila, Philippines September 14-18 to lead the US delegation to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings on women and the economy. While in the Philippines, Ambassador Russell will launch several US-led initiatives that will empower women to play larger roles in the APEC economies.