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.



bangkokpost.com Thailand has rejected a Chinese proposal to increase the top speed of the new double-track railway from Bangkok to the Northeast and the Eastern Seaboard to 250 kilometres per hour from 180 km/h.



wsj.com Malaysia's anticorruption agency will look into a report in The Wall Street Journal that Malaysian investigators have traced nearly $700 million of deposits into what they believe are the personal bank accounts of Malaysia's prime minister, Najib Razak.

reuters Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak denied taking money from state fund 1MDB or any other entity for personal gain, after a media report said investigators traced nearly $700 million to bank accounts that were allegedly in his name. Najib blamed former prime minister and Mahathir Mohamad, a past ally, for being behind the latest corruption allegations.

ft.com Malaysia's prime minister was battling with the most damaging allegations yet in a financial scandal that has sparked political turmoil in a country once noted for stability.



abc.net.au The death toll after a passenger ferry capsized in the central Philippines has risen to 54, amid confusion about exact passenger numbers. The Philippines coast guard said there may have been more people aboard the vessel than were listed in its passenger manifest.



truth-out.org The plight of the Rohingya is the culmination of three years of riots and violent attacks directed at Burma's Muslim minority, who make up over 30 percent of the population in the state of Rakhine. As the Association of Southeast Asian States, or Asean, prepares to integrate the region's economies by the end of 2015, it's worth asking what it is these countries will be combining - their markets or their deep-seated social problems?



todayonline.com Singapore has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 36 percent by 2030, a move environmental observers have hailed. However, they said it requires all parties, from industries to individuals, to play their part to achieve it.



chennelnewsasia.com There is a lot of money headed Indonesia???s way, but the question now is will that money actually be put to work, or will it get tangled in the bureaucratic process.



cambodiadaily.com Var Kimhong, chairman of Cambodia's Joint Border Committee, called a press conference to counter claims from the opposition that he will not release the government's maps of the country's border with Vietnam because they were drawn by the Vietnamese in the 1980s.



tuoitrenews.vn Vietnam and two of its neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, have agreed to launch a three-month crackdown on human trafficking along the Vietnamese borders, given the recent complications with the issue, local media reported.



news.asiaone.com The High Court in Brunei has sentenced a Filipino man to death by hanging after it found him guilty of murder. In 2013, Cyrille Navarro Tagapan, 31, was charged with the murder of Abdullah Hj Hamid on August 1, 2012.