MAE SAI, THAILAND | After 10 days trapped in a flooded cave in northern Thailand, and after an enormous search effort that had transfixed Thailand, the missing 12 boys and their soccer coach had finally been found in Tham Luang Cave on Monday. In a brief video filmed by a British diver, which was posted…
Read moreSINGAPORE | FROM the Himalayas to the Korean DMZ to the South China Sea, the balance of power in Asia appears to be shifting. But beneath the rhetoric, have the fundamentals really changed ? In East–West Center International Media Conference in Singapore, an expert panel of journalists, policy analysts, and academics examined the situation from…
Read moreYANGON / COX’S BAZAR | Rohingya refugees returning to Myanmar will have no explicit guarantees of citizenship or freedom of movement throughout the country, under a secret agreement between the Myanmar government and the United Nations seen by Reuters. The UN struck an outline deal with Myanmar at the end of May aimed at eventually…
Read moreSUBIR BHAUMIK | Indian para–commandos have attacked a transit camp of the NSCN–K inside Myanmar, top military officials told LOOKEAST. The Special Forces unit crossed the international border at pillar no 151 in Nagaland’s Mon district around 2pm on Wednesday and struck the rebel camp around Shwelo inside Myanmar. The officials said that the rebels…
Read moreHONGMEI HE / JIAO NIE / YAO WANG | Along with deepening the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has also accelerated its cooperation with the rest of the world in recent years. However, some international media have increasingly reported China–led BRI as an ambition of military expansion. These reports purposely define…
Read moreYANGON | Myanmar’s military has sacked a top general who was named in a fresh European Union sanctions against security officials accused of serious rights violations against the Rohingya minority, including killings and sexual violence. The military, also referred to as Tatmadaw, announced late on Monday in a Facebook post that Major General Maung Maung Soe,…
Read moreSK CHATTERJEE | THE Sydney Morning Herald ran a fine opinion article, Great powers stepping up on China, on June 4 regarding the recently concluded Shangri–La Dialogue in Singapore. The author, Peter Hartcher, said successive speakers at the forum talked about the rules–based order in the South China Sea, and the further their countries were from the…
Read moreNADEEM QADIR | If the top bureaucrat of a country’s foreign ministry gets immersed in corruption that country fails to promote its image on global platforms. This writer has received blazing complaints of bribery and corruption from reliable sources of the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) about Foreign Secretary Md. Shahidul Haque. According to…
Read moreLOOKEAST REPORT | Chief minister Bengal Mamata Banerjee and her colleague in Tripura Biplab Deb could have grabbed the opportunity of participating in GLOBAL BAMBOO AND RATTAN CONGRESS 2018 (BARC2018) to be held in Beijing, China from 25–27 June 2018. The first ever global congress shall conduct ministerial summit on the UN Sustainable Development Goals…
Read moreLOOKEAST REPORT | Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the authorities in the state of Tripura, in north–eastern India, to ensure that an almost fatal knife attack on an investigative reporter does not go unpunished and that the reporter is protected. Suman Debnath, 30, a journalist with various local media outlets who is known for…
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