Burma enacted a new law requiring mothers in designated areas to space the births of their children three years apart—a measure clearly aimed at the Muslim minority.
After weeks of escalating tensions along the remote mountain border, a Burmese MiG-29 fighter jet carried out an air-strike on Chinese territory, killing four farm workers.
The latest fighting in Burma's opium-producing hinterlands involves a Han Chinese ethnic group, the Kokang. Some 50,000 have fled across the border into China.
In "moderate" Malaysia, an opposition leader is sent to prison for "sodomy," and when a cartoonist lampooned the sentence, he was arrested for "sedition."
Despite a democratic opening and hopes for peace with ethnic insurgencies, horrific accounts of rights abuses continue to emerge from Burma's opium-producing hinterlands.
A clash between Philippine National Police troops and Moro rebels left 30 dead, jeopardizing the Mindanao peace deal. The troops were hunting down the Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf cell.
A military court in Thailand sentenced web editor Nut Rungwong to four-and-a-half years in prison—the latest journalist convicted of defaming the nation's king.
Protesters in military-ruled Thailand have been silently reading 1984 in public to outwit a ban on gatherings—leading to the book itself being banned. Egypt could be next.
Protesters in the Philippines marked five years since the country's worst political massacre, at Ampatuan—where paramilitary troops killed 58 opponents of a local boss.
A decade after striking workers were massacred at Hacienda Luisita in Central Luzon, nobody has been brought to justice. Survivors now demand resignation of President Aquino.
Journalist Taing Tri, of a local newspaper in Cambodia's Kratie province, was shot dead as he attempted to photograph trucks transporting illegal luxury wood.
Indigenous tribes within the proposed Bangsamoro territory in Mindanao, created under a peace deal with Moro rebels, are demanding that their ancestral lands be excluded.
