In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Last week, the Asian Development Bank released its annual “Asian Development Outlook” report for 2013, with Asia’s success story of unprecedented growth in the last decades forecast to grow by 6.6 percent in 2013 and 6.7 percent in 2014.

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Since the International Contact Group was formed in late 2009 to work with the Malaysian Facilitator in peace talks between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), I have traveled back and forth to Kuala Lumpur often.

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The Asia Foundation recently hosted U.S. Ambassador to Bangladesh, Dan W. Mozena, for an informal lunch discussion at its San Francisco headquarters, followed by a public event organized by the Foundation’s Washington, D.C., office.

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Today, March 20, marks the 180th anniversary of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, making the U.S. bilateral relationship with Thailand the longest uninterrupted diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and any Asian nation. The Thai-American Chamber of Commerce’s theme for 2013 commemorating 180 years of relations…

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Malaysia’s 13th general elections must be called by June 2013. After the ruling Barisan Nasional lost its two thirds majority in the 2008 elections, the big question in the minds of citizens and political parties is whether BN will recapture its majority or lose further ground to the opposition.

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The inauguration ceremony of South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-hye, was held on February 25 with mixed feelings among Koreans about her election. She is the daughter of the controversial former president, Park Chung Hee…

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The violent attack on a young woman in New Delhi last December, and the nationwide protests that followed, were yet another indication that India’s youth are increasingly fed up. This case, piled upon countless other commonplace incidents of sexual violence directed at women and children throughout the country…

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South Korea’s new President Park Geun-hye took the oath of office [on February 25] as South Korea’s first female president, the first Korean president to have previously lived in the Blue House, and the first Korean president to have visited North Korea prior to her term in office.

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This year, spring arrived a few days early in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and its advent was a raging bloom. On February 5, a few Bangladeshi blogger-activists occupied the Shahbag intersection to protest against the mild sentence of life-imprisonment awarded to war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah…

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The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (CA) in May 2012 has left Nepali politics in a deep impasse over the formation of an “election government.” The opposition has been refusing to go into an election until a broad-based government is formed under the leadership of Nepali Congress (NC), but the current prime minister…

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