Southeast Asia links: Pope's pivot, bloggers and gay rights in Vietnam, Thai monks and more
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- To much fanfare, the Pope will visit the Philippines this week – all part of the Pope's pivot to Asia, says Prashanth Parameswaran.
- At the beginning of the year Hanoi took the lead in gay rights in the region by allowing same-sex marriage.
- The news from Vietnam isn't all good though, writes Shawn Crispin, with recent arrests of bloggers dashing hopes that a free-speech crackdown will end.
- Over at CSIS, Murray Hiebert and Greg Poling look at how the US should rebalance in Southeast Asia in 2015.
- Despite reports last week that Aung San Suu Kyi will not run in November's elections, a senior NLD official said the party would decide mid-year whether it would participate in the election.
- Much to the chagrin of environmentalists, Hun Sen opened a 338MW hydrodam this week and defended Chinese-funded mega-dams in Cambodia.
- Jusuf Kalla said in an interview with the WSJ that he wanted to end Indonesia's long simmering conflict in Papua.
- Zachary Abuza on the ongoing power politics in Vietnam between the army, the people and the Party. David Brown explains why Vietnam expects a tough political year ahead.
- Twenty Muslims were jailed on terrorism charges in Myanmar amid claims that Buddhist extremist group the 969ers tampered with the cases.
- There's been renewed interest in the behaviour of Thai monks since a video circulated of a monk slapping an English teacher on a train. Al Jazeera took a look at Thailand's troubled monks: