ASEAN this week This week The ASEAN Post covered a wide range of stories ranging from geopolitics to the energy sector.

Rohingya Muslims who fled a village where Myanmar has admitted its forces helped massacre 10 people said Thursday the victims were all civilians, not fighters as asserted by the army. The Myanmar army chief's office confirmed Wednesday that security forces took part in killing "Bengali terrorists" on September 2 in the village of Inn Din in Rakhine state, using a pejorative term for Rohingya. It was the first time Myanmar had admitted abuses during an army-led

Sofia Begum is a case study in the power of hope. Three months ago, armed vigilantes attacked the six-year-old’s village in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Sofia saw neighbors killed, an uncle wounded by gunfire, and her home razed.Miraculously, Sofia, her parents, and two younger brothers survived. After an arduous four-day journey that included evading militias and making a perilous river crossing, they reached safety in neighboring Bangladesh. “Now I want to be back in school,” Sofia tells me.

Myanmar has notoriously low residential property taxes rates, accounting for just 7.5% of GDP, compared to the 13-14% its neighbours, Laos and Cambodia pay.In 2016, this amounted to just US$1.86 per capita in Yangon according to research done by the Renaissance Institute.

Myanmar was never a frontrunner when it came to press freedom in the Southeast Asian region. However, there was a glimmer of hope when the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Laureate kept under house arrest for years because of her democratic activism, won historic elections in 2015. This led many to expect that more media freedom would follow.Fast forward to today, it seems that the country’s press freedom has only been shrinking.

What can we expect from 2018?The ASEAN Post began the year with an in-depth review of what to expect from the region throughout 2018. The review covered aspects including capital markets, energy, environment, real estate, general elections and the Belt Road Initiative (BRI).Last year, ASEAN was touted to admit its 11th member – Timor-Leste but failed to do so. The topic of ascension to ASEAN is easy enough to understand.

Vietnamese police have seized US$3 million worth of heroin hidden inside packets of tea and smuggled from Laos on Thursday, which is the largest recorded haul of the drug in the country.According to AFP, “a police sting in the mountainous northern Vietnamese province of Dien Bien on Tuesday caught a man aged 44 and a woman in her late 30s, carrying 170 kilogrammes of heroin on the back of their motorbikes.” The drugs were also said to be smuggled over from Laos and packed into scores of packe

Thousands of tourists have floated in a hot-air balloon over Myanmar’s historic Bagan plains dotted with more than 2,200 ancient Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries. Chances are they rode one of Memories Group Ltd.’s inflatables.The company, the largest operator of balloons in the area, will start trading under the MEGL ticker on the Singapore stock exchange on Friday.

At 4:20 am – a time which was deemed auspicious by a Burmese astrologer – on the 4th of January 1948, a new nation was born. Myanmar celebrates the 70th anniversary of its independence from the British today.

Myanmar is set to raise the minimum wage to around $3.60 a day, state media announced Wednesday, as Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government struggles to project economic progress after almost two years in power.The new daily figure of 4,800 kyats represents a 33 percent increase on Myanmar's first-ever minimum wage introduced in 2015 by the previous army-backed administration."The new minimum wage will be applied across all regions and states to all businesses with 10 or more wo