Phuket, Thailand  - Before tourism, Phuket Island was renowned for its tin-mining which lured Chinese migrants to its shores in search of fortunes the way western tourists now come in search of sunshine.

Phuket was one of the last stops on the Malacca Straits route to riches for the shiploads of Chinese who flocked to South-East Asia over the past 400 years, most of them Hokkien from southern Fukian.

Phuket, Thailand  - A proposal to make the Mississippi and Mekong "sister rivers" has won the support of US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and her counterparts from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, officials said Friday.

Clinton met the foreign ministers of the four countries along the lower Mekong River Thursday at the tail end of a South-East Asian foreign ministers meeting held this week on Phuket, a Thai island 600 kilometres south of Bangkok.

Phuket (Thailand), July 23 : External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna on Thursday said Indonesia had placed the issue of terrorism upfront at the retreat of 27 foreign ministers of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).

“Indonesia opened this subject because they were the latest victims of terror when terrorists struck at Jakarta, just a few days back. Indonesia made a fervent appeal to all of us that terrorism will have to be fought both on a collective basis as well as on country-specific basis.”

Phuket (Thailand), July 23 : India on Thursday stated that it values its time-tested and purposeful relations with Russia, as the two sides decided to upgrade their strategic partnership.

Holding a meeting in Phuket on the sidelines of the ASEAN ministerial meeting, External Affairs Minister S M Krishna and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, reviewed the status of bilateral relations.

Both leaders also discussed issues related to their upcoming annual bilateral summit.

Phuket, Thailand  - Thai police on Thursday destroyed a motorcycle parked outside the venue for Asia's top security forum, causing a blast that raised security concerns among its delegates.

"The motorcycle was parked where it shouldn't have been, and when sniffer dogs were sent to investigate, they seemed to detect something suspicious," Thai Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Thani Thongpakdi said.

Phuket, Thailand - US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday signed South-East Asia's main friendship and security treaty in a gesture signalling America's return to the region.

"The United States is back in South-East Asia," Clinton told a press conference minutes before signing the Treaty on Amity and Cooperation in South-East Asia (TAC), a loose code of conduct for the region that was signed by the original founding members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1976.

Phuket, Thailand - US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Wednesday said a consensus was taking shape among major powers to demand the "complete and irreversible denuclearisation" of North Korea.

After meetings with her counterparts from China, Russia and Thailand, Clinton called for a united stand to ensure North Korea shuts down its nuclear weapons programme.

"All the foreign ministers agreed that a complete and irreversible denuclearisation is the only path for North Korea," Clinton said.

Phuket, Thailand  - The next summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been scheduled for October in Thailand and the host is seeking to involve the United Nations, a senior official said Tuesday.

Thailand is inviting United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to tag on an ASEAN-UN summit to the regional summit October 23-25 on Phuket island.

"We would try to squeeze it in to the programme, but it is likely we would have to expand the duration of the summit," said Vitavas Srivihok, director general of ASEAN affairs at Thailand's Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Phuket, Thailand  - The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) needs to become an action-based community, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva urged Monday at the opening of an annual meeting of the region's foreign ministers.

"The ASEAN community must be a community of action," Abhisit said in his opening speech to the 42nd ASEAN foreign ministers' meeting held this week in Phuket, 600 kilometres south of Bangkok. "We need to show the world that ASEAN is ready to meet any challenge."

Phuket, Thailand  - A meeting of foreign ministers from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) kicked off Monday on Phuket Island with a call to turn the grouping into a more action-based one.

"The ASEAN community must be a community of action," Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said in his opening speech to the gathering of ASEAN foreign ministers.

"We need to show the world that ASEAN is ready to meet any challenge," he said.

Phuket, Thailand  - Finance ministers from South-east and East Asia met Sunday on the Thai tourist island of Phuket to try to come up with joint measures to tackle the effects on the region of the global economic slide.

Although institutional investors in East Asia generally stayed away from the kind of financial instruments that led to the current economic crisis in the West, the countries of the region have already experienced dramatic falls in volumes of exports to the West, with further drops expected.

Phuket, Thailand - Now is the time for a cheap holiday in Phuket, Thailand's leading beach resort.

Tourism is the number one industry on Phuket, swelling the island's 350,000 official population to more than 5 million each year. More than 48 per cent of these tourists come from Europe.

There was apprehension on the island in November that numbers would drop as a result of the world economic crisis, but future bookings looked good until anti-government protestors in Bangkok closed the two international airports from November 26 to December 3.

Phuket, Thailand – They were flying to the “paradise isle” in southern Thailand to have a short break, but they never knew that they would be lost forever in the paradise island.

However, Millie Furlong, a Canadian waitress and her Thai boyfriend were fortunate enough to come virtually unscathed from a plane crash that killed 88 people on the resort island of Phuket. They were chanting loads of prayers while they were being taken to hospital.