John Sparks

As the king of Thailand celebrates his coronation day, John Sparks meets Chatwadee Amornphat, one of those few Thai voices daring to speak out against the monarchy.

Brunei may be small – but it is earning an over-sized reputation for brutality as it introduces Sharia law punishments for offences including pregnancy outside marriage and homosexual acts.

With chants of “tell us the truth” families of missing passengers from the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 are demanding answers with mounting anger.

The recovery teams are quickly losing their best opportunity to find the plane. They have to find what is left of it to have any chance of understanding what really happened.

We’re walked to the edge of the runway, where the pilot tells us what he and rest of the crew saw – or in today’s case what they didn’t see.

After a day when there were no further sightings of possible wreckage from Malaysian Airlines flight 370, the extent of the challenge in trying to recover the plane and black boxes is becoming clear.

Last night Malaysia’s transport minister told me flight MH370’s data communication system had been deliberately disabled before the last verbal communication from the aircraft.

Once again, the Malaysian authorities offer little new information about the search for flight 370 at a well-attended press conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Six days after the disappearance of flight 370, the awkward truth is that we are no closer to discovering what happened to this sophisticated jetliner and the 239 people on board.

The head of Malaysia’s aviation authority called the disappearance of flight 370 an “unprecedented mystery” – on Tuesday the puzzle got even more perplexing.

There wasn’t much that officials from Malaysian Airlines were able to say, other than the fact that flight MH 370, “had gone missing.”

No one gets to decide where they are born, but if people had the power to choose, no one would want to be a Rohingya from north-west Burma.

Human traffickers are selling migrant workers from Cambodia and Burma for a couple of hundred dollars each to the owners of Thai fishing boats.

On first reading, it sounded like a gutsy decision. After months of turmoil, Thailand’s embattled prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, has decided to proceed with an election this Sunday.

With the middle classes still on the streets, the embattled Thai prime minister needs a ringing endorsement from rural voters if she is to retain any authority after elections due early next month.