For the first time, Malaysian authorities have caned three Muslim women under Islamic law for acts of adultery, the country's national news agency Bernama reported Feb. 17. Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein said the punishment was carried out Feb. 9 at a women's prison near Kuala Lumpur, "to educate and make the offenders realize their mistakes and to return to the right path."

Claims by Indonesia authorities that the killing of West Papuan rebel leader Kelly Kwalik last month would improve security in the province's restive Timika region were dashed Jan. 24 when nine people traveling in a convoy of US mining company Freeport-McMoran were injured in an ambush. Papua police said gunmen fired at two buses and four other vehicles carrying Freeport employees and family members on the highway between the mine and Kuala Kencana town. The injured included one US and one South African national working at the Grasberg gold and copper mine, the teenage daughter of a mine employee, and four Mobile Brigade police officers. (Jakarta Globe, Jan. 25)

Four Christian churches in Malaysia were attacked Jan. 8 amid tensions over the use of the word "Allah" by non-Muslims in the country. Attackers threw a molotov cocktail at a church in Selangor state, although it failed to ignite. Hours earlier, a petrol bomb was thrown at a church in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, as attackers attempted to set another two ablaze in a nearby suburb. The attacks come amid protests over last week's court ruling that overturned a ban on non-Muslims using the word "Allah" in their literature—allowing a Catholic newsletter to use the term to refer to God in the Malay language.

A UN High Commissioner for Refugees official protested Thailand's move to forcibly repatriate some 4,000 ethnic Hmong back to Laos. "UNHCR is extremely dismayed that Thailand has commenced the deportations of the Lao Hmong today from the camp in Phetchabun," said Ariane Rummery, UNHCR spokesperson in Bangkok. "We don't have access to the area, but we have had reports that deportations began this morning and about 400 people have been removed so far."

Indonesia's National Police announced Dec. 16 that they had shot Kelly Kwalik, leader of the Free Papua Movement. Authorities said Kwalik was killed as he resisted arrest during a police raid on a house in Timika, Papua. Five others, including a 10-year-old boy, were also arrested in the raid. Authorities charge that Kwalik was behind a 2002 ambush of a convoy of buses that killed a US national near the Freeport McMoRan gold and copper mining operation. They also claim Kwalik was behind a string of armed attacks in the Freeport area that left eight people dead, three of them foreigners, between June and November this year.

Former Khmer Rouge head of state and "Brother Number Five," Khieu Samphan, has been charged with genocide, the UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia announced Dec. 18. Samphan is the third member of the Khmer Rouge to be charged with genocide by the war crimes tribunal this week. "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea and former foreign minister Ieng Sary also face genocide charges—marking the first time the charge has been brought against Khmer Rouge leaders by an internationally sanctioned court. All three are accused in the deaths of thousands of members of Cambodia's Vietnamese and the Cham Muslim minorities.

Calls are growing for a declaration of martial law in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao in the wake of a series of attacks. In the most recent, on Dec. 13 dozens of Moro militants used sledgehammers and bolt cutters to smash their way into the Basilan provincial jail, freeing 31 inmates—including two commanders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). A jail guard and one of the raiders were killed in the pre-dawn assault. (Inquirer, Manila, Dec. 14)

A renowned Buddhist teacher has protested the eviction of his followers from a monastery in southern Vietnam's Lam Dong province, and a group of Vietnamese intellectuals have issued a petition to support them. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese-born Zen master who popularized Buddhism in the West, wrote a letter last week to President Nguyen Minh Triet criticizing the police eviction of nearly 400 from Bat Nha monastery. His followers say a mob including undercover agents descended on the monastery Sept. 27, damaged buildings and forced the devotees out, beating some with sticks.