The UN secretary general is shortly headed to Myanmar to observe the country’s reforms, and ahead of his visit his special advisor on Myanmar, Vijay Nambiar, told the press that the country had the potential to be the next Asian tiger, as it emerges from its hibernation and begins to attract significant investment. But Ban, who in the past has taken a relatively meek approach to the Myanmar government and military, should be coming in this time more empowered, able to go where he wants, and able to try and answer some of the big questions about the reform process. Read more »

Over at “India Ink,” the India blog of The New York Times, there’s a terrific interview with Ajay Banga—the CEO of Mastercard and the new chair of the U.S.-India Business Council. It’s a striking presentation at a time when there’s been little but gloom and doom about India in the markets.

Why all that gloom? Here are six reasons:

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Pretty soon everyone you know will have been to Myanmar, so you better get there fast. The UN Secretary General is headed there, Canada just suspended sanctions (following the EU earlier this week), and Japan is gearing up for sizable investments in the country, as are many European businesses. In the new issue of Prospect, I explore Myanmar’s looming gold rush. Read more »

Last week I participated in the Fortune Brainstorm GREEN conference, a two-and-a-half day meeting in California that brought together money people, inventors, CEOs, chief sustainability officers, journalists, and policy analysts to talk about what is going on in the world of clean and green tech. The meeting struck me as unusual for a couple of reasons.

First, there was a lot of positive energy—no pun intended—engendered primarily by the inventor types and CEOs (not surprising, I suppose, since they are the ones actually involved in creating things), as well as the sustainability officers who are always thinking about how to make their companies do more with less. Read more »

Over at New Mandala, there is a detailed report by longtime correspondent Nick Nostitz of Thaksin Shinawatra’s visit to Cambodia during the Thai New Year. For followers of Thailand and Indochinese politics, it is well worth a read.

As with Nostitz’s prior reports and books, this one is full of on-the-ground details, but what struck me the most was the intense feeling poured out by some of the Thais who traveled to meet Thaksin, the kind of emotion I previously associated in Thailand with Thais’ meetings with, er, a man whose title ends with “Nine.” Read more »

Over at New Mandala, there have been a series of excellent posts on the continuing conflict between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Myanmar military. Several have suggested that, as the Kachin area is increasingly covered in the state press in Yangon, it suggests that the government may no longer be trying to downplay the conflict, and may instead be trying to wins hearts and minds both in the Kachin area and among the majority Burman population for its handling of the fighting, in order to isolate Kachin regions from the broader reform effort and possibly split them from sympathy in the National League for Democracy (NLD). Read more »

The UN Security Council issued a toughly-worded Presidential Statement on April 16, 2012, that deplored North Korea’s April 13 launch, called upon North Korea to “re-establish its preexisting commitments to a moratorium on missile launches” and directed the committee responsible for implementing UN security council resolutions against North Korea to make additional sanctions recommendations. Read more »

A spate of articles over the past week has highlighted the growing possibility that former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra will soon return to Thailand from exile. During a recent visit to Laos, just across the border from the Thai Northeast, Thaksin told supporters that he is going to return to Thailand within the next three or four months, in time for his birthday. As The Economist noted last week, his recent visit to Laos had all the trappings of a state visit, with high security, crowds of supporters, and the highest-level audiences with the Lao government. Thaksin has also increasingly dropped the façade that he is “retired” from politics, though he continues to insist that he is not interested in returning to the premiership. Read more »

I heard this morning the news that Tadashi Yamamoto passed away in Tokyo on Sunday. There will be a flood of tributes from the many people who knew him better than I did, but I wanted to add my modest voice to these many remembrances.

I first met Tadashi Yamamoto in the 1990s through a U.S.-Japan-China trilateral project that he put together at the Japan Center for International Exchange. I had studied Japanese in Tokyo in the late 1980s and continued to stay involved with Japan. But through Tadashi Yamamoto and JCIE, I met Japanese colleagues at the very outset of my professional career who became close friends and have remained important associates ever since.

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Press reports today and yesterday confirm that British prime minister David Cameron will visit Myanmar on Friday, as part of a tour through Asia. This will make Cameron the first major Western leader to visit Myanmar in at least two decades, since the 1990 elections, whose results were never recognized internationally. Cameron is supposedly bringing with him a business delegation, as companies are now rushing to get into Myanmar.

In some ways, the United Kingdom is well positioned to be the European country that breaks the ice, leading the end of the European sanctions. Read more »