Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been sentenced to another 18 months of house arrest after an American man swam out to her lakeside home back in May. BBC Asia expert Jill McGivering tells us about the sentence and the uninvited lakeside visitor.

The U.S. government is deploying dozens of Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Afghanistan in a new kind of anti-drug surge. It's the biggest expansion in DEA history, but will it help? Joining The Takeaway is Gretchen Peters, former Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent for ABC and author of Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda.

They’re starting to call it “the cruise to nowhere.” For more than two weeks, the U.S. government has been closely tracking the progress of a North Korean ship as it makes its way across the South China Sea bound for Myanmar. At first officials thought the mystery ship could be the first test of the UN Security Council's resolution to allow inspection of suspicious ships. But now it seems that the North Koreans may be fishing for something else: a confrontation with the U.S. BBC Correspondent John Sudworth joins The Takeaway from Seoul, South Korea, with more of the story.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reports that North Korea test fired yet another short range missile today. This would be the sixth missile launch since the North's nuclear test on Monday. Our partner, The New York Times, is reporting this morning that the U.S. may push China to ban North Korean flights through its air space to prevent the transfer and proliferation of nuclear materials. New York Times correspondent David Sanger joins us with a look at the U.S. response to North Korea's rogue behavior. He's also the author of The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power.

For more of The Takeaway's coverage of North Korea, click here. For a look at Kim Jung Il, click here.

Yesterday, North Korea's official news agency warned of a “powerful military strike” on South Korea if it searched the North’s ships. This came the same day that the North said that it no longer considers itself bound by the terms of the armistice that ended war between the Koreas five decades ago. New York Times reporter Martin Fackler wrote about a dramatic shift in how South Koreans are viewing their northern neighbors. He joins The Takeaway from Seoul.

For more, read Martin Fackler's article, S. Koreans Express Fatigue With a Recalcitrant North, in today's New York Times.

North Korea is claiming it test fired a trio of nuclear missiles yesterday. Such claims haven't always turned out to be true, but there are indeed reports of seismic activity in the area. The official North Korea news agency said these explosions were more powerful than the previous tests in October 2006. The claimed tests are raising tensions in the region and Japan has already called for a UN Security Council meeting to discuss the situation. For more we turn to the BBC's Jonathan Marcus.

An American man swam across a lake in Myanmar and, as a result, a pro-democracy leader is imprisoned. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace prize laureate, has been taken to a top security prison in the capital for violating the terms of her house arrest, after John Yettaw, the American man, swam across a lake to enter her home, uninvited. It’s a mysterious story and the BBC’s Asia analyst Jill McGivering has been following it.

The government in one of the world's youngest democracies collapsed yesterday when the Prime Minister of Nepal resigned. This ends government rule by former Maoist guerrillas, who took power in elections after fighting a ten-year civil war against the King. Protests from all sides have exploded in Kathmandu in recent days. Somini Sengupta joins The Takeaway with more of the story. She's the South Asia Bureau chief for our partner The New York Times.

Today, China announced that it's GDP grew at a much slower rate in the first quarter of 2009, down almost 4% since this time last year and the weakest growth since quarterly records began in 1992. China says it's determined to achieve annual growth of 8 percent. So, what does this say about China's place in the shaky financial world? And what implications does China's growth have for the U.S.? To help answer those questions, The Takeaway is joined by John Pomfret. He is the author of Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China and writes the blog Pomfret's China on the Newsweek Washington Post website.

The North Koreans have launched what they say is a “communications satellite’ into orbit. America and its allies suspect the state’s “satellite” is in fact a long-range ballistic missile, which North Korea was testing. North Korea and their leader Kim Jong-Il remain defiant in the face of global protest and strong warnings from North Korea's neighbors. After the launch, the U.S. and its allies denounced the move and called an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to . The BBC's John Sudworth and Brian Myers of Dongseo University join The Takeaway to discuss the implications of this launch.


Our partners at the New York Times are reporting that the North Korean Missile Launch Was a Failure, Experts Say.

By now, we’re all aware of the dark side of the world of finance. But there’s another side to finance that starts with a youthful impulse to save the world and evolves into something both savvy and humane. After a funny encounter with a child wearing her cast-off sweater in Rwanda, Jacqueline Novogratz realized how interconnected the world really is. Novogratz has been at the front of a movement that combines social investing and social entrepreneurship in some of the poorest countries in the world. She is founder of The Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm that supports small businesses in developing countries, and author of the book The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.