A huge fire swept through a crowded Thai border camp home to thousands of refugees from neighboring Myanmar on Thursday, destroying hundreds of homes, the authorities said.

The blaze started at about midday (0500 GMT) and quickly spread around the Umpiem Mai refugee camp, said Poth Ruwaranan, head of Phop Phra district in western Tak province.

International funding cuts threaten to deepen an HIV crisis in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of people are denied lifesaving treatment, an aid agency said Wednesday.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said only a third of the 120,000 people in need of antiretroviral drugs in Myanmar were receiving the therapy, with up to 20,000 people dying each year due to a lack of treatment.

Myanmar has released more than 300 people deemed by the opposition to be political prisoners, a minister said Saturday, after the West hailed the move as a substantial sign of reform.

Home Affairs Minister Lieutenant General Ko Ko insisted however that none of them had been jailed for political reasons, saying: "We didn't take action against anyone because of politics or beliefs."

A fire followed by several explosions engulfed many state warehouses and neighboring homes, killing at least 17 people and injuring 108 in Myanmar's main city of Yangon on Thursday.

The blasts occurred as firefighters were putting out the fire that had started in a state-owned warehouse before spreading to other warehouses and nearby homes and buildings before dawn.

Scientists identify a new species every two days in the Greater Mekong region, the WWF said Monday, in a report detailing 2010's more unusual finds such as a leaf warbler and a self-cloning lizard.

But the conservation group warned some species could disappear before they are ever recorded because of man-made pressures in the Southeast Asian area, described in the report as "one of the last frontiers" for new discoveries.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, two of the world's most recognizable women leaders, pledged on Friday to work together to bring democracy to Suu Kyi's long isolated and repressive nation.

Wrapping up a historic three-day visit to Myanmar, Clinton held hands with Suu Kyi on the porch of the Nobel peace laureate's lakeside home where she spent much of the past two decades under house arrest and thanked her for a her "steadfast and very clear leadership." The meeting was the second in as many days for the pair who appeared to have bonded almost as sisters after a private, one-on-one dinner in Yangon on Thursday.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won promises of further reforms from Myanmar's rulers in historic talks Thursday, but said it was too soon to end sanctions after decades of repression.

Paying the most senior U.S. visit in more than half a century to a nation long distrustful of the West, Clinton offered only cautious incentives to encourage more action, despite a call by China for Western sanctions to be lifted.

U.S. President Barack Obama held previously unannounced talks with China's Premier Wen Jiabao Saturday, after a week of sharp exchanges between the two nations during Obama's Pacific tour.

Obama and Wen met on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, following public spats over currency, trade and a territorial dispute in the South China Sea.

Myanmar has released about 20,000 prisoners this year under an amnesty program, the country's foreign minister said on Tuesday.

"Approximately 20,000 inmates from prisons and labor camps were released until the end of July 2011" under a amnesty order issued by President Thein Sein in May, Wunna Maung Lwin told the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Seven people died when an old World War II bomb exploded in western Myanmar, officials said Thursday.

"They were killed accidentally in the blast while trying to remove a bomb that appeared at the sea shore near their village. They seemed to have no idea what it was," said a government official who asked not to be named.