Disasters and emergency response
Mekong river at lowest level this year
The water level in the Mekong river has dropped quickly and was only about 1.90 metres deep in this northeastern border province on Monday, the lowest this year. The lack of water is being blamed on the many dams upstream in China, and this year’s poor ...
PATTANAPONG SRIPIACHAI
Myanmar Migrant Worker Says His Seafood Market Boss Started Chain of COVID-19 Infections
A Myanmar migrant worker in Thailand who became infected with the coronavirus said Wednesday that he contracted the illness from his Thai employer in a huge seafood market compound in coastal Samut Sakhon province near the capital Bangkok. On Monday, Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and ...
Nayrein Kyaw for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Analysis: How Vietnam came to embrace a new vision of the Mekong Delta’s future
On any list of places menaced by climate change, Vietnam’s broad and fertile Mekong Delta ranks near the top. And yet, as I wrote for Mongabay four years ago, rising seas and changing weather patterns are not the only threats to the delta’s fabled fecundity. A spasm of ...
David Brown
Finding community at a COVID-19 quarantine centre in Myanmar
In another world, I could have been checking into a hotel. Only instead of staff, two fellow COVID-19 patients welcomed me at the door, with a plastic box filled with toiletries, snacks and masks, and showed me to a small room I would share with another ...
Reuters
2020 review: 10 resilience defining stories in Vietnam
2020 has been defined mostly by the dogged resilience of the Vietnamese people in confronting unforgettable disasters, positively heightening the nation’s international profile. United front against Covid-19 Perseverance as severe drought parches Mekong Delta The 37th ASEAN Summit – an online triumph Together in grief as disasters devastate central ...
Phan Anh, Dat Nguyen
Anti-Myanmar hate speech flares in Thailand over virus
“Wherever you see Myanmar people, shoot them down,” read one Thai comment on YouTube after a surge of coronavirus cases among workers from Myanmar. The outbreak, first detected at a seafood market near Bangkok, has prompted a flare-up in such online hate speech as well as ...
Reporting by Shoon Naing in Yangon; Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Sam Holmes
A New Surge of COVID-19 Infections is an Undesirable "New Outbreak": PM Prayut
The Public Health Ministry has conceded a new round of widespread Covid-19 outbreaks has occurred in the country now as Bangkok has come up with proactive measures against the possible widespread outbreak in the city PM Prayut Chan-o-cha has posted on his official Facebook Page this ...
B.Tribune
Myanmar’s Jade Center Suspends Most Mining Amid Coronavirus Spike
The Myanmar government has suspended large-scale jade-mining activities in Kachin state, home to the world’s largest jade mine and a magnet for poor scavengers, until early next year in the face of surging coronavirus infections, the state’s natural resources minister said. Large-scale mining in Hpakant township, ...
Elizabeth Jangma for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Cambodian education in the time of Covid: Ripping up the textbook
Open, close, open, close – not the instructions for a particularly fiddly front door, rather it is the pattern that schools in Cambodia have followed as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic continues to throw the system into limbo, forcing educators to rip up the textbook and adapt ...
ALEXI DEMETRIADI
China Building Massive Myanmar Border Wall: Reports
Reports have emerged that the Chinese government is constructive a 2,000-kilometer reinforced fence along its coiling border with Myanmar, following a spike in COVID-19 cases in the latter country. According to a report in Radio Free Asia (RFA), the giant undertaking has been codenamed the “Southern Great Wall” ...
Sebastian Strangio