News

Wearing a plastic face shield and his orange monastic robes, Ashin Wirathu walked into a Yangon police station on November 2 after more than a year on the run. Until he went into hiding in June of last year, Wirathu, a nationalist preacher with links ...

The United States has announced new funding of $25 million over five years to feed children in schools across the Lao PDR.  The U.S. program, funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program project, will be implemented by ...

Vietnam is forecast to face a severe gender imbalance by 2026, with an excess of 1.38 million males, according to the General Statistics Office. Speaking at a recent workshop involving nearly 200 women and collaborators in population affairs in the Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh, Dr Mai Xuan ...

Drought, rains, inundation and landslides have cost the Mekong Delta province of Ca Mau an estimated over 1 trillion VND (43 million USD) from the outset of the year, according to the provincial steering committee on natural disaster prevention, search and rescue. More than 20,800 households faced a ...

Myanmar, a Southeastern Asian country roughly the size of Texas, houses almost 54 million people. In 2005, almost half of Myanmar’s population lived in poverty. However, a report released by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO) determined that Myanmar successfully increased its GDP and cut poverty to 24.8% ...

Vietnam has threatened to shut down Facebook in the country if it does not bow to government pressure to censor more local political content on its platform, a senior official at the US social media giant told Reuters Facebook complied with a government request in April ...

Asia Pacific leaders set aside differences Friday with their first joint communique in three years, calling for free and predictable trade to help a global economy laid low by the coronavirus pandemic. Leaders of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which included U.S. President Donald Trump ...

Hundreds of people gathered in front of the Koh Kong Provincial Court on November 18 to await the sentencing of their three community land representatives who were accused of defamation related to a land dispute. Provincial court prosecutor Un Sovantheany identified the three activists as Phao ...

Vietnam’s National Assembly Tuesday amended the country’s environmental protection law to give communities a bigger role in conservation and impose responsibilities on corporations, but critics say monitoring mechanisms in the country are not adequate to enforce it. Lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the Revised Law on Environmental Protection, ...

The Vietnamese Government has committed to joining hands with governments in the region and the world to reduce biodiversity loss by 2030 for sustainable development. Deputy head of the Vietnam Environment Administration’s Biodiversity Conservation Agency and head of Vietnam’s ASEAN working group on biodiversity preservation, Hoang ...