New York Times

Inside the Campaign to Save an Imperiled Cambodian Rainforest

We were seated near a lush river in the Southern Cardamom Mountains, huddled over a lunch of chicken and rice, when the tip came in via text message: Someone had passed along the location of a poaching camp. Within minutes, the entire group — including Darian ...

Francesco Lastrucci

Genocide Designation for Myanmar Tests Biden’s Human Rights Policy

Three years ago, American investigators produced a 15,000-page analysis of atrocities committed in 2017 against the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority group in Myanmar. The report documented survivors’ accounts of gang rapes, crucifixions, mutilations, of children being burned or drowned and of families locked inside their blazing ...

Lara Jakes

Covid Infections, and Blame, Rise Along Southeast Asian Borders

The border between Thailand and Myanmar is more than 1,500 miles long, much of it thickly forested. Myanmar has suffered runaway transmission of the coronavirus. Thailand, so far, has not. But over the past couple of weeks, at least 19 Covid-19 cases in Thailand have been ...

Hannah Beech

China Limited the Mekong’s Flow. Other Countries Suffered a Drought

As China was stricken by the coronavirus in late February, its foreign minister addressed a concerned crowd in Laos, where farmers and fishers across the Mekong River region were contending with the worst drought in living memory. His message: We feel your pain. The foreign minister, Wang Yi, ...

Hannah Beech

Damming the Lower Mekong, Devastating the Ways and Means of Life

The water is so clear on the Mekong River in northeastern Thailand that the sunlight pierces through to the riverbed, transforming the waterway into a glinting, empty aquarium. It is beautiful but it means death. At this time of year in Thailand, this stretch of the ...

Hannah Beech

The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs

Crouched on the ground in a dimly lit factory, the women picked through the discarded innards of the modern world: batteries, circuit boards and bundles of wires. They broke down the scrap — known as e-waste — with hammers and raw hands. Men, some with faces ...

Hannah Beech and Ryn Jirenuwat

‘Our River Was Like a God’: How Dams and China’s Might Imperil the Mekong

ON THE MEKONG RIVER — When the Chinese came to the village of Lat Thahae, perched on a muddy bend of a Mekong River tributary, they scrawled a Chinese character on the walls of homes, schools and Buddhist temples. No one in this isolated hamlet in ...

Hannah Beech

At a Cambodian Lake, a Climate Crisis Unfolds

When I first met Ly Heng in May 2016, the forest behind his house was still smoldering — the remnants of the worst drought to hit Southeast Asia in decades. Heng lived along a small river at the top of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, in a protected ...

Abby Seiff

Capital of Laos Seeks Stronger Ties to China

Two decades ago, this sleepy city on the Mekong River was just starting to pave its streets. [] In recent years, Chinese investment in resource-rich Laos has strengthened the country’s economy, which is projected to grow by 7 percent this year.  Keep reading ...

Can Facebook, or Anybody, Solve the Internet’s Misinformation Problem?

In the new age of the industrialization 4.0 the big information technology groups are taking proactive actions to remove detected coordinated propaganda campaigns, however is it enough?  Reading ...

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