News

Since it entered into force in early 2022, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has helped strongly promote integration of value and supply chains, strengthen confidence in regional economic recovery and create new impetus for trade and investment growth in the region and the world, ...

In southeast Asian region, Chinese human trafficking syndicates operate in nexus with local authorities in countries for luring away hundreds of people on the pretext of providing them decent jobs but are forced to work in the illegal cryptocurrency business, brothels, and massage parlours, Mekong ...

Following three years of pandemic restrictions, Thailand’s eastern seaboard gateway—U-Tapao airport—has returned to the spotlight after deputy government spokesperson Tipanan Sirichana recently said expansion plans would commence in early 2023. Earmarked as an “Aviation City” in 2017, the $8.8 billion mega airport project will occur ...

“If the Mekong were a human, she would be half-dead, because everything has completely changed,” said Niwat Roykaew, a Goldman Environmental Prize recipient who has been leading the movement for river conservation for over 20 years. “This is big. The change of water level, the disappearance of sediments and the increasing level ...

There are only 80 Irrawaddy dolphins left in a loosely-patrolled stretch of the Mekong River in central Cambodia. Hydropower dams are shrinking freshwater pools in their main habitat, leading to more contact with fishermen who threaten their survival. Three dolphins died in December, accounting for about 5% of their ...

Three financial institutions in Japan, the United States and Australia have announced that they will support Vietnam’s decarbonization effort. The institutions, backed by the governments of the countries mentioned above, would help Vietnam transition into liquefied natural gas plants and step up renewable energy utilization and ...

Myanmar’s junta has been responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity since the military coup in February 2021, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2023. The security forces have been implicated in mass killings, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, sexual violence, and attacks on civilians in ...

A fear-cloaked dynamic has increasingly percolated Vietnam’s information environment, in both cyberspace and the mainstream media. A decree guiding the controversial Cybersecurity Law, which took effect in October 2022, looks to further empower Vietnamese authorities to censor online content they disfavour and bolster the state’s digital surveillance ...

On 30 December, Lao Prime Minster Phankham Viphavanh (72) resigned ostensibly on health grounds, but amidst an economy in sharp decline and saddled in foreign debt. He is succeeded by the scion of one of the country’s two political dynasties, Deputy Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone (56). Politics in ...

The Mekong River, the longest waterway in Southeast Asia, is often called the world’s most productive river because it holds a greater abundance of freshwater fish than any other river basin on the planet. From an ecological standpoint, there is one stretch of the river, in ...