News
Center to be set up for Mekong Delta agriculture development
A center to provide guidelines for agricultural production in the Mekong Delta will be established in Can Tho City. The Mekong Delta Agricultural Product Center would act as a hub connecting farmers, producers and traders, Duong Tan Hien, deputy chairman of Can Tho, said at a ...
Nguyen Anh
Mekong News Agency journalist Maung Maung Myo jailed on terrorism charges in Myanmar
Myanmar authorities should immediately and unconditionally release journalist Maung Maung Myo and stop jailing members of the press for reporting the news, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. Around 6 p.m. on May 10, Maung Myo, a contributor to the local Mekong News Agency, was traveling ...
CPJ
US pledges assistance for Vietnam’s climate change adaptation
Receiving visiting Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in Boston on May 14 (local time), Kerry expressed his impression of Vietnam’s COP26 commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025, as well its approach to energy transformation and climate change response. He assured Chinh ...
We need new weapons against packaging waste
Last month, researchers found microplastics — small, microscopic pieces of plastic fragments — within human lungs for the first time. This comes on the heels of news that microplastics were found in human blood, which may travel around the body and enter organs. Microplastics find their ...
SIMON BALDWIN
Myanmar state of affairs worsening, ETI warns businesses
In a position statement, the ETI points to a Commission of Inquiry into the decline of workers’ rights in Myanmar established by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in March, noting such a move is the ILO’s highest-level investigative procedure which is generally set up when a member state ...
Hannah Abdulla
Diplomacy is indispensable to manage the Mekong
Milton Osborne mischaracterises the Mekong River Commission when writing last month in The Interpreter that the regional organisation “ignores reality”. To say we were “celebrating” the health of the river at our Mekong Day event on 5 April overlooks the fact that on that day I continued ...
ANOULAK KITTIKHOUN
Sustainability and security concerns feed Southeast Asia’s rice conundrum
The balance of food sustainability and national security of Southeast Asia hangs on a tiny white grain. Rice is the daily staple of 3.5 billion people globally, providing about one-fifth of their calorie needs. It is the main food crop in Asia, which includes the world’s ...
PAUL TENG
Report: Foreign-funded infrastructure projects need more scrutiny for quality control
As foreign funders drive the construction of major new infrastructure projects in Cambodia, an inconsistent regulatory approach may be opening lanes for shoddy construction. Last month, an inspection by the Ministry of Public Works found irregularities in the builds of National Roads 2 and 22, which ...
Sorn Sarath, Seoung Nimol
Massive stingrays may live in Mekong’s deep pools
US scientists have suggested that unexplored deep pools in the Mekong River in an area of Stung Treng could potentially be home to significant populations of giant freshwater stingrays, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish species. This comes as a fisherman hooked a 180kg stingray ...
Ry Sochan
Thailand taps rice, sugar biomass to wean itself from fossil fuels
Thailand has launched a full-fledged effort to adopt biomass as a major future energy source, a drive that has received a boost from companies looking for relief from skyrocketing fossil fuel prices. Thailand took up the bio-circular-green economic model a year ago as a way to ...
YOHEI MURAMATSU, Nikkei staff writer