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When Thai Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul met with Pfizer company representatives in Bangkok in late 2020, the businessman-cum-politician declined to place a Covid-19 vaccine order because in his words the shot was not yet proven effective on “yellow-skinned people”, according to government sources familiar ...

In May, Campaign for Nature announced that Southeast Asian nations were showing growing support for the goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. Dr Zakri Abdul Hamid is ambassador for the campaign, which is a partnership between the Wyss Campaign for ...

More than a month has passed since the Cambodia branch of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it would be ending its assistance to Cambodian government entities through the USAID Greening Prey Lang project and the future of the 431,683-hectare wildlife sanctuary ...

The Open Development Initiative (ODI) first began working with our constituents on data literacy in 2019, with a 3-month data literacy programme for journalists in Myanmar. Since then we have localized our Data Literacy Curriculum, adapted from the World Bank Certificate Program, to meet the ...

Some of the world’s biggest financial institutions are working on a plan to speed the closure of coal-fired power plants in Asia, the BBC has been told. The initiative was developed by UK insurer Prudential, is being driven by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and includes ...

Rice traders’ inactivity, perfunctory function of processing plants and businesses’ reluctance to export the grain threaten to break the supply chain in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s rice bowl. Tran Van Nam of Thoi Lai District, Can Tho City, said he has harvested some 20 tons of ...

A long-running territorial standoff over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea has seen vessels dumping enough raw sewage to threaten the marine ecosystem there — and the degradation is extensive enough to be seen from space. On July 12, U.S.-based geospatial tech company Simularity ...

For several years, US politicians have adopted the Japanese slogan of a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” calling for international law to apply over disputes in the South China Sea, where China is accused of acting aggressively. Earlier this month, during the East Asia Summit foreign ministers’ ...

Authorities in Myanmar currently have no plan to include minority Rohingya Muslims living in densely-packed camps as they begin vaccinating priority groups against COVID-19 in western Rakhine State, the junta-appointed local administrator said. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh during military operations in 2017 ...

Authorities in Vietnam have arrested a Facebook user for posting mild criticism of government COVID-19 policies, while a university fired a lecturer after a student shared on her comments faulting Hanoi’s pandemic response on the social media platform. The Tien Giang People’s Procuracy announced Tuesday that ...