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GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — Hundreds of thousands of people are being coerced in Southeast Asia by criminal gangs into carrying out online scams, often under the threat of torture, the United Nations said Tuesday. Many have been trafficked into working in online criminality and face serious violations such ...

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 ...

The killing of a prominent indigenous expert and a British journalist in Brazil is yet another safety issue for environmental and land activists around the world. Bruno Pereira, former head of Brazil’s indigenous organization Funai, and British journalist Dom Phillips were previously declared missing while reporting ...

Abortion is a global health issue, impacting individuals and families regardless of ethnicity, income, social status or nationality. Yet there is no worldwide legal standard for the practice of terminating a pregnancy. Lawmakers and governments hold sway over access to abortion, or its abolition. In the ...

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 ...

Southeast Asia was once largely covered in dense rainforests, but intense forest clearing over the past decades has denuded much of the tropical region of its forest cover. On the island of Borneo, for instance, 5.9 million hectares of trees were lost between 2004 and 2017 to logging, ...

Developing Asia’s economy will rebound faster this year than previously estimated, as nations tread diverging recovery paths, according to the Asian Development Bank. Southeast Asia’s forecast was lowered to 4.4% growth this year amid reduced projections for Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The region’s gross domestic product ...

As Myanmar’s dark era of junta rule began winding down in 2011 with the bold reforms initiated by the quiet ex-general, President Thein Sein, other events happening across Southeast Asia gave reformists hope this was not an isolated instance of democratic progress.   That year, Yingluck Shinawatra ...

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 ...

A study by J Poore and T Nemecek titled, ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,’ published by the University of Oxford revealed that food production is responsible for 26 percent of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing to global warming. The study showed ...