Disasters and emergency response
2020 review: 10 resilience defining stories in Vietnam
2020 has been defined mostly by the dogged resilience of the Vietnamese people in confronting unforgettable disasters, positively heightening the nation’s international profile. United front against Covid-19 Perseverance as severe drought parches Mekong Delta The 37th ASEAN Summit – an online triumph Together in grief as disasters devastate central ...
Phan Anh, Dat Nguyen
Anti-Myanmar hate speech flares in Thailand over virus
“Wherever you see Myanmar people, shoot them down,” read one Thai comment on YouTube after a surge of coronavirus cases among workers from Myanmar. The outbreak, first detected at a seafood market near Bangkok, has prompted a flare-up in such online hate speech as well as ...
Reporting by Shoon Naing in Yangon; Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Sam Holmes
A New Surge of COVID-19 Infections is an Undesirable "New Outbreak": PM Prayut
The Public Health Ministry has conceded a new round of widespread Covid-19 outbreaks has occurred in the country now as Bangkok has come up with proactive measures against the possible widespread outbreak in the city PM Prayut Chan-o-cha has posted on his official Facebook Page this ...
B.Tribune
Myanmar’s Jade Center Suspends Most Mining Amid Coronavirus Spike
The Myanmar government has suspended large-scale jade-mining activities in Kachin state, home to the world’s largest jade mine and a magnet for poor scavengers, until early next year in the face of surging coronavirus infections, the state’s natural resources minister said. Large-scale mining in Hpakant township, ...
Elizabeth Jangma for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Cambodian education in the time of Covid: Ripping up the textbook
Open, close, open, close – not the instructions for a particularly fiddly front door, rather it is the pattern that schools in Cambodia have followed as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic continues to throw the system into limbo, forcing educators to rip up the textbook and adapt ...
ALEXI DEMETRIADI
China Building Massive Myanmar Border Wall: Reports
Reports have emerged that the Chinese government is constructive a 2,000-kilometer reinforced fence along its coiling border with Myanmar, following a spike in COVID-19 cases in the latter country. According to a report in Radio Free Asia (RFA), the giant undertaking has been codenamed the “Southern Great Wall” ...
Sebastian Strangio
How have Thailand and Cambodia kept Covid cases so low?
When the coronavirus first began to spread rapidly in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Thailand appeared especially vulnerable. It was the first country outside China to report a case of Covid-19, when, on 13 January, a 61-year-old woman from Wuhan was confirmed to have tested positive in ...
Rebecca Ratcliffe
Natural disasters cause people to flee Mekong Delta
The fear of natural disasters has caused more than 1.3 million people living in the Mekong Delta to migrate to HCMC and elsewhere. The figure was published on Monday in the first annual Mekong Delta Economic Report coordinated by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry ...
Cuu Long
Myanmar COVID-19 Vaccination Expected from April
Myanmar plans to start providing COVID-19 vaccines to about 20 percent of its 54.4 million population in April under the global Covax affordable medicines program, according to health minister Dr. Myint Htwe. Myanmar on Dec. 7 submitted its request to the Covax program at the World ...
NYEIN NYEIN
Laos Presses Ahead with 4 More Mekong Dams Amid Drought
Laos is pushing ahead with four dams across the mainstream of the Mekong River, despite an escalating chorus of objections and crippling debt to Chinese state banks which resulted in the loss of control over its electricity grid to China. For almost two decades scientists and ...
Luke Hunt