Social development

For the first time in four years the annual Mekong River Festival and multi-sport gala, a celebratory event to pay tribute to Asia’s seventh longest river, is to be held within easy distance of Phnom Penh. Running from March 9-11, the fourth edition of the ...

A Vietnamese national has won the top prize of a photo contest organized by the Asian Development Bank to showcase the development progress in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Anh Dung Kieu bagged the US$500 prize for his photo depicting early morning trading at a ...

Across the globe, democracy, freedoms and the rule of law are collapsing. Our planet is suffering from increasing uncontrolled migration due to resource extraction limits and global climate change which is compounding rising authoritarianism and xenophobia in countries like Myanmar. Thailand, a key middle power in ...

Thailand on February 4 dismissed the end-of-mission statement by United Nations Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee on refugees’ basic rights in the kingdom, saying that her message was untrue and unfair. Keep reading ...

As civil society groups campaign for greater inclusion of women in the peace process, Frontier profiles women playing important roles in communities across the country. Keep reading ...

A new study in the Lancet Infectious Diseasesindicates that resistance to the first-line treatment for malaria in Southeast Asia began to emerge several years before it was first detected and is linked to an aggressive strain that has spread rapidly across the region. Experts say the ...

Tuberculosis (TB), an infectious disease affecting the lungs and causing fever, hemoptysis, night sweats, and weight loss, has ravaged Southeast Asia for decades. According to the World Health Organization, the region contains one third of the world’s TB cases. TB has threatened Vietnam, where HIV ...

In December 2017, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its latest report on opium production in Myanmar and, at face value, the news was good. Since 2015, the area of cultivated opium poppy in Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin states has decreased ...

Thai Security forces seized 11.1 million methamphetamine tablets and arrested a Lao national at a Mekong River pier in Tha Uthen district of Nakhon Phanom province Monday night. Acting on a tip-off that a huge drug haul was to be smuggled across the Mekong River ...

A new study of drug resistance in the parasite responsible for roughly half of all malaria cases worldwide has identified more than 80 genes that contribute to resistance, some of which could provide important information for drug development, researchers say.[]In recent years, however, a strain ...