News

More than 20 years ago, when two Chiang Rai-based environmentalists, Niwat Roikaew and Somkiat Kuenwongsa, learned that the Chinese government were blasting rapids in the upper Mekong River from Yunnan to Myanmar and Laos to clear the way for large commercial vessels, they started worrying. Back ...

To accelerate the country’s national digital transformation programme, the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) organised the Vietnam Open Summit, last week. The summit gathered 200 participants, including senior officials of ministries and agencies, as well as IT experts from large high-tech corporations. MIC Minister Nguyen ...

Only 50% of households in Myanmar, one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia, are connected to the public grid. Five years ago, the government set a goal of electrifying 100% of the country by 2030. With that in mind, in June, Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, together ...

The government threatened on Tuesday not to buy electricity from Sanakham dam in Laos after it learned the project might affect the Mekong River. “The country’s territory is our paramount concern,” Somkiat Prajamwong, secretary-general to the Office of National Water Resources, said on Tuesday after a seminar ...

 Thai police unnecessarily used water cannons and teargas against peaceful democracy demonstrators outside the parliament in Bangkok on November 17, 2020, in violation of international human rights standards, Human Rights Watch said today. At about 2:25 p.m., police attempted to prevent a demonstration organized by the People’s ...

Leaders of the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho and the EU Delegation to Vietnam on November 23 shared a hope for multilateral cooperation in climate change response. At a reception for the EU Delegation, Tran Viet Truong, Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee, said Can ...

For decades, NASA has used the vantage point of space, combined with airborne and ground-based field campaigns, to decipher the impact of air pollution and help other agencies protect people when unhealthy air threatens the places they live, work, and play. Now, government agencies in Thailand are harnessing the power ...

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the EU Delegation and the National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute (NAFRI) last week launched a new project to boost food security and nutrition. The project on Developing Capacities in Agriculture Innovation Systems of Scaling up ...

Wearing a plastic face shield and his orange monastic robes, Ashin Wirathu walked into a Yangon police station on November 2 after more than a year on the run. Until he went into hiding in June of last year, Wirathu, a nationalist preacher with links ...

The United States has announced new funding of $25 million over five years to feed children in schools across the Lao PDR.  The U.S. program, funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program project, will be implemented by ...