The Guardian

Sex worker activists are among the most at risk defenders of human rights in the world, facing multiple threats and violent attacks, an extensive investigation has found. The research, published today by human rights organisation Front Line Defenders, found that their visibility as sex workers who are advocates ...

Thailand’s worsening Covid outbreak is placing intense pressure on hospitals, forcing doctors to treat patients in parking lots and turn away people who are severely ill. The country was widely praised for its Covid response last year, when it maintained one of the lowest caseloads in ...

The path to Preak Tachan ranger station, in Botum Sakor national park, Cambodia, snakes through dense, silent forest. It crosses bubbling rivers and clearings where luminous butterflies flit around gargantuan hanging vines and tall wild grasses. It’s The Lost World, Indochina-style. I half expect a ...

When Hla, 19, tried to go back to work seven months ago after having a baby, there were no jobs. Hundreds of garment factories in Myanmar had closed after western fashion brands cancelled orders due to the pandemic, leaving thousands of women jobless. As lockdown gripped Yangon, ...

Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium opens with sound: an outboard motor puttering in the dark. The tea-brown, silt-clouded water of the Mekong appears, gliding beneath the prow of a little boat. Lines from the great poet Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener lap the screen, concluding: “Why did the ...

New sprawling development near Phnom Penh could prompt environmental catastrophe, including for the capital’s water systems. The destruction of critically-important wetlands by politically-connected developers in Cambodia threatens to flood more than one million Phnom Penh residents, ruin the city’s wastewater system, force hundreds of families from ...

Kyaw Thu* waited until night fell before taking his family to the bank of a river not far from their village. While millions across the world were told to remain at home to stay safe from the coronavirus pandemic, he and his neighbours were forced ...

The global toll of dengue fever is becoming well known, with rising temperatures contributing to severe outbreaks that made 2019 the worst year on record for the disease. In 1970 only nine countries faced severe dengue outbreaks. But the disease, which is spread by mosquitoes that ...

Tbong sits in the shade of a makeshift stilt hut over the edge of Tonlé Sap lake, surrounded by curious children. “Snake, catfish, elephant fish ” he says, his eyes crinkled against the sun. “Before, a long time ago the lake had a lot of ...

Myanmar troops and rescue services have scrambled to provide aid in flood-hit parts of the country after rising waters caused by the annual monsoon rains forced residents to flee by boat and a landslide killed at least 52 people. The deluge has tested disaster response after the ...