Nikkei Asian Review

Myanmar is pursuing greater economic cooperation with Russia including on nuclear energy, as U.S. and European sanctions increasingly isolate them from the rest of the world. Myanmar leader Sen. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing on July 11 met with Alexey Likhachev, director general of Russian state energy ...

Thailand has launched a full-fledged effort to adopt biomass as a major future energy source, a drive that has received a boost from companies looking for relief from skyrocketing fossil fuel prices. Thailand took up the bio-circular-green economic model a year ago as a way to ...

Thailand’s government badly wants the middle-income country to achieve advanced economy status. But it will fail unless it raises agricultural productivity and upskills rural workers for jobs in more productive sectors. This will demand hitherto unseen political commitment. For decades, political leaders have paid lip service ...

The rebuke of coal has pushed countries like South Korea and Japan to embrace the harvesting of trees to be processed into wood pellets, but environmentalists are warning that this fuel might prove as damaging as the black mineral it is replacing. Some critics focus on ...

Vietnam is granting Can Tho, on the Mekong Delta, a special status to draw investment amid China’s growing presence in the country and the South China Sea. The National Assembly approved the plan to promote the southern city on Tuesday. With this resolution, Hanoi will grant ...

The dream of a Thai land bridge, a transport route that would cross the Malay Peninsula to connect ports on either side, has surfaced again in Thailand. If it becomes a reality, a land bridge could cut shipping times by about two days, compared with ...

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a mission impossible this week to restore her country’s shaky credibility as a trusted ally. “The reason I am here is because the United States is a global leader, and we take that role seriously,” a straight-faced Harris said on her ...

The Mekong River is Southeast Asia’s beating heart, coursing almost 5,000 km through China, where it is known as the Lancang River, and onward through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia before entering Vietnam and flowing into the sea. More than 70 million people rely on the ...

For expatriates like me, an unexpected upside to life in Bangkok during the COVID-19 outbreak is that it has become significantly easier to hail a taxi. Before the pandemic, drivers would often ignore me or try to rip me off, thinking I was among the millions of ...

China’s water relations with Southeast Asian neighbors are under strain after Beijing held up the Mekong River’s flow at one of its large dams upstream, precipitating a sudden drop in volume for downstream countries that share the region’s longest body of water. “The water levels dropped ...