The Washington Post
Thailand reports 1st local coronavirus case in 100 days
A prison inmate in Thailand has tested positive for the coronavirus in the country’s first confirmed locally transmitted case in 100 days, health officials said Thursday. They identified the inmate as a 37-year-old man arrested for drug abuse who was brought to prison in Bangkok on ...
Busaba Sivasomboon | AP
How China is choking the Mekong
The former chief of Pak Chim, a tiny village on a tributary of the Mekong River, remembers clearly the moment he knew his hamlet would be no more. It was a decade ago. A few hundred residents of Pak Chim and nearby villages along the snaking ...
Shibani Mahtani
Thai reporter gets jail in libel case filed by poultry farm
A court in Thailand on Tuesday sentenced a reporter to two years in prison for criminal libel for a comment she tweeted about a labor abuse grievance at a poultry farm. The case against Suchanee Cloitre, then working for Voice TV, is one of 20 lawsuits ...
Busaba Sivasomboon and Grant Peck / AP
Mekong River’s new aquamarine color may be sign of trouble
The Mekong River has recently acquired an aquamarine color that may beguile tourists but also indicates a problem caused by upstream dams, experts in Thailand say. The river usually has a yellowish-brown shade due to the sediment it normally carries downstream. But lately it has been ...
Busaba Sivasomboon | AP
Indigenous people are being killed for protecting their land. But we will not be silent
Night had already fallen. A small group of sugar cane farmers and their families were resting in a makeshift tent when gunfire erupted. Dozens of men started shooting at the impromptu camp on the island of Negros in the Philippines, the latest salvo in a ...
The World Bank is rewarding ethnic cleansing in Myanmar
This month, the World Bank published a proposal for a $100 million development project in Rakhine state, the region of western Myanmar that recently saw the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim community. The aim of the project is to fund credit for small businesses in ...
Azeem Ibrahim
Under Vietnam’s new cybersecurity law, U.S. tech giants face stricter censorship
When Vietnam’s government took offense at a game on Google’s app store in which a player could battle characters named after the country’s political figures, the tech behemoth caved. It blocked access to the app in Vietnam, one of Asia’s most promising online markets and ...
Vietnam detains senior official for global rights group
A senior executive for an international human rights group was detained by Vietnamese authorities on Sunday as she arrived in the capital to attend a World Economic Forum meeting and is expected to be deported. Debbie Stothard, secretary general of the International Federation for Human Rights, ...
Rohingya upset UN agreement didn’t address citizenship
Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled attacks in Myanmar said they were disappointed that a U.N. agreement signed earlier this week did not address one of their key demands: Citizenship. Most refugees say they are desperate to go home, but fear going back unless they are given ...
