Top Stories

BANGKOK, Aug 3 (Newsmekong) - Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej’s plans to divert water from rivers across the Thailand and from neighbouring Laos to help feed agricultural production faces stiff opposition from activists, who argue the ambitious projects could threaten the environment and local people’s lives.

VIENTIANE, Mar 31 (Newsmekong) - Cross-border highways were the talk of many at the Mekong Summit that ended here, even as a key link in the North-South corridor linking Kunming to Singapore was opened Monday and Mekong governments pledged to step up regional integration and cooperation over the next five years.

In the collection of views below, young people at the 3^rd Greater Mekong Subregion Summit held in Vientiane, Laos on Mar.30-31, 2008 talk about what they’d like Mekong leaders to do.

PHNOM PENH, Mar 4 (Newsmekong/IPS) – Within seconds after his jealous wife threw acid at him, Soum Bunnarith could hear nothing. He could not see it, but his eyes and his right ear had turned a dark, burnt shade.

   Meantime, the acid continued to crawl down his neck, arms and upper body, Bunnarith recalled of the incident that happened on Dec. 31, 2005. He was just about to leave his home in Sampov Meas district’s Kbal Hong village, Pursat at 7 a.m., when his wife threw a liter bottle of acid at him.

SYDNEY, Oct 3 (IPS Asia-Pacific) – Over the last decade or so, China’s deft use of soft power has seen South-east Asian neighbours’ view of it change from a looming threat to a largely friendly, if still imposing, giant to the north.

   But while that much is clear, what is not is whether China’s ‘kinder’ profile will allow countries downstream of the Mekong River it shares with Laos, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia real opportunities to discuss the fate of this shared resource – and sensitive issues like hydropower construction on it.

SVAY CHRUM, Cambodia – A flurry of bicycles starts from 6 a.m. onwards in Chambak and Kruos communes in this district in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province, on the border with Vietnam. Drivers pedal frantically toward the Tanou border post, named after the stream that separates the two countries.

Cambodia has buried the hatchet with its Vietnamese neighbour, but many scars remain today from centuries of conflict, and the occupation of the Kingdom during the decade that followed the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge by forces of the NUFSK (National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea) and soldiers from Hanoi. Today, the often-silent discrimination against the Vietnamese people has gotten the better of more than one mixed marriage between Cambodians and Vietnamese.