People and government

The UN World Food Programme will extend its current Myanmar operations into the end of 2017, despite a funding shortfall of US$40 million. The announcement comes as the organisation continues its early recovery missions in areas affected by the monsoon floods in August, as well as internally ...

The ire of MPs over the 11.95 percent supplementary budget request from the outgoing government was directed on 3 December toward the Central Bank. While its request for K59.059 billion represents just 2.3 percent of the K2.464 trillion budget proposal, MPs said it was a prime example ...

China has signed rice and rubber purchase deals with Thailand as part of the Thai-Sino railway development agreement. Negotiations over the railway are continuing. The deals were signed at the ninth meeting of the Joint Committee on Railway Cooperation in Bangkok on 3 December. Keep reading ...

The government has agreed to delay the passage of a controversial law governing the trade union sector, announcing it would set up a national workshop to work out the legislation’s thornier clauses on 15 December. The decision comes after repeated protestations from a coalition of 23 ...

Strengthening links between government and people, the Myanmar People’s Forum will meet at Yangon’s International Business Centre from 15-16 December, executive director U Kyaw Lin Oo has announced. The forum brings together MPs, representatives of government and local civil society to get people’s voices heard. Keep reading ...

Bangladesh and Myanmar remain at odds over 28 people who were among more than 900 rescued at sea in May, after being abandoned by human traffickers. Following the repatriation of 48 Bangladeshi nationals on 2 December, the Bangladesh embassy in Yangon said in a statement that ...

More than 110,000 students are studying in 47 countries around the world, spending an estimated $3 billion a year, local media reported.   The figures were released by an education and training working group of the Vietnam Business Forum at its year-end session in Hanoi on 1 ...

Fish buyers never know that fish may have been caught illegally, from lakes heavily contaminated by extremely dangerous chemicals.    Bien Hoa airbase, which is around 30 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City, is one of the sites with the severest and longest lasting dioxin pollution in the ...

A civic group on 3 December petitioned Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha to exercise his special power and cancel the Cabinet’s resolution approving the payment of Bt9.6 billion in compensation to the constructor of the corruption-plagued Klong Dan wastewater-treatment project. Keep reading ...

A Polish citizen of Lao heritage jailed in Laos for criticizing the government online will not be among hundreds of prisoners granted pardons by the end of the year because he “does not meet the proper criteria,” according to a public security official. Lao authorities arrested ...