News stories by Marwaan Macan-Markar, page 2

BANGKOK, Sep 10 (IPS) - After decades of grinding poverty under successive military dictatorships, Myanmar’s rice farmers have a chance at a better future through rural reforms ushered in by the country’s quasi-civilian government. Microfinance is at the root of it. 

BANGKOK, Sep 09 (IPS) - As government negotiators from the world’s poorest countries ended a round of United Nations climate change talks in the Thai capital, they sounded a grave note about what appears imminent when they assemble in November in Doha – the reading of the last rites of the Kyoto Protocol.

BANGKOK, Sep 04 (IPS) - When Philippines President Benigno Aquino III delivered his annual state of the union address in July, he appealed to the country’s lawmakers to break a  deadlock on progressive birth control laws in this predominantly Catholic nation.

BANGKOK, Aug 28 (IPS) - Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.

MAE SOT, Thailand, Aug 03 (IPS) - In a country where talk of a ceasefire brings representatives from 11 different armed ethnic groups to the table, Myanmar’s chief peace negotiator, Railway Minister Aung Min, is experimenting with an unusual solution to decades of separatist struggles.

BANGKOK, Jul 31 (IPS) - A year after the Laotian government launched a safe pregnancy programme news of this initiative,  involving the dispatch of teams of midwives across the country, is yet to reach women in the remote  communities.

MAE SOT, Thailand, Jul 17 (IPS) - From a wooden, weather-beaten building on the edge of this border town, Mahn Mahn charts dangerous missions deep Myanmar (also Burma) for the 2,000-odd health workers under his wing.

Reports of sectarian violence in western Myanmar have exposed the plight of 800,000 Muslim Rohingya, a persecuted minority that a regional human rights body described in 2006 as facing a 'slow-burning genocide.'