News stories by Marwaan Macan-Markar, page 21

A new financial mechanism to help the developing world deal with the challenges posed by climate change looms as a major hurdle on the road leading up to a United Nations summit in Copenhagen in mid-December.

As the countdown continues towards a United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen in December, a seemingly intractable tussle between negotiators from the developing and developed world has begun to take shape over international commitments to slash greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions.

Shorbanu Khatun flew into the Thai capital to share her pain about being a victim of a natural disaster. In May, Cyclone Aila tore through her community along the coast of Bangladesh, adding another layer of misery to the 36-year- old’s already impoverished life.

With an insurgency threatening to worsen, Thailand’s military is turning to civilians like Nipa Waya to return fire in the three southern provinces close to the Malaysian border.

In landlocked Laos, pregnancy brings with it the spectre of death. South-east Asia’s poorest country has recorded over 700 women dying every year due to complications during childbirth.

A year after Thailand’s last coup d’état, in September 2006, a village that straddles the northern boarder of this provincial city took on a new name. It began to call itself Baan Samaki Phattana, which translates to Unity Development Village.

Conservationists are raising the alarm about the fate of an animal in South-east Asia’s growing list of endangered wildlife, even though the animal in need of saving was only discovered in a remote mountainous corner of Laos in 1992.

The race to mass-produce vaccines for the lethal H1N1 virus has attracted contenders from Asia’s developing countries, confirming a noticeable expansion of a field that has been dominated by flu vaccine production centres in Europe and North America.

If military-ruled Burma needed a stark symbol of China’s growing dominance in the country, then it would be poised to get one soon. The Asian giant is about to start building two pipelines — for gas and oil — that will span the breadth of the South-east Asian nation.

For the past decade, it was demand for Asian exports from the developed world that helped this region march ahead towards meeting internationally set development targets — such as slashing the numbers living in poverty.