News stories by Marwaan Macan-Markar, page 7

A diplomatic deadlock between Thailand and Cambodia is ratcheting up already rising tensions between the two Southeast Asian countries, where a fresh round of border clashes between Thai and Cambodian troops has resulted in 12 deaths on both sides since Friday.

A raging insurgency in Thailand’s southernmost provinces has become a breeding ground for another potential killer — the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito — that is threatening to wipe out the gains Thailand has achieved in fighting the disease.

A small army of volunteers from local non-governmental organisations has fanned out across Burma to inoculate 3.4 million children from a rare strain of the polio virus that has re-emerged three years after the country was declared polio free.

Led by countries like Indonesia, 48 developing nations are rolling out a range of pledges to voluntarily cut their respective emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) by 2020, the year climate scientists say the earth’s rising temperature should peak by if an environmental catastrophe is to be avoided.

The World Bank is facing mounting opposition from a broad network of green and grassroots activists over its role in a new global Green Climate Fund (GCF) aimed at helping developing countries combat the ravages of climate change.

With just seven months to go before a pivotal U.N. climate change summit in South Africa, green groups are raising the alarm here about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only international treaty that mandates most industrialised nations to cut their environment polluting greenhouse gases (GHG) to save the planet from overheating.

Death haunts women in this Cambodian village at a moment of happiness - when they give birth.

Cambodia’s rise out of poverty continues to depend on the nimble fingers of young women like Khiev Chren.

Vietnam’s race to build nuclear power plants has barely skipped a beat despite the troubling scenes unfolding in Japan, where a nuclear nightmare has gripped the country for over a week. It places the Southeast Asian nation at odds with its regional neighbours who have similar plans but are urging caution.

The first in a new series of 11 dams planned across the Mekong, South-east Asia’s largest river, could break a special bond between two communist-ruled countries.