News stories by Marwaan Macan-Markar, page 9

A steady rise of new dams in Cambodia is becoming a platform for the country’s prime minister to showcase where the Southeast Asian kingdom’s ties with China - a late arrival among Cambodia’s foreign aid and development partners - is headed.

In response to growing labour costs, China is increasingly turning to its neighbours to supply what it once produced locally - raw materials and intermediate goods, such as machine components and parts - to retain its international reputation as the ‘factory to the world’.

As military-ruled Burma prepares to unveil its new political cast, an enduring link between the junta and the country’s notorious drug lords is poised to come under the spotlight.

Thanks to a healthy cocktail of foreign aid and a pragmatic condom policy, one of South-east Asia’s poorest countries is well on course to meeting an international target aimed at reversing the spread of HIV and AIDS.

When he is not designing another house for this city’s sprawling urbanscape, a Thai architect in his mid-forties worries about another run-in with this kingdom’s cyber police.

An ongoing clash along the Thai-Burma border, pitting Burmese troops against ethnic insurgents, is raising the spectre of more violence in areas that the Burmese military sees as the final frontier to putting the country under the grip of one army for the first time in over six decades.

As the World Bank returns to the big dam business with the inauguration of Laos’ largest hydropower project, it is coming under the scrutiny of familiar adversaries: green groups and grassroots activists.

Barely a week after a ranking United Nations official visited military-ruled Burma, the country’s strongman has sharply reminded the global body about the challenges that await any envoy who refuses to march in step with the junta.

All eyes are on Indonesia and its forest policy as climate- change negotiations continue in the upcoming global talks in Mexico, against the prospect of billions of dollars flowing from the planet’s major polluters to the developing world to slow global warming.

A dilapidated colonial villa on the banks of the Inya Lake in Rangoon, Burma’s largest city, has regained its identity as a home — instead of a prison — following the Saturday release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the icon of the military-ruled country’s democracy movement.