Monsoon storms in Bangladesh and India have killed at least 59 people and unleashed devastating floods that left millions of others stranded, officials said Saturday.Floods are a regular menace to millions of people in low-lying Bangladesh, but experts say climate change is increasing their frequency, ferocity and unpredictability.Relentless downpours over the past week have inundated vast stretches of Bangladesh's northeast, with troops deployed to evacuate households cut off from neigh

A boat carrying more than 100 Rohingya refugees, including dozens of children, landed on the coast of Indonesia's westernmost province Aceh early Sunday, police said.The vessel, which sailed from a Rohingya camp in Bangladesh, arrived shortly after 3:00 am on a beach in Bireun district.It was carrying 114 people, including 58 men, 21 women and 35 children aged under 15 years old, police said."We will conduct a general health check-up and COVID-19 rapid antigen tests for these foreig

India may now be past the peak of its latest coronavirus surge, but some other countries in Asia are experiencing rising infections.Meanwhile, vaccination rates across the region remain (with some exceptions) generally low, amidst concerns that the Delta variant is spreading.Where Has Happened To Case Numbers?The World Health Organization (WHO) recently deemed the Delta variant, which originated in India, the "most transmissible of the variants identified so far".

The United Nations (UN) on Tuesday appealed for US$943 million to cope with the Rohingya humanitarian crisis, fearing that a COVID outbreak in South Asia could reach refugee camps before vaccines do. The agency said the funds were needed urgently this year for nearly one million refugees from the Muslim minority who fled to Bangladesh from neighbouring Myanmar after a deadly crackdown in 2017.Most are crowded into squalid refugee camps, and the pandemic has rendered them even more vu

As India battles a major coronavirus wave, there's concern about rising infection levels in neighbouring countries.Travel and other restrictions have been introduced amid fears that poorly resourced local health services will be unable to cope.What's Happened To Case Numbers?In India, daily case numbers and deaths began rising in March and then surged dramatically.

Five people are feared dead and at least 20,000 Rohingya have fled a huge blaze engulfing shanty homes at refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, officials said Monday, in the third fire to hit the settlements in four days.Nearly one million of the Muslim minority from Myanmar - many of whom fled a military crackdown in their homeland in 2017 - live in cramped and squalid conditions at the camps in the Cox's Bazar district.Officials said the fire apparently started in one of the 34 cam

Even after Asia’s economies climb out of the COVID-19 recession, China’s strategy of frenetically building dams and reservoirs on transnational rivers will confront them with a more permanent barrier to long-term economic prosperity: water scarcity.

It is already apparent that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be uneven, with poorer countries bearing the brunt of the fallout. This includes the 1.2 million children in Bangladesh who are engaged in the harshest forms of child labour. In such uncertain times, these children – and millions of others elsewhere – are even more vulnerable to exploitative and hazardous work. The reason is simple.

Last year, a child died of pneumonia every 39 seconds, on average. A form of acute respiratory infection, pneumonia is detectable, treatable, and preventable. Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) – which protect against the bacteria that cause pneumonia and meningitis (a life-threatening brain infection) – have existed since 2000.

When hundreds of Rohingya refugees paid traffickers to escape their squalid camp in Bangladesh, they were promised a new life in Malaysia after just one week at sea.Instead, the group of mostly women and children suffered more than 200 days of terror on the high seas, until they landed this week on Indonesia's northern coast, where they are now back in refugee tents.Beaten by the traffickers, they battled hunger and thirst as storms lashed their wooden vessel, and watched in horror as th