Nok (not her real name) is from Thailand and works in a hotel in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the hotel laying off a number of its staff. Nok was spared being laid off, but she has to go on unpaid leave until December 2020; with a provision that if she can resume work earlier then her new pay would be 25 percent lower than before.

Saturday, 8 February, will be a date that Thais will not soon forget. It was the day an armed gunman entered the Terminal 21 shopping mall in Nakhon Ratchasima (popularly known as Korat), and began indiscriminately firing at innocent shoppers, taking the lives of 29 people before he himself was later gunned down as he hid in the seven-storey shopping mall.

Earlier this week, Thailand’s Transport Ministry revealed that only two days after Thais began their New Year holiday on 27 December, there had already been 974 road accidents. This is just another story highlighting country’s deadly roads.The 974 road accidents led to 109 deaths and 993 injured.

Singapore is cheap. This is something you will not hear from many tourists who go to visit the popular island state. As such, the fact that Singapore has one of the most affordable food prices in the world may be a little hard to “swallow” at first.Nevertheless, this is exactly what the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) revealed in its recent Global Food Security Index published on 9 December.

The University of Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC) recently revealed that the slowing economy has triggered a surge in household debt of 7.4 percent this year.

Women’s hair is her crowning glory – even when the hair is not her own. Hair extensions have become an essential segment in the multi-billion-dollar hair industry, with an estimated annual sales range from US$250 million to over US$1 billion.

Researchers Abbey Pangilinan, Maria Carmen Fernandez and Nastassja Quijano recently released a report which attempts to bring fresh evidence of how hundreds of families have been plunged deeper into poverty amid the Philippines’ war on drugs, birthed by the country’s President Rodrigo Duterte around three years ago.The study is focused on the beneficiaries of the Philippine conditional cash transfer programme – a monthly subsidy targeted at poor households with the aim of breaking intergenera

Last Monday, civic networks in Thailand gathered to mark World Habitat Day 2019 and called on the government to address land and housing problems facing the poor in both, urban communities and rural areas. The call was made at a gathering of 2,000 members of the Four Region Slums Network (FRSN) and People's Movement for a Just Society (P-Move).

On her scruffy, downtrodden bank of the river, teashop-owner Khin works just a few hundred metres across the muddy water from Yangon and dreams of the riches promised by a new bridge linking to Myanmar's commercial heart.