The Mekong River

VOA Breaking News A Vietnamese duck farmer has become the first person to die of bird flu in Vietnam in nearly two years, while another death from the disease was reported in neighboring Cambodia. Vietnamese officials said Thursday the 18-year-old farmer from the southern Mekong delta died after reporting a high fever and respiratory problems. [...]

By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor and The Christian Monitor The great city of Angkor in Cambodia, first established in the ninth century, was the capital of the Khmer Empire, the major player in southeast Asia for nearly five centuries. The ancient city of Angkor — the most famous monument of which is the breathtaking ruined [...]

Scott Learn for The Oregonian When Robert Costanza and colleagues traveled to Laos earlier this year, the decision to build the lower Mekong River’s first mainstream dam seemed close to done. Then the researchers, most from the Northwest, pointed out the poor history of predicting environmental and social damage from big hydropower dams. Their study [...]

Not only is the waterway home to millions of people, but the freshwater fish it supplies is a major food source for the people of four different countries Op-Ed for the Bangkok Post The ministerial meeting to decide the fate of the controversial Xayaburi hydropower dam in Laos ended last week without a clear decision [...]

Milton Osbourne for The Lowy Interpreter At a meeting of the Council of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) in Siem Reap, Cambodia, yesterday the issue of whether or not Laos should be able to go ahead with its plan to build a major dam on the Mekong at Xayaburi was fudged, with the council members [...]

Mom Kunthear for the Phnom Penh Post Relatives of those who died in the stampede on the bridge to Koh Pich last year said they had to force themselves to attend yesterday’s ceremony inaugurating a stupa built to commemorate the lives of the disaster’s 353 victims. “I started crying when I saw my son’s name [...]

Earth Observatory Thailand and Cambodia continued to cope with widespread flooding at the beginning of November 2011. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the top image on November 1, 2011. For comparison, the bottom image shows the same area three years earlier, on November 12, 2008. These images use a [...]

Gayathri Vaidyanathan for Nature Scientists are hoping to stall plans to erect a string of dams along the Mekong River. This summer, a crew of strangers arrived in the tiny village of Pak Lan along the Mekong River in northern Laos. They sat around in shorts, examining technical drawings, and then surveyed the area, measuring [...]

Reuters HANOI (Reuters) - More than 100 people in Cambodia and southern Vietnam have died in the worst flooding along the Mekong River in 11 years after heavy rain swamped homes, washed away bridges and forced thousands of people to evacuate. Worse could be in store if Typhoon Nesat, which killed at least 39 people [...]

Phak Seangly and Tep Nimol for the Phnom Penh Post Officals in Phnom Penh are bracing the city against rising floodwaters in the Tonle Sap and Mekong river system that have inundated areas of three provinces, as authorities upstream in Thailand warn that water levels in Thai dams are reaching dangerously high levels. The Ministry [...]