World

By RFA Burmese2024.11.11 Read RFA coverage of this topic in Burmese. A former minister in Aung San Suu Kyi’s ousted government has died shortly after being released from prison, family friends and party colleagues told Radio Free Asia, the latest jailed member of Myanmar’s last elected government to die. Win Khaing, 74, was minister of electricity and energy in the government formed by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, or NLD, which was overthrown on Feb. 1, 2021, when the generals ended a decade of tentative reform and reimposed hardline military rule. “The respected Win Khaing joined hands with the NLD to make it the best. He was involved in both management and policy reforms and was capable of carrying them out,” said NLD colleague Bo Bo Oo, the party’s deputy chairperson fo...

By RFA Vietnamese2024.10.29 Read more on this topic in Vietnamese Nguyen Thi Tam, serving a six-year sentence for “propaganda against the state” at a prison in Vietnam, said her cellmate threatened to kill her, Tam’s daughter told Radio Free Asia. Since April, she has been sharing a cell with a woman jailed for drug offenses at the prison in Thanh Hoa province. Tam told her daughter the woman, who Radio Free Asia is not identifying given the sensitivity of the situation, swore at her, kicked her legs when she was trying to sleep at night and threatened to “beat her to death.” She complained to prison guards and asked them to move the woman to another cell but said officers only tried to reassure her, saying they had already “disciplined and educated” her cellmate. However, Tam said th...

By RFA Burmese2024.11.21 Read RFA coverage of this topic in Burmese. Children make up nearly 40% of the more than 3.4 million people displaced in Myanmar due to the civil war, UNICEF said Thursday. The findings from United Nations Children’s Fund came as an organization that monitors conflict in Myanmar said the ruling junta and affiliated groups have killed more than 670 children since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat, sparking the conflict. In a statement on Thursday -- a day after World Children’s Day -- UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban said that the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar is “reaching a critical inflection point,” with escalating conflict and climate shocks “putting children and families at unprecedented risk.” He said that approximately...

By RFA Vietnamese2024.11.21 Read more on this topic in Vietnamese. A court in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City has sentenced a former police lieutenant to 12 years in prison for “corporal punishment” that led to the death of a suspect, the Thanh Nien newspaper reported. The former police officer, Vo Thanh Dat, was convicted of beating to death a suspected thief, Trieu Quang Binh, at a police detention center in the southern city. Dat was the warden of the police lock-up. Two other inmates at the detention center were convicted of helping Dat beat the prisoner, who the court was told had been causing trouble in his cell, the newspaper reported. The two others convicted in the beating death, Quach Bao Lam and Lu Hoai Thanh, had been sharing a cell with Binh. They were jailed for eight-and-a-...