Two surveys over an eight-month period found more than 10,000 ivory items on sale. Image courtesy of TRAFFIC.

New York Times Dec. 21, 2018

Decades after the war with America ended, Vietnamese families continue to search for the remains of their kin who are still missing in action.

By Joseph Babcock  (Mr. Babcock, a teacher of writing, is working on a book about contemporary Vietnam)

On July 27, the day a collection of remains believed to be those of American soldiers lost in the Korean War were flown out of North Korea, I was driving from Hanoi to Vietnam’s rural northern province of Yen Bai. My host that morning was Ngo Thuy Hang, the 42-year-old vice director of Marin, a local nonprofit devoted to helping Vietnamese families locate the remains of their loved ones.

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January 2, 2019 By The Asia Foundation

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first edition of InAsia for 2019. In our last issue we looked at some of our top stories from the year just ended, stories that chronicled the successes and failures, the triumphs, and the tribulations of 2018 through the eyes of our experts in Asia. This week, we invite you to look ahead with us to a still-young 2019, as The Asia Foundation’s country representatives offer their predictions of the stories that will dominate the news from Asia in the coming year. Here, to kick off 2019, are perspectives from our 18 offices in Asia. —John Rieger, editor, InAsia

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Aljazeera.com

Experts are concerned that the Mekong dolphin is unlikely to survive Cambodia’s modernisation as a new dam is planned.

by Nathan A. Thompson 17 Dec 2018 

An Irrawaddy dolphin, also known as the Mekong dolphin, swims in the river at Kampi village in Kratie province, 230 km (143 miles) northeast of Cambodia [File: Chor Sokunthea/Reuters]

New York Times Dec. 11, 2018

By David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, Glenn Thrush and Alan Rappeport