Social development

Asia-Pacific nations have pledged at talks in Bangkok to take steps, including legal reforms, to tackle statelessness, a key issue in the region.More than half of the world’s 10 million people who are stateless live in Asia, with at least 1 million of them Rohingya ...

The school children of Huay Pan are getting ready for their afternoon lesson where they will be taught about water.There is nothing particularly unusual about what their teacher has got planned for them, with one exception. The classroom will be the Nan River, a 740-km ...

‘In Asia, we are witnessing more and more human rights defenders being subjected to increasingly severe forms of violations, particularly killings, simply for defending human rights, ’says Sejin Kim, Programme Manager of the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), during the launch of ...

Patients can, from now on, expect reasonable prices for treatment at private hospitals and can demand that private hospitals provide an estimate of their treatment costs, including the prices of medication, as well as the costs of nursing and treatment services, before undergoing treatment. The ...

A terminally ill HIV couple, in Phutabat in Chondan district of Thailand’s Phetchabun province, say they felt better after being treated with cannabis oil for nine days.After previously being treated with modern medicines, the wife was found lying unconscious showing little or no response. She ...

More than 70,000 Thais die from smoking-related illnesses each year, and the number of new smokers — some as young as 10 years old — is on the rise, despite the country’s decades-long effort to curb smoking rates, which was initiated by the late Privy ...

A 61-year-old homeless woman who died of tuberculosis (TB) last month had only just been confirmed as a Thai in a DNA test, which would have earned her a citizenship card and access to the Bt30 healthcare scheme that could have saved her life.The tragedy ...

Thailand legalised the use of marijuana for medicinal and research purposes in December 2018, granting usage for patient treatment and research and industry activities only. The bill allows the use of cannabis or marijuana and kratom which is a local plant with opioid properties native ...

The decades-long downward trend in the quality of Thai education can be reversed if key proposals set out over the past two years are embraced, members of the Independent Committee for Education Reform (ICER) believe.“We have already delivered tangible guidelines for the education sector,” ICER ...

Suriyan “Hook” Kla-thalae, a 36-year-old Moken born on Koh Surin, keeps dreaming that he’ll get his community’s boat, known as a kabang, back out on the Andaman Sea. But it remains anchored on shore on the island, which lies 60 kilometres off the Phang Nga ...