Kandal province villagers have erected tents to stand guard over their rice fields on the site of Phnom Penh’s new airport development, as two bulldozers arrived and began to clear the area.
The Environment Ministry has told all provincial governors to immediately stop the issuing of land certificates in protected areas such as biodiversity corridors, saying 70 sanctuaries in 11 provinces were facing encroachment.
Tens of thousands of workers in Phnom Penh’s worker dormitories say they concerned about Covid-19, but also strained by hunger and boredom a week into their homes becoming “red zones.”
Some vegetable growers in Kandal province say their produce is rotting in their fields as Phnom Penh markets are shut down for the Covid-19 lockdown and traders face a crackdown by continuing to sell in violation of public health measures.
Illegally felled timber is still flowing through provinces despite travel bans and increased scrutiny of traffic due to the Covid-19 outbreak, activists alleged, raising suspicions of officials’ involvement in the trade.
Phnom Penh’s Din Han Enterprise garment factory, which has seen hundreds of workers test positive for Covid-19, is struggling to pay last month’s paychecks to workers placed in lockdown.
A Kampong Chhnang shoe factory is threatening workers’ jobs as they try to unionize, the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions and its local representative said.
Three communes in Kampot province have been turned into “Bokor city,” a new administrative area slated to become the province’s second municipality located in the midst of the 150,000-hectare Preah Monivong Bokor National Park.
The Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Thursday charged a man under the nation’s new Covid-19 law over a social media video in which he tells factory workers not to take Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines, officials said.
In an open letter, forestry activists said they were “appalled” by USAID recently claiming to “work directly” with them, saying they had been turned down from participating in USAID-run conservation projects, and the American agency “never supported us.”
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