The prisons department says it still has not conducted any Covid-19 testing for prisoners, who are showing some symptoms of coughing, fevers and runny noses due to changing weather, even though the latest local cluster originated from the prisons director’s family.
Authorities in Vietnam have reported more trafficking victims crossing from Cambodia, the Interior Ministry’s counter-trafficking chief said, as the global economic slowdown creates a desperation for jobs while closed borders due to Covid-19 elevate the dangers of migration.
Three days after reopening, Phnom Penh’s Aeon Mall temporarily shuttered some shops at the Health Ministry’s request amid widening concerns over a local cluster of Covid-19 cases.
She was 17 when she left her hometown in Kratie for a “good job” in China. Two and a half years later, on Saturday, she was able to post a message online. “They’ve forced me to take husbands here. They said if I don’t take them as husbands, they would sell me to a brothel.”
No prisoners have been tested for Covid-19 despite contact with an infected department director, even as more than 250 prison officers at the same Phnom Penh facilities have received tests due to the risk of contagion, officials said.
Bunong villagers flushed out by Sesan dam floodwaters have been taking boats to visit ancestral grounds, wading through clusters of dying trees that were not adapted to survive permanent floods. They are now bracing for a new fight as a rubber company eyes their refuge on higher ground.
Twenty-three families have ostensibly received a vacant plot on the edge of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Tamok lake — but some locals, including the village chief, suggest people have been paid to thumb-print applications to obtain lake land for unknown outsiders.
The Environmental Ministry has this year stopped sharing environmental and social impact assessments for new development projects with NGO Forum, the civil society network said.
The infilling of 70 hectares of the Mekong River across from Phnom Penh is nearly complete, residents say, as the Kandal provincial governor touts the “development potential” of the oknha’s project that he says will soon sway any unhappy locals.
A Thai chicken factory has agreed to demands related to overtime and allowing migrant workers to leave its compound to buy food following last week’s protest by hundreds of Cambodian laborers, the factory’s management and a labor group said.
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