Asia

In few places has coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims been more sorely tested as in India, yet few post-colonial nations can claim a more unlikely success. Kerala is an exceptionally diverse southern state: 32 million inhabitants, 56 percent Hindu, 25 percent Muslim, 19 percent Christian, plus a scattering of...

In Bangla, "easy like water" translates roughly as "piece of cake." The irony is that in Bangladesh -- with 150 million people in a country the size of Iowa, water poses a relentless threat. With increasingly violent cyclones and accelerating glacier melt upstream, flooding may create 20 million Bangladeshi...

Every January, 83-year-old Olga Murray of northern California goes to southwestern Nepal for the annual Maghe Sankranti winter festival. That's where she can find impoverished Tharu farmers selling their daughters to higher caste families to work as domestic slaves. In the illegal trade, families get about $50 for what is...

The Himalayan foothills of northern Myanmar form the ancestral homeland of the Kachins, an ethnic group that has endured decades of brutal repression at the hands of the Burmese military. Starting in 1962, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) waged a low-grade insurgency against the Burmese military. Today, a tenuous...

Climate change is threatening to displace 2,500 inhabitants of the Carteret Atoll in the South Pacific. Their stories are the main topic explored in the Academy Award®-nominated film Sun Come Up.

Four days before the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government faced an unexpected wave of violence in the heart of the country's restive Muslim homeland. On August 4, a small group of Islamic militants staged a daring attack on a police station near Kashgar in...

Sri Lanka is a byword for beauty and tragedy. Even the wholesale devastation of the Asian tsunami was not enough to halt a 25-year civil war between an ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government and a notorious separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as the Tamil Tigers. But...

For much of the world Cambodia brings to mind the horrors of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. And because progress is assumed to have taken place in the three decades since, the world tends to overlook the state of affairs there today.

But contemporary Cambodia continues to...

The doubling of the price of rice in Asia has given rise to what some have coined "the Asian Food Crisis." While some economists feel that this is a temporary price hike, others see that the devastation from the recent cyclone in the central rice growing region of Burma...

Dost Mohammad Fahim Khairy, an Afghan who left his country in a time of great turmoil and was resettled in the United States refugee program, makes his first journey home to Afghanistan since he left on Sept. 15, 2001. A reporting team, comprised of lead reporter Jessica Wanke, reporter...

The Taliban is not the only threat facing Afghanistan. The rise in poppy cultivation places the country at risk of moving from narco-economy to narco-state, and as eradication efforts continue to prove wildly unsuccessful, the threat increases. Yet the reasons for poppy's growing influence in the country are not...

In April 2008 Nepal turned a corner. More than 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for elections to choose a new government tasked with abolishing the monarchy and forging a stable republic after a decade-long insurgency that claimed over 13,000 lives. Despite pre-election violence and intimidation, international observers...