After a decade-long experiment with democracy Myanmar’s army, the Tatmadaw, slammed the door shut on liberalisation and freedom of expression on 1 February 2021 by deposing and imprisoning the country’s elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and ruthlessly cracking down on dissent.

The transport sector is going through the biggest shake-up in over a century with combustion engines being phased out and electric cars selling in ever larger numbers.

One of several theories about the origins of Covid-19 is that it was transmitted from bats to humans, via an intermediary species such as the pangolin.

Though it was the first country to record a case of coronavirus outside China in January 2020, Thailand has consistently bucked the trend during the developing pandemic.

Even in the pouring rain, in the middle of the night, they are out scavenging, wearing headlamps to scan a mountain of rotting garbage more than 15 stories high.

In 2015, Thailand had the second highest number of road fatalities in the world, second only to war-torn Libya where dying on the road is but one of many dangers facing ordinary citizens.

On the island of Sumbawa in central Indonesia, thousands of artisanal miners have been digging up gold in dangerous, informal mines, sunk into jungle hillsides, for generations.

The boy mounted the horse barefoot, with only an ill-fitting Hello Kitty helmet to protect his head and a talisman under his clothing to give him the courage of his ancestors.

In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte won the presidential election in the Philippines with strident promises that he would eradicate drug use and associated criminality by killing thousands of dealers and users.

Soon after dawn, Win Myint Oo starts a generator and squats on a bamboo platform suspended under a 40-foot, jury-rigged derrick made out of three steel poles and bamboo struts lashed together with rope.

Manila North Cemetery, opened in 1904, is one of the oldest and largest in the Philippines.

While conflict diamonds have made their way into the news headlines and become the target of high profile campaigns to ban their use, the jade industry has largely escaped such scrutiny.

The South China Sea is one of the most important maritime environments in the world.

With its mushrooming cities, power-hungry heavy industry and steadily, if less rapidly, growing economy, China’s demand for power appears unstoppable.

The panda is much more than just an iconic animal associated with China, instantly recognisable by its distinctive black fur patches around its eyes and ears.

Myanmar was once the world’s largest supplier of heroin until it was unseated by a post-Taliban surge in production in Afghanistan.

In recent years Burma, long a byword for political repression and brutal military rule, has emerged from its half century of isolation and become the playground of growing numbers of foreign tourists and companies from around the world sniffing opportunities in an untapped market.

The subject of human trafficking in Southeast Asia has recently been highlighted by the tragic fate of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar trying to gain access to Thailand and other neighbouring countries to escape violence and discrimination in their homeland.

China’s economy depends on coal – and it has vast quantities of the black stuff left underground to dig up and burn.

Burma’s Buddhist monks have long stood for non violent resistance to the country’s now retired military junta and were at the forefront of a number of protest movements that chipped away at the regime’s legitimacy.

The conflict in Syria continues to drag on and the battle for Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital and second city, has so far failed to create the tipping point that the rebels had hoped would be a precursor to their assault on Damascus.

The winds of change have swept through Burma in the past year as President Thein Sein and his government have introduced reforms that have transformed the mood of the country and caused a geopolitical shift in the region and beyond.

Ordos City, which derives its name from the Mongolian word for ‘palaces’, is a gleaming, extravagant urban development on the dusty plains of Inner Mongolia some 570 km from Beijing.

They may not conform to the western stereotype of a provocative girl band but Myanmar’s first all girl pop act, the Me N Ma Girls are certainly pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in deeply religious and conservative Burmese society.

North Korea is the world’s last and only hereditary communist dictatorships and has been in the news spotlight for all the wrong reasons over the past decades.

On the 7th of June 2010, the day Afghanistan overtook Vietnam to become the longest war in US history, ten NATO soldiers including seven Americans were killed.

On November 13th 2010, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in Rangoon.

The 7th of November 2010 saw the first ‘democratic’ election in Burma since 1990.

Wounded soldiers lie prone on the battlefield, but they are not scattered across it as one might expect.

The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 and has already lasted longer than both World Wars.

Violent ethnic clashes between the indigenous Uighur and Han Chinese populations rocked the north-western Chinese city of Urumqi in July 2009.

In a year of extreme weather, the Typhoon that hit the east coast of the Philippines on 7 November 2013 still surprised meteorologists with its sheer ferocity and speed.

It is 10 years on 7 October 2011 since the beginning of the War in Afghanistan.