The harshest winter since 2008 is contributing to shortages of staple vegetables across Central Asia and sending prices north in a region still suffering from COVID-induced food inflation. 

In Uzbekistan, record frosts have highlighted the shortcomings of the national energy system as even residents of the capital spent days on end without power. But the cold has also hammered the agriculture sector in the region’s most populous country.

On the afternoon of January 10, Van Bawi Mang, a member of an armed resistance group fighting against the Myanmar military, was resting in his barracks at a camp on the country’s northwestern border with India when a loud explosion jolted him back to the reality of war.

He scrambled into a nearby ditch as jet fighters flew overhead, glass shattering with the reverberation of the falling bombs.

Fighting has flared in recent days between Myanmar junta forces and rebels opposed to their rule, officials and locals said Tuesday, with reports that large numbers of civilians have fled the violence.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since Aung San Suu Kyi‘s civilian government was toppled in an army coup almost two years ago.

Long-established ethnic rebel groups, as well as dozens of “People’s Defence Forces” (PDF), have emerged in opposition and clash frequently with the military.

Two years after Azerbaijan and Armenia ended a war that killed about 6,800 soldiers and displaced around 90,000 civilians, tensions between the countries are again high in a dispute over a six-kilometer (nearly four-mile) road known as the Lachin Corridor.

The winding road, which is the only land connection between Armenia and the ethnic Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan, has been blocked by protesters claiming to be environmental activists since mid-December, threatening food supplies to Nagorno-Karabakh’s 120,000 people.

Israel's Cognyte Software Ltd won a tender to sell intercept spyware to a Myanmar state-backed telecommunications firm a month before the Asian nation's February 2021 military coup, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

The deal was made even though Israel has claimed it stopped defence technology transfers to Myanmar following a 2017 ruling by Israel's Supreme Court, according to a legal complaint recently filed with Israel's attorney general and disclosed on Sunday.

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government said it has raised more than US$100 million to fund its democracy effort and topple the junta.

About 45 per cent of the funds are from the sales of so-called Spring Revolution Special Treasury Bonds, according to Tin Tun Naing, shadow minister for planning, finance and investment. The debt does not pay interest and the capital will be repaid only when the democracy effort is successful.

The US is facing major moves by the global community to de-dollarize their economies.  The reserve status of the US dollar will eventually come to an end, maybe not anytime soon, but sometime in the future as it is facing numerous challenges not only from major powers such as Russia and China who are actively trying to rid themselves of the toxic currency, but also countries with smaller economies who are based in the Southeast Asian region which includes Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos.  The globalist think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Pea

Russia has blamed Armenia for a breakdown in peace talks with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in the latest sign of friction between Moscow and Yerevan over the conflict.

For months, Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, have tried to discuss a peace deal for the contested region in the South Caucasus.

Thousands of supporters of Bangladesh’s main opposition party have rallied across Bangladeshi cities to demand Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and the formation of a caretaker government to conduct general elections.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies staged protests in the capital Dhaka and nine other cities on Wednesday, the latest of several demonstrations in recent months amid mounting anger over the rising cost of living.

Armenia has canceled planned military drills with Russia which were to be held under the countries' Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), straining relations further between the uneasy regional allies. 

"These exercises will not take place," Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told a Tuesday press briefing. "Armenia does not believe it is expedient to conduct CSTO exercises in the republic this year."