Newsletter Archive

If you experience difficulty accessing any of the stories below, please use this link: https://377477.info

Southeast Asia is the fastest growing internet market in the world, driven largely by smartphones, with nearly 4 million people coming online every month. This young and tech-savvy population, with an increasing middle-class base, is expected to help grow the digital economy by 500 percent to around $200 billion by 2025. This dynamism means Southeast Asia-based companies are poised to become global players, helping to narrow economic inequality, and potentially strengthening the ASEAN nations’ relationship with the US.

Rape has reached ‘epic proportions’ in the South Sudan conflict, which leaves Uganda struggling to meet the mental health needs of refugees who’ve endured gender-based violence. The nearly one million South Sudanese refugees in Uganda face food shortages, domestic violence and the trauma of the war they fled. VOA speaks with two rape and domestic abuse survivors in Adjumani, Uganda.

Saudi Arabia is the chief exporter of Salafism around the world, a fundamentalist strain of Islam that, along with Saudi-born Wahhabism, form the ideological bedrock for most terror groups. So when Saudi Arabia and its allies — including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing it of funding extremist groups, Qatar pretty much told Saudi Arabia to look in the mirror.

A walking blood bank could make the difference between life and death in remote areas of the world. A company in Seattle, Washington, has come up with a blood transfusion kit the size of a backpack. It contains everything caregivers in rural clinics need to collect and transfuse blood — no refrigeration needed. The Bloodpak also comes with an app that can send a mass text to registered villagers, calling on them to come to the clinic to give blood in an emergency.

Life in America isn’t quite the dream some refugees thought it would be. Mohammad Mashooq Dowlati came to the US on a special visa after working as an interpreter for US forces in Afghanistan. And while the father of three is grateful for the opportunity, he didn’t realize how tough life in the US was going to be.

VIDEO EXPLAINER: The American government conducts the US census every 10 years. Mandated by the Constitution, the idea is to get an accurate count of everyone living in the US and its territories. The next census will be held in 2020 and participation is required by law. Here’s why the government goes to the trouble of trying to count every single person living here.