As long time fans of the show, Nathan and I were pretty pumped to appear on The Underworld Podcast last week. It’s not the lightest of subjects – we’re talking about our experiences investigating the growth of industrial-scale online scams in Southeast Asia, which has involved tens of thousands of people being trafficked into modern slavery in some truly atrocious conditions. But we did get to dive into the rise of Chinese gangster-patriots and the bizarre history of currency and crypto scams across Asia – a story which features militia-run casino towns in the jungles of Myanmar, fake nuns scrawling the name of Ponzi-Cult leaders on their shaved heads, and Chinese ex-cons buying new identities (and business empires) in Cambodia. Oh, and the time we wandered into a human trafficking processing centre in Laos.

Hope you find it entertaining / interesting / enlightening, etc.

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On April 10, Cambodia’s parliament passed a sweeping new state of emergency law granting the government the power to impose its will to protect “national security and social order”—using the army if necessary—in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Days earlier, a leaked draft of the law had alarmed human rights groups, which feared the legislation would embolden Cambodia’s long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen to take an even more authoritarian line. Since shutting down the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party in 2017, Hun Sen’s government has cracked down on opposition activists and online dissenters.

Read the full story at Foreign Policy >

Photo by Chris A. Tweten on Unsplash

Until recently, billboards around Kabul were emblazoned with a simple phrase: “Imagine Peace.” Now, they instruct people to wash their hands.

Afghan security forces weren’t only armed with guns when they rushed to the scene of a brutal massacre of Sikh worshippers by an Islamic State-affiliated gunman on March 25; they also wore protective masks and gloves. Dreams of an end to violence are as distant as ever because Afghanistan now faces a more imminent and potentially deadly threat than terrorism or even the Taliban: COVID-19.

Read the full story on Foreign Policy >

Unfortunately, the TePonui team wasn’t able to travel to Kabul to report on this story due to the pandemic, but we were very pleased to collaborate with Afghan reporter Ezzatullah Merhdad.

Photo by WantTo Create on Unsplash