The Agriculture Ministry last week accused slaughterhouses across Cambodia of conspiring to form a cartel and engaging in price fixing while local authorities turned a blind eye, but has since said it has no plans to punish or even name the alleged perpetrators. ...

Interior Minister Sar Kheng on Thursday ordered authorities to investigate a potential connection between a recent gun-smuggling case in Thailand and a similar case last year, seemingly contradicting the Defence Ministry’s earlier claim that the weapons didn’t stem from Cambodia. ...

Phnom Penh municipal governor Khuong Sreng on Thursday signed a research report conducted by Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) over 12 months on sewer system development at Choeung Ek lake in the capital. The move will allow Jica to design a development project. ...

The Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training, and employer and union representatives will meet next month to discuss the 2020 minimum wage for workers in the garment and footwear sectors, where unions expect an increase of between $20 and $25 a month. ...

Negotiations for next year’s minimum wage will continue this week as the parties work to reach an agreement that will impact about 800,000 workers in the textile, garment and footwear industries, the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training said on Thursday. ...

The Interior Ministry has reiterated its claims that a new law requiring NGOs and associations to register with the government does not apply to small community-based groups, despite recent efforts by police to apply the legislation to a group of families in Kratie province. ...

A team of security officials led by a commune chief descended on a private home in rural Koh Kong province on Friday morning to prevent a group of students and ac­tivists from holding a democracy training session, an activist and officials said. ...

A global forest management organization has stripped a Vietnamese rubber company of its certification after finding that the state-owned entity committed human rights violations and illegally destroyed thousands of acres of forest for rubber plantations in Cambodia. ...

One of two women claiming to represent 163 families that won access to a swath of land in Sen Sok district after a prolonged dispute failed Wednesday to have her breach of trust and forgery charges thrown out of the Phnom Penh Municipal Court. ...

Cambodian health officials have been sent to a northeastern district where 10 people died and more than 100 were sickened in two separate incidents linked to the consumption of dog meat and rice wine, a medical officer said Friday. ...

Local authorities say they are struggling to protect the Mondulkiri Protected Forest and the Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary from being logged by villagers in the province’s Koh Nhek and Pech Chreada districts, while villagers accuse authorities of colluding with certain logging groups. ...

Following a nationwide spate of violent gun crime over the past few months, the government has called on City Hall for help in its crackdown on illegal firearms, a problem one Ministry of Interior official laid at the feet of authorities themselves. ...

An ad hoc task force set up by Prime Minister Hun Sun last month to go after illegal timber stocks in eastern Cambodia has started sending cases to the pro­vincial courts for prosecution, Na­tional Police spokesman Eng Hy said on Monday. ...

Amid late-arriving rains and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, groundwater supplies are shrinking, a fact that could leave 1.5 million Cambodian farmers unable to water their crops within 15 years, according to a study published last month in the Journal of Hydrology. ...

One Belt One Road refers to the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road.” Chinese President Xi Jinping first brought up the concept during foreign visits in late 2013. It is Xi’s signature world economic strategy. ...

A group of election-monitoring NGOs have expressed alarm at what they say are inexplicable delays in starting to rebuild the national voter list, with concerns that the National Election Committee (NEC) may be leaving things too late for the 2017 commune elections. ...

A new report has alleged labour rights abuses at Cambodian supplier factories for apparel giant H&M, as more than 500 garment workers gathered in Phnom Penh yesterday to air some of the same concerns over working conditions during a workers’ forum.   ...

Thailand-based JWD Infologistics Plc’s recent purchase of a 5.2 percent stake in the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone Plc (PPSEZ), is expected to give a boost to the local company’s traded share value on the Cambodia Securities Exchange (CSX). ...

Continued widespread logging in the Prey Lang forest is evidence that the government’s recent push to have more than 400,000 hectares of land protected is toothless, according to activists as well as a Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN) report released yesterday. ...

As the government plans to transfer roughly 60 percent of detainees at the notorious Prey Speu detention center to a “mental illness” center in Kandal province, mental health experts expressed doubts this week over the country’s capacity to provide proper care. ...