April 24, 2012
- Documents under investigation show that around $90 million may have been laundered from logging companies in Sabah to UBS bank accounts linked to high-ranking Malaysian officials, according to the Sarawak Report. Critics of the government say the money is likely kickbacks from logging companies to government officials for the right to log in the state's declining rainforests. Such transactions are alleged to occur typically in the run up to elections.
April 20, 2012
- Malaysia will tighten controls on the trade in sugar gliders, a big-eyed gliding possum increasingly popular in the pet trade in Southeast Asia and the United States, according to the country's Department of Wildlife and National Parks (Perhilitan).
April 9, 2012
On December 18th, 2011, a female Sumatran rhino took a sudden plunge. Falling into a manmade pit trap, the rhino may have feared momentarily that her end had come, but vegetation cushioned her fall and the men that found her were keen on saving her, not killing her. Little did she know that conservationists had monitored her since 2006, and for her trappers this moment...
March 27, 2012
The world's third largest mining company, Rio Tinto, and a local financial and construction firm, Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS), have cancelled plans for a $2 billion aluminum smelter to be constructed in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The cancellation calls into question Sarawak's plan to build a dozen massive dams—known as the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (...
March 20, 2012
Earlier this month, biologists with Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC) in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Borneo, found and rescued a tarsier from a locally owned palm oil plantation. "For a day, we kept the animal in a cage at the field centre and fed him with insects", explained Alice Miles, a Cardiff University student leading a project on tarsier and slow loris...
- A new campaign by The Body Shop West Malaysia and TRAFFIC Southeast Asia attempts to raise awareness of the illegal slow loris pet trade. YouTube videos of "cute" pet slow lorises have raised demand for these endangered primates, but as the campaign highlights the pet trade is fueling slow loris deaths in the wild and cruel treatment, such as pulling out their teeth, to make them more desirable pets.