A Japanese man with first-hand experience of natural disasters has announced a one-off special event in Phnom Penh to benefit the victims of the deadly earthquake which struck Turkiye and Syria on February 6. The death toll from the massive quake currently stands at more than 50,000. Yuki Aotani has put together similar events in the past. He raised money for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans – a town he used to live in – in 2005, and has held numerous fundraisers for earthquake victims in his native Japan. Aotani is brewmaster at Flowers Nanobrewery, where…
Author: Raksmey Hong
In 2001, Dahn Hong developed Khmer Unicode, which remains the basis for most Khmer language fonts in use today. He designed the Unicode – a standardised system which assigns a unique number to each character – in response to frustration with the Limon font, a much earlier version, which was developed in 1994. Limon was difficult to employ, particularly in the age of smartphones. Not content with providing a clean, dependable source for nearly all of the Khmer typography in use, he has set his sights on reliable spellchecking software. Hong, a former law student, was inspired to devise the…
Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Dith Tina aims to promote cooperation between local farmers in northern Takeo province’s Bati district and the owners of Kirisu Dairy Farm, saying he foresees great potential in such a venture. Tina encouraged people living around the farm – located near the Phnom Tamao Zoological Park and Wildlife Rescue Centre, just outside the capital – to grow Mombasa grass and sell it to the company, Khmer Fresh Milk Co Ltd, for use as cattle feed. “There are excellent potential profits to be made from doing so, but I have observed that some farmers appear…
More than 500 well-known music artists will come together for the Cambodia Pleng Music Awards 2023, which takes place next month. The concert and awards ceremony will take place on March 18 in Borey Peng Huot Grand Star Platinum’s Grand Hall and Ballroom. It is being organised by Smart Mobile’s music streaming service Pleng with the aim of supporting and encouraging the achievements of the singers, songwriters, musicians and music producers in Cambodia, many of whom have music available to listen to via the Pleng app. Mila Jivkova Kusheva, chief marketing officer at Smart Axiata, expressed her pleasure at getting…
Circus performances at the Secondary School of Fine Arts (SSFA) have resumed after a years-long hiatus due to the Covid 19 pandemic, drawing over 500 people for two performances recently. However, two performances, no matter how well-attended they are, will not be enough to support the costs associated with organising future performances without the support of funding from public institutions, private businesses and non-profit organisations. “Due to the long suspension of circus performances, the SSFA under the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has reopened the theatre for two test performances and 538 tickets were sold,” said Vun Sokha, a…
Min Chinda, 33, was born in Kampong Chamloang commune’s Tbong Damrey village of Kandal province’s Khsach Kandal district and attended school like the village’s other children at a primary school there. By grade 4, Chinda began to have vision problems. At first it was just poor eyesight but then it worsened until the ophthalmologist said she had serious eye problems and would go blind, but her mother didn’t believe what the doctor said. “When I was in grade 6, my vision got weaker and weaker so that each time I copied a lesson from the whiteboard I had to move…
With a smile on her face and thick tidy hair, Pav Pak sits on a mat tying a pattern for weaving on an ikat under a wooden house on stilts located in Siem Reap province where she has worked for the Institute of Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT) for more than two decades. At sixty-years-old Pak has been weaving in the Khmer style for 20 years. She is currently producing a hol pidan – a kind of Khmer woven wall and ceiling tapestry made from silk – and this one is an 8m long masterpiece featuring images of temples, ships and…
A state agency and partner NGOs are working to promote eco-tourism community targets in the Upper Mekong and Tbeng Meanchey Mountain area, with a workshop is one of their latest activities held early this week and attended by tour operators and stakeholders as well as Minister of Tourism Thong Khon. The workshop was conducted in collaboration with the National Committee for Management and Development of Community-Based Tourism and Ecotourism, USAID Greening Prey Lang (GPL) Project and Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme (NTFP-EP Cambodia). “The minister instructed the Secretariat of the National Committee to continue to work with the USAID and…
Num kruok – a Khmer cake made from flour dough and spring onion (Allium fistulosum) – is a popular snack with the Cambodian people as it goes well with sweet and sour fish sauce. At Pou Restaurant on Wat Bo street in Siem Reap town, one chef uses additional ingredients like beetroot and preserved daikon radishes mixed with red sugar and rumdeng or galangal to create a taste similar to sweet and sour fish sauce, but it is even better and it has beautiful purple highlights in its colouring. These are the kind of creative ideas that are drawing local…
Big Bad Wolf Books Exhibition – one of the world’s largest of its kind – is returning to Cambodia for the second time ever and the first since the Covid-19 crisis. The exhibition runs from February 22 to March 12 at Olympia Mall in Phnom Penh. Its opening day was attended by Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith and Tun Saim, undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport. Kanharith said at the opening ceremony for the exhibition that he personally intends to buy several books to read and to donate to the ministry’s library and the Scholar’s…