There are moments when repression does not arrive with tanks or gunfire, but with paperwork, court dates, and the slow suffocation of words. Hong Kong is living one of those moments. And at its center stands Jimmy Lai — a frail, stubborn figure whose imprisonment tells the story of a city losing its voice. Jimmy Lai is not a revolutionary…

Some public commentary framed the US operation in Northern Nigeria as a defence of Christians against religious persecution. Nigerian officials were quick to reject that framing—and rightly so. ISIS-linked violence in Nigeria does not follow a single religious line. Christians are targeted. Muslims are targeted. Mosques and churches alike have been attacked. Civilians die not because of what they believe, but because they are reachable, undefended, and trapped inside contested spaces. Reducing this violence to a narrative of Christians versus Muslims risks misunderstanding the conflict and, worse, reinforcing the very sectarian divisions extremist groups exploit. ISIS does not seek theological purity alone; it seeks control through fear. Religion is a language it uses, not a boundary it respects.

Thailand’s latest escalation with Cambodia has been framed, from Bangkok, as something more precise than a border war: a campaign against the scam industry — the casinos, the sealed compounds, the “special economic zones” that are not quite economies and not quite legal, where fraud is industrialised and human beings are treated like replaceable cables in a server rack. Thailand says it is not attacking Cambodia as a nation so much as striking a…

There are policy decisions that arrive quietly, almost unnoticed, yet speak volumes about a country’s state of mind. China’s recent move to remove VAT exemption on contraceptives is one of them. On paper, it looks like a technical adjustment — a fiscal tweak meant to make products less affordable. In reality, it is a small window into a much larger unease…

Mau’s note: This article is based on reporting and investigations conducted by international journalists, human rights organizations and United Nations bodies over more than a decade. Key findings draw from the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which concluded in 2018 that Myanmar’s military campaign against the Rohingya showed genocidal intent and was preceded by widespread hate speech and incitement.

This photograph was taken in Abu Dhabi in 2015, in a moment when the city briefly surrendered to the desert. I was driving out of my garage when the sandstorm fully closed in. The sky turned opaque, the horizon dissolved, and the familiar geometry of roads and signs lost their authority. Everything was reduced to a single tone of yellow, dense and absolute.

I walked toward the Zayed National Museum with my Leica M11 Monochrom in hand, instinctively switching my eyes to black and white even before raising the camera. Some buildings ask for color; others demand contrast, shadow, geometry. This one belongs to the second category. On Saadiyat Island, under the pale Abu Dhabi sky, the museum does not shout. It…

I reached Japing on a slow morning, when the air was still moist and the sound of the storm still filled the valleys. The car had left the main road some time before, diving into narrow lanes bordered by palms and shrines covered in moss. In the heart of Bali, away from the cafés of Canggu and the tourist trails of Ubud, Japing unfolds like a living painting — a vast…

There is a moment, in every night market, when the chaos fades and all you see is a single human gesture. Here, under the neon haze of Shilin, a young vendor leans over his grill with the concentration of a craftsman. In his hands, not the tools of a chef but the instruments of a sculptor: tongs in one hand, a blowtorch in the other.

There’s something oddly poetic in the idea that the world’s most successful company makes a product we rarely notice. YKK — three letters stamped on billions of zippers — is one of those quiet presences that connect our daily lives more than we imagine. Jackets, jeans, backpacks, camera bags, tents: they all close with the small, perfect click of a YKK zip.

Every city has a place that tourists never quite find—a corner where the pulse of daily life beats quietly, untouched by the routines of souvenir hunters and package tours. In Taipei, this place hides beneath the elevated JHengguo Road, where two parallel markets wake up every weekend with the same calm precision as a well-kept ritual: the Jianguo…

I have walked through many markets in Asia, from the narrow lanes of Hanoi to the endless food corridors of Bangkok. Yet Taipei’s night markets have a rhythm that feels different, more intimate. They’re not just places where you go to eat; they’re windows into how the city breathes after dark. The neon lights flicker awake, scooters weave through impossible gaps, and suddenly a quiet neighbourhood becomes a theatre of…

Across Asia, temples are never just buildings. They are breaths of the past rising into the present, places where incense curls like memory, and where belief is expressed not through doctrine but through movement: slow, deliberate, deeply human. When I walk into a temple, whether in Taipei, Bangkok, Hanoi or Kyoto, I feel the same quiet pull: the sense that faith here is not…

Taipei never speaks in long sentences. It whispers in aromas, in the swirl of steam rising from a pot on a sidewalk, in the clatter of chopsticks echoing between narrow alleys. Every corner I turn, I’m reminded that this is a city where food is not a separate chapter , it is the narrative. You taste Taipei before you understand it, and often the understanding (if any) comes later, while walking with my…

Taiwan is a place where history feels layered like sediment: each epoch pressed over the previous one, never fully erasing what came before. Today’s island—democratic, technologically advanced, self-assured—rests on centuries of migrations, occupations, and reinventions. It is a story shaped as much by geography as by politics: a mountainous fortress on the western rim of the Pacific, close enough to invite conquest, far enough to nurture autonomy.

The “Milk Tea Alliance” began, as many modern political phenomena do, with a meme. In early 2020 a quarrel between Chinese nationalists and Thai internet users over a pop idol metastasised into a transnational online protest movement. It quickly drew in activists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and later Myanmar—societies that share little in language or political system, but much in experience: pressure from authoritarianism, frustration with entrenched elites, and a belief that democracy in Asia can be defended only through solidarity across borders.

In this image from 2013, taken in Myanmar with my Leica M7 and Kodak Tmax400, there is everything that makes travel photography an act of witnessing — the meeting of lives, the pauses between movements, the slower rhythm of a country that at the time felt suspended outside of time. The group of men gathered around the trishaws reflects a simple everyday…

In the early 1950s, when the outskirts of Milan were still fields and farmhouses, Enrico Mattei imagined something extraordinary: a modern company town, built around ENI’s newly formed gas enterprise. That dream took shape in Metanopoli, the “city of methane,” conceived not merely as an industrial district but as a model community where work, nature, and social life could coexist.

In the increasingly crowded world of consumer-packaged-goods innovation, an unassuming product from South Korea stands out. Haru Hana Banana – literally “one a day banana” – is a novel take on the humble fruit that re-packages it as part of a daily ritual. Introduced by E-Mart, the pack arranges six bananas each at a distinct stage of ripeness…

In Penang, even breakfast carries the quiet poetry of travel. This plate — two generous toasts layered with diced vegetables and a fan of avocado, a soft heap of scrambled eggs, a handful of greens on the side — feels like the kind of pause I often look for when wandering through George Town’s humid streets. There’s something intimate in the way morning light falls on a simple meal, the way wooden textures of the café table frame the scene, hinting at the slow rhythm of a place that has learned to blend cultures without losing its soul.

Fifteen years can change a city. But in Shanghai, fifteen years are enough to erase one world and build another. When I first walked through the lanes of the old lilong neighbourhoods — narrow alleys lined with grey bricks, laundry crossing the sky like prayer flags — I had the feeling of entering a living archive. Small Mao-era houses still carried the faint smell of coal and soy sauce.

There are moments, while walking through Hanoi’s Old Quarter with my Leica M11 Monochrom in hand, when history feels close enough to touch. It hides in the cracked walls of yellow shophouses, in the smell of incense rising from doorways, in the soft rumble of scooters pushing through narrow alleys. The city does not whisper its past — it…

PHOTO OF THE DAY #2 BURMA CIGARS Inside a dim, wooden hall in rural Myanmar, time seems to move slower. Women sit in quiet concentration, their hands performing the same gestures repeated countless times — filling, rolling, and tying cigars with a precision born of habit rather than haste. The air is thick with the scent of tobacco leaves…

In early September 2025, the U.S. military announced that it had conducted a “kinetic strike” against a boat departing Venezuela, allegedly carrying members of the Venezuelan criminal organisation Tren de Aragua. The vessel, the White House claimed, was transporting narcotics bound for the United States; eleven people were killed, and the incident was cast as a showcase of Washington’s renewed war on “narco-terrorists”.

I’ve followed Mandami’s campaign for New York City mayor with real enthusiasm. A young Democratic Socialist who understands the everyday struggles of those living in the city without earning millions — and who offers practical solutions. A man capable of running a genuine campaign on ideas, not a “big tent” built on shaky and unrealistic alliances. It all brought me back to my years in New York — and to Carlo.