Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand that could escalate into a wider war

since calls for restraint from ASEAN and the UN Security Council have been largely ignored.

Joining us to discuss why the two countries are fighting and what is needed to bring the death and destruction to a quick end is Yeshua Moser,

Pansouan, who is a political activist, researcher, author and lecturer on nonviolence in human society,

who has lived and worked in a dozen countries, spending most of his adult life in Southeast Asia.

Since refusing U.S. military conscription in 1972, he has sought to promote pragmatic,

nonviolent methods to address human problems.

Since 2005, he has served as the international campaign to ban landmines and cluster

munitions coalition global thematic Editor and is a regional research

coordinator on mine ban policy and cluster munition ban policies for Asia, the Pacific,

Middle East, and North African regions.

Then we'll look into Trump's brazen planned underway to get Texas Governor Abbott to gerrymander

the already gerrymanded state of Texas to the point the GOP will have 80% of the power

with only 55% of the vote. Joining us to discuss how racist this plan is since whites are

only 40% of the Texas population and minority 60% is Matt Engel, who directs

the Texas Democratic Trust in the Lone Star Project, a political action committee that aims to

be an aggressive fact checker on the Republican Party, both at the state and national levels.

Matt Engel has served as executive director of the Democratic

Congressional Campaign Committee, and from 2004, he was the executive director of the House

Democratic Caucus. Then finally, with Trump and his law firm, the Department of Justice,

...