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Oct 17, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
Apple has opened a new research and development (R&D) center in Shenzhen, the iPhone maker’s latest bid to counter a resurgent Huawei and bolster its position in the world’s largest smartphone market. It is Apple’s fifth product R&D facility in China. The move shows Apple continues to prioritize shareholder interests above the din of anti-China US politicians.
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Aug 25, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
BANGKOK – Two weeks after Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved the election-winning Move Forward Party for campaigning for royal reform, and Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit insists everything is going to plan for his popular progressive movement.
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Aug 15, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
BANGKOK – Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been elected Thailand’s next prime minister, a dramatic and unexpected shift in national leadership that consolidates the family clan’s hold on politics but won’t necessarily stabilize them. Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor – with 319 for, 145 against and 27 abstaining – of the 37-year-old political novice and loyal daughter of until recently self-exiled ex-premier and current ruling Peua Thai party patron Thaksin Shinawatra.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
BANGKOK – A Thai court has ruled Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin breached ethical standards in his appointment of a convicted felon to his Cabinet, knocking the embattled premier from power after less than a year in office and thrusting Thai politics back into relative chaos.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
This article was first published by Pacific Forum and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here. At the 37th Asia-Pacific Roundtable: Crisis in an Interregnum held in Kuala Lumpur June 4-6, 2024, scholars and practitioners from across the world covered a range of conflicts and disputes in the region. There have been heated debates on Gaza, Ukraine and the South China Sea.
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Aug 7, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
In a lurch backward for Thai democracy, a court ruled today to dissolve the opposition Move Forward party for campaigning against a severe royal insult law, which the nine-judge panel ruled violated election laws and was tantamount to attempting to overthrow the constitutional monarchy. The unanimous ruling will ban the party’s top executives from politics for a decade but will apparently allow its parliamentarians to reconstitute under a new party banner, likely the Thinkakhao Chaovilai Party.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
asiatimes.com | Richard S. Ehrlich |Shawn W. Crispin
BANGKOK – Thailand hopes China will help build a US$2.8 billion, east-west highway and railway “Land Bridge” across the kingdom, linking the Andaman Sea and Gulf of Thailand as a short-cut for oil and other international cargo currently sailing further south via Singapore and the Malacca Strait.
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Nov 2, 2023 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
The world is infatuated with artificial intelligence (AI), and for good reason. AI systems can process vast quantities of data in a seemingly superhuman way. However, current AI systems rely on computers running complex algorithms based on artificial neural networks. These use huge amounts of energy, and use even more energy if you are trying to work with data that changes in real time.
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Oct 17, 2023 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
Vietnam is revising its social insurance law to discourage employees from withdrawing their social insurance premiums early and giving up their pensions. There is concern that the proposed changes might cause discontent among factory workers, many of whom have resorted to withdrawing social insurance premiums to overcome financial hardship.
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Sep 15, 2023 | 
asiatimes.com | Shawn W. Crispin
He is a despicable dictator of one of the world’s poorest countries, yet he commands our attention because he resembles a glamorous villain from James Bond, traveling to meet President Vladimir Putin in Russia in a photogenic armored train. To North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, that visit represented a triumph. For Putin, it was an opportunity but also a humiliation. For Asia and the world, however, it was just a cinematic sideshow. Much more important events were happening elsewhere.
