This is the second part of a two-part series on North Korea’s cyber crime and cyber warfare capabilities. Part 1 can be read here. North Korea, home to a population of 25.6 million and an army of over 1.2 million, may be the world’s most militarized nation, per capita. Its conventional threats are largely aimed at South […]
It’s an old expression — one man’s junk, is another man’s treasure. You might say that’s the case with China’s semiconductor makers, who are snapping up used chipmaking machines as fast as they can buy them. The surprising thing is where they’re getting them from — Japan. According to a report in Nikkei Asia, the rush […]
In a statement last Wednesday marking the “return” of the United States to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Secretary of State Antony Blinken disclosed that President Joe Biden’s administration is placing democracy and human rights at the center of American foreign policy. But the cat is out of the bag. The US is in relative decline […]
This is Part 3 of the series Watch Out! Biden wants to save the planet. Click to read Part 1 and Part 2. BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest investment management company with about 8 trillion dollars of managed assets, plays a singular role in US President Joe Biden’s climate policy. Indeed, it looks like BlackRock and the Biden […]
China’s National People’s Congress and People’s Political Consultative Conference will debate the contentious proposal to ask Chinese workers in their 50s and 60s to work beyond the current retirement age of 60 amid reports that national pension funds are depleting. The issue, now being weighed by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, is […]
As the first tranche of 324,000 British-Swedish developed Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines arrived at Phnom Penh’s International Airport on March 2 – and with one of the first doses already administered to Cambodia’s prime minister – there is certain cause for Covid-19 optimism in Cambodia. The vaccines were provided by the World Health Organization-backed COVAX scheme, an […]
MANILA – The Philippines has finally kicked off its Covid-19 vaccine rollout with much-publicized donations from China but rising controversies around the rollout will prevent Beijing from declaring a “vaccine diplomacy” win. China recently delivered 600,000 doses of the vaccine developed by the Beijing-based company Sinovac Biotech and frontliners across the country are set to be […]
JAKARTA – Once regarded as an icon in the war against corruption, the shock arrest of South Sulawesi Governor Nurdin Abdullah on bribery charges has shown yet again how Indonesian leaders struggle to retain their integrity as they rise from district to provincial and national level. The Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK) investigators roused the 58-year-old academic-turned-politician […]
A combination of pandemic-linked economic slowdowns, global over-production and a wave of countries going green is creating pains for global producers. In the Eastern Mediterranean, falling prices and shrinking demand threaten to upend the region’s most ambitious-ever natural gas sector project. The US$7 billion East Med Gas Pipeline (EMGP) – lauded by politicians from Tel […]
At least 10 Katyusha-type rockets slammed into the Ain al-Asad airbase located in Anbar province in Western Iraq on the morning of March 3. Since the earlier attack in January 2020 by heavier Qiam-2 advanced tactical ballistic missiles launched from Iran, the airbase has been reinforced with air defenses that proved unable to stop the rocket attack. Can the US protect […]
