Ethnic Karen rebels and their allies claim to have captured an important trade hub on the Thai border in southeastern Myanmar, despite a last-ditch effort by the Myanmar military to prevent the town’s fall. In a statement today, the Karen National Union (KNU) announced that its armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), and … Read more
Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s state visit to the United States – highlighted by his meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden on April 10 – crystallizes the fundamental tenets of the Japanese post-war security architecture, while also affirming the new reorientations of the U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific. This comes at a time of significant … Read more
South Korea’s liberal opposition parties were expected to win a landslide victory in Wednesday’s parliamentary election, initial exit polls suggested, a result that if confirmed would make conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol a lame duck for his remaining three years in office. The joint exit polls by South Korea’s three major TV stations – KBS, MBC, … Read more
Malaysia’s government has requested that the social media giants Meta and TikTok present a plan of how they intend to clamp down on offensive content on their platforms, as the government reported a sharp increase in content removal requests. According to a joint statement yesterday from the Communications and Multimedia Commission and the Malaysian police, the … Read more
Cambodia’s continued attempts to minimize the extent of cyber-slavery on its territory reflect official complicity, as well as the need to embark on a learning curve that many other countries have yet to master, experts say. A huge volume of media reports concur that trafficking victims are recruited to work in cyber-slavery from China, and … Read more
A bipartisan consensus in the U.S. House of Representatives culminated in the passage of legislation in that, if also passed by the Senate and signed into law by the president, would require the Beijing-based company, ByteDance, to either divest from its U.S.-based subsidiary – TikTok – or have it be removed from the U.S. market … Read more
As Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim approaches the midpoint of his second year in office, he finds his work cut out for him. The national currency, the ringgit, was one of Asia’s worst-performing currencies in 2023, having declined 4.3 percent against the U.S. dollar. This year has so far brought no respite: on February 20, … Read more
India is in the midst of its 18th general election. Almost every opinion survey indicates that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will return for a third straight term in power. The BJP is expected to ride to victory on Modi’s popularity. Despite growing unemployment and massive corruption under his rule, Modi’s approval ratings … Read more
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is likely to win the largest number of seats in the forthcoming general elections in India’s frontier region of the Northeast, similar to the results of the last general election five years ago. India’s Northeast comprises the eight border states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, … Read more
Ethnic Karen rebels in eastern Myanmar claim to have seized control of part of the town of Myawaddy on the country’s border with Thailand, inflicting another serious debacle on the military junta. On Friday, according to a BBC report, the Karen National Union (KNU) announced that it had accepted the surrender of a battalion based … Read more