Yesterday morning delivered a reminder of our shared geological vulnerability. At 7:37am, a massive magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Mindanao in the Philippines, sending shockwaves through the region and triggering immediate alerts across the Pacific Ring of Fire. Southeast Asia is facing an escalati
As semiconductor manufacturing crosses the 2-nanometer threshold into the era of the angstrom, the global chip race is now about much more than shrinking dimensions. It has become a broader system of competition encompassing transistor architecture, backside power delivery, advanced packaging, manuf
Taiwan is facing a serious demographic crisis, characterized by one of the lowest birthrates in the world and a growing number of older residents. This is leading to a labor shortage, and the government has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to introduce Indian workers into Taiwan to make up
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India’s youth have many reasons to feel wounded. From shrinking returns on college education to the disappearance of good jobs and fading hopes of a middle-class life, they are fighting one battle after another. In the end, though, what broke Gen Z’s dam of patience was an insult from the highest co
The US-Iran ceasefire is entering yet another round of escalation since it came into effect on April 8. This week, there have been further strikes on Iran by the US, and Iranian retaliation against Kuwait and Bahrain, alongside Israeli escalation in Lebanon. Earlier flare-ups over the past two month
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) in San Francisco on Tuesday last week said if she had not met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), she would have been “just a plain” and “even negligible” KMT chairperson, bluntly signaling the role she is playing in her visit to the
In 1935, the German Reich led by the National Socialist Party officially created the Nuremberg Race Laws, a “legal cage”, for German Jews, stripping them of citizenship, criminalizing their personal relationships, barring them from public life, and transforming them into stateless subjects and isola
Nigel P. Daly’s recent article, “Taiwan wants bilingual, artificial intelligence-ready graduates — but tests for yesteryear,” (June 3, page 12) highlighted a challenge at the heart of Taiwan’s education system. We are asking schools to cultivate creative, critical thinkers for an AI-driven global ec
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No one knows whether AI will trigger a white-collar jobpocalypse. The loudest warnings still come from people building and selling the technology, whose predictions often double as hype-mongering or cover for unrelated cost-cutting with investor-friendly language. Think-tank and analyst forecasts ar
At the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pressed the US’ Asian allies to spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on defense, fueling anxiety across the region and beyond. His brow-beating call to arms might well bring about a regional defense build-up on a scale un
With grim inevitability, Elon Musk’s mission to stoke racial division has been playing out in scenes of riots on British streets. The spark for recent unrest in Southampton, a port city in southern England, was the murder of a young white teenager who died in police handcuffs after his Sikh killer f
The Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore provides an annual snapshot of evolving regional security concerns. At the 2024 forum, then-US secretary of defense Lloyd Austin spoke of a “new convergence,” envisioning a network of alliances incorporating Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippin
In the grand, circular choreography of the traditional East Asian calendar, the ninth act arrives around June 5, bringing with it a sense of urgency — both atmospheric and agricultural. The solar term is known as mangzhong (芒種). For the uninitiated, the name is a linguistic pivot; for the farmer, it
At the Computex Taipei expo on Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) told a hall of technology executives that the most responsible thing Taiwan could do for global supply chains was to keep the political “status quo” intact. It was meant as reassurance, but it read as a confession of dependence, run
At the Shenshuping Panda Base in China, Kang Cheol-won called to Fu Bao, the panda he helped raise from birth in South Korea. The panda recognized his voice and approached. The moment was brief, yet it carried unusual force: It showed that care can leave a memory, even across species, places and pol
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The promise and peril of soccer diplomacy during the soccer World Cup that starts on June 11 were already on display in December, during the draw that took place in Washington’s Trump Kennedy Center. Three world leaders shared the stage, representing the tournament’s co-hosts in this first-ever trin
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