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Michael Friis Johansen
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AEC news today
August 29, 2018
ASEAN’s ‘little red dot’ about to burst with home-grown AI applications
Has an artificial intelligence (AI) ever given you advice about education, finances, or love? If yes, you might want to thank (or otherwise) the many researchers and developers in Singapore, a tiny red dot on most maps, set to become very large in the high-tech world of AI application development.
AI applications produced in Singapore not only advise users on educational or financial matters, they also ensure hospital patients get the right medication and help screen Asia’s top entrepreneurial talent.
September 4, 2018
Philippine flagship BRP Gregorio del Pilar removed from shoal
The Philippine Navy managed to get its stranded flagship, the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, off Half Moon Shoal on Monday night, but the dignity of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) remains firmly aground.
The 51-year-old frigate, a former United States Coast Guard cutter the US sold in 2011 as surplus, earlier this year was refitted with state-of-the-art radar — although apparently not sonar.
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September 12, 2018
British Airways data theft leaves customers fuming, out of pocket
‘Customer data theft’. That is the grim message now greeting visitors to British Airways’s UK website. ‘We are investigating the theft of customer data from our website and mobile app’, it says. ‘The website is now working normally’.
The website might now be fine, but it will probably take a little longer for the rest of the company’s operations to get back to normal. The data theft, the website explains through a link, took place between August 21 and September 5 and involved ‘personal and financial details of customers’ making or changing bookings on ba.com and through the mobile app.
September 19, 2018
Bogus threat to suspend Cambodia’s UN seat raises PM’s hackles
The European Union is not plotting to have Cambodia thrown out of the United Nations, despite what one Phnom Penh newspaper recently reported, and what the Cambodian government now believes.
A story the Phnom Penh Post published on September 17 reported that a human rights-related resolution the European Parliament adopted four days earlier was threatening sanctions against individual Cambodians and was calling for a review of Cambodia’s involvement in a preferential trade deal.
The Post also wrote that the “suspension of its seat at the United Nations” would possibly result from Cambodia ignoring the EU’s “ultimatum”.
September 27, 2018
Vietnamese government helping steal rare rosewood says Phnom Penh
The government of Cambodia is accusing its Vietnamese counterpart of complicity in the illegal importation of increasingly scarce and highly valuable Siamese rosewood.
As Cambodia told the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), Phnom Penh imposed a harvesting ban on endangered hardwood trees such as the Siamese rosewood (D. cochinchinensis) with the 2002 Forestry Act and then prohibited the export of such wood in 2013.
Despite this, Cambodia pointed out, Vietnam reported importing more than 8,000 square metres (about 86,111 sq.ft) of Siamese rosewood from Cambodia in the three years that followed. During that time, Cambodia told the United Nations’s CITES Secretariat, no export permits for Siamese rosewood had been issued.