Southeast

Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com Japan’s UBE Corporation will build an EV battery chemicals factory in Louisiana to set up a US EV battery supply chain – and compete with China. Chemical company UBE Corporation will invest $500 million to build the first US manufacturing facility for EV lithium-ion battery ingredients dimethyl carbonate (DMC) and ethyl methyl carbonate (EMC) in New Orleans. There are currently no DMC nor EMC production facilities in the US. DMC and EMC act as…

If Colorado’s economy were viewed as a drought map, the Front Range from the Wyoming border to Colorado Springs has abundant water and ranks high for prosperity, with Douglas County the equivalent of Blue Mesa Reservoir. Economic strength stretches up the Interstate 70 corridor across the mountains west through Garfield County to the Utah border, with roaring tributaries of prosperity pouring down from Steamboat Springs and Aspen and Telluride. Other pockets of prosperity include Lake, Custard, Park, Chaffee and Ouray…

Catch up with China 1. Two influential Chinese bloggers in exile have been sharing uncensored news about the country on overseas social media. Now the police are tracking down their followers in China, one by one. (Associated Press) “Teacher Li,” one of the bloggers, rose to prominence in late 2022 when he tirelessly collected and shared information on the White Paper protests in China. I talked to him at the time about the toll the work had taken on him. (MIT Technology Review) 2. Leaked internal documents from…

A growing roster of vertical AI startups is emerging in Southeast Asia to serve sectors ranging from seafood to finance. Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler recently made a bet on 37 of them, investing $5.1 million in total for pre-seed deals. This included a strategic partnership with Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, which invested into seven startups. “If you look at the rest of the world, there’s lots of horizontal AI and it’s becoming insanely competitive,” Antler co-founder and managing…

Thailand’s prime minister has claimed that Singapore sought a deal with Taylor Swift to prevent her from playing elsewhere in south-east Asia on her Eras tour.Srettha Thavisin said the concert promoter AEG had informed him that the Singaporean government offered subsidies of US $2m-$3m (£1.6m-£24m) a show as part of an exclusivity agreement.Swift is playing six sold-out shows at the 55,000-seat National Stadium in Singapore in March.“ didn’t tell me the exact figure but they said the Singapore government offers subsidies…

The first gunshots rang out in Bell half an hour before midnight. Two men in a red vehicle sped away, leaving behind one man dead outside an elementary school.Over the next 90 minutes, authorities say, southeast Los Angeles County was the scene of a terrifying and seemingly random string of killings. When it was over, four people were dead in a series of drive-by shootings within five miles of each other, including a 14-year-old boy. The violence left family members of the victims grieving and communities reeling.On…

Two people were arrested Tuesday in connection with the shooting deaths of four people in southeast Los Angeles County late Sunday and early Monday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. Homicide investigators allege that the shootings were connected although they are not sure how. The shooting deaths spanned a few hours in the cities of Huntington Park, Bell, Cudahy and Los Angeles, according to homicide investigators.“Detectives have arrested two suspects believed to be involved in the four murders,” Nicole…

A 14-year-old boy and a man were shot and killed outside elementary schools in Cudahy and Bell during a violent night that claimed a total of four lives in four separate shootings, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. Javier Pedraza Jr., 14, was killed Monday outside Ellen Ochoa Learning Center in the 5000 block of Live Oak Street in Cudahy, the Sheriff’s Department said. He and another boy were shot and found by deputies, who responded after receiving reports of gunfire in the area. Paramedics were called…

Like millions worldwide, Southeast Asians have been trying out large language models such as Meta's Llama 2 and Mistral AI - but in their native Bahasa Indonesia or Thai. The result has usually been gibberish in English.This leaves them at a disadvantage, tech experts warn, as generative artificial intelligence transforms education, work and governance worldwide. A Singapore government-led initiative aims to correct the imbalance with a Southeast Asian LLM, the first in a family of models named SEA-LION - Southeast Asian…

Sunspot AR3575 has been spewing out large amounts of solar material lately, with multiple coronal mass ejections and solar flares originating from this source. On February 6, this sunspot hurled out a dangerous M-class solar flare that caused blackouts in several regions around the world. Solar activity has been on a dangerous rise in the last few months, and it is expected to increase as we approach solar maximum. Know all about the strong M-class solar flare that impacted Earth in the last few days.M-class solar…