Author: Newley

Hi. I'm Newley Purnell. I cover technology and business for The Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong. I use this site to share my stories and often blog about the books I'm reading, tech trends, sports, travel, and our dog Ginger. For updates, get my weekly email newsletter.

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Links

8 Links

Some Thailand-related, some not:

  1. Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés — The New York Times
  2. Marginal revolutionaries: The crisis and the blogosphere have opened mainstream economics up to new attack — The Economist
  3. New, darker portrait of legendary American — AP on a new book
    about Jim Thompson by Joshua Kurlantzick
  4. Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World — The New York Times
  5. Do Sports Build Character or Damage It? — The Chronicle of Higher Education
  6. Everything you need to know about buying a camera — The Verge
  7. Exercise Hormone May Fight Obesity and Diabetes — The New York Times‘s Well Blog
  8. Video embedded above and on YouTube here: “BBC Earthflight — Common Cranes Fly Over Venice (Narrated by David Tennant).”
Categories
Thailand

Two Economics-Related Stories Worth Reading: the iPhone Economy and the Emergence of Dual Gilded Ages

Two economics-related stories I suggest checking out:

1) This New York Times story by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, which was the toast of Twitter yesterday, is worth a read.

It’s called “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work.”

You’re probably familiar with many of the concepts here — higher labor costs and fewer engineers in the U.S., China’s nimble and powerful manufacturing capacity and supply chain integration, etc. — but this piece weaves things together quite nicely.

2) This piece, by Chrystia Freeland, was in the print edition of today’s IHT.

It’s a look at the ideas behind economist Jim O’Neill’s new book, “The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond.”

As Freeland writes:

In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the opening of the American frontier created the Gilded Age and the robber barons who ruled it. Today, as the world economy is being reshaped by the technology revolution and globalization, the resulting economic transformation is creating a new gilded age and a new plutocracy.

The two forces are intricately related. Indeed we are living through slightly different gilded ages that are unfolding simultaneously. The West is experiencing a second gilded age, while the emerging markets, as Mr. O’Neill and others have documented, are experiencing their first gilded age.

(Emphasis mine.)

Categories
Thailand

NY Times on Thailand’s Supply Chain Issues Following Floods

A recent New York Times story says:

KHLONG LUANG, Thailand — The floodwaters receded weeks ago from this sprawling industrial zone, but the streets are littered with detritus, the phones do not work and rusted machinery has been dumped outside warehouses that once buzzed with efficiency.

Before Thailand’s great flood of 2011, companies like Panasonic, JVC and Hitachi produced electronics and computer components that were exported around the world. Now of the 227 factories operating in the zone, only 15 percent have restarted production, according to Nipit Arunvongse Na Ayudhya, the managing director of the company that manages the Nava Nakorn industrial zone, one of the largest in Thailand and located just north of Bangkok.

“The recovery has not been that easy,” Mr. Nipit said in an interview Friday on the sidelines of a meeting where he sought to soothe anxious foreign factory managers.

The slow recovery here is having global consequences. Before the floods, Thailand produced about 40 percent to 45 percent of the world’s hard disk drives, the invaluable and ubiquitous storage devices of the digital age. It is now becoming clear that it will be months — significantly longer than initially expected — before production of hard drives returns to antediluvian levels.

(Emphasis mine.)

Worth a read.

Categories
Thai politics Thailand

STRATFOR: “A Hezbollah Threat in Thailand?”

Global intelligence firm STRATFOR has this report:

On Jan. 12, Thai authorities arrested a man they say was a member of the Lebanon-based Shiite militant group Hezbollah who was plotting an attack in Bangkok. In uncovering the plot, Thai police cite cooperation with the United States and Israel going back to December 2011. Bangkok is indeed a target-rich environment with a history of terrorist attacks, but today Hezbollah and other militant and criminal groups rely on the city as more of a business hub than anything else. If Hezbollah or some other transnational militant group were to carry out an attack in the city, it would have to be for a compelling reason that outweighed the costs.

(Emphasis mine.)

Categories
Thai politics Thailand

Details on Thailand Cabinet Reshuffle from AP

The AP reports:

A firebrand ‘Red Shirt’ leader charged with terrorism over the movement’s 2010 protests was appointed Wednesday to Thailand’s Cabinet, and a second appointee is a businesswoman blacklisted from certain U.S. financial transactions.

Worth a read.

Categories
Thai politics

TIME: “Vague Terrorism Alert, Arrests Put Bangkok on Edge”

TIME has this story, which sums up the situation:

Last Friday, just hours after the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok warned on its website of a “possible terrorist threat” in tourist areas of the Thai capital, Thai security officials arrested a Lebanese man suspected of being a member of Hizballah, the Iranian-backed militant group. After three days of interrogations, police seized more than 4,000 kg of bombmaking materials from the townhouse he rented in a Bangkok suburb. But instead of receiving praise their police work, Thailand’s government and security officials are being roundly criticized.

The scorn-filled and suspicious responses are the result of mistrust of the U.S., concern over lost tourism earnings, and the conflicting statements and shifting narrative of events by various government officials, all of whom are insisting tourists and locals have nothing to fear because they have the situation “under control.” As an editorial in the English-language Nation newspaper opined, “In Thailand we have a long history of politicians telling us half-truths and lies, especially when it comes to security matters. And so when they tell us to be calm because everything is under control, we have good reason not to trust them.” Ten nations aside from the U.S. have now issued terrorism alerts about Thailand to their citizens.

Categories
Journalism

Self promotion: New WSJ Piece on a Unique Villa in Cambodia

Just briefly: I neglected to mention that a Wall Street Journal “House of the Day” feature I wrote about a unique villa in Cambodia ran last month.

It’s called “Over the Water, on a Private Island in Cambodia.” Give it a look.

On a related note, I noticed that the Phuket sea-side villa I wrote about in Sept. made it onto Scene Asia’s Asia Houses of the Year list.

Categories
Thai politics Thailand

Bangkok Terrorism Threat Update

A few stories to note today:

120116114839 thailand terror suspect story top

The Bangkok Post reports:

A detained Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist suspect was part of a planned attack on the Chabad Jewish community centre near Khao San road in Bangkok, according to a news website which specialises in intelligence reporting.

Debkafile said on Tuesday that its sources confirmed that Hussein Atris, who was arrested by Thai police at Suvarnabhumi airport on Friday night, was part of a planned attack along the lines of al Qaeda’s attack on the Mumbai Chabad [Jewish] centre in 2008, involving the taking of hostages and blowing up the building. Eight Jews were killed in the attack.

The DEBKAfile story, for the record, says:

The Thai police’s capture of a Lebanese-Swedish Hizballah suspect, who was charged Monday, Jan. 16, thwarted a terrorist attack on Bet Habad in Bangkok, involving the taking of hostages and blowing up the building. It was to have followed the same lines as al Qaeda’s 2008 assault on the Mumbai Habad center which killed 8 Israelis and Jews – only more ambitious. The Habad Bangkok is much larger: its hostel has rooms for dozens of lodgers. A second team was to have hit the Khao San Road restaurants popular with Israelis and Americans in a coordinated operation.

I am unfamiliar with DEBKAfile, but as I mentioned on Twitter earlier, this report relies exclusively on anonymous sources. Just noting it for the record. I have heard no official comment along these lines.

More info on Debka is available on their site. There’s also a Wikipedia page with more info on the site.

Meanwhile, CNN.com reports:

Thai police said Tuesday that they would seek court permission to extend the detention of a Lebanese man they have charged with illegal possession of explosive materials.

The move comes amid tension after the United States and Israel warned their citizens in Bangkok on Friday of the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack.

The police charged the man, Atris Hussein, on Monday after finding “initial chemical materials that could produce bombs” in an area just outside Bangkok. The police said Hussein, who also holds a Swedish passport, led them to the location.

(All emphasis mine.)

(Thanks to @benjalord for pointing out the DEBKAfile story.)

Image via CNN.com

Categories
Thai politics

Bangkok Terrorism Threat: Last Post of the Day

Last post of the day on this topic, I promise.

I wanted to point out an interesting Bangkok Post story from this afternoon. It includes some details on the materials seized by police:

More than 200 police raided a three-storey commercial building in Mahachai area after Atris Hussein, a Lebanese man carrying a Swedish passport who has suspected links to the Hezbollah militant group was arrested at Suvarnabhumi airport on Friday evening. He confessed that explosive ingredients were hidden there, Pol Gen Priewpan said.

He said 4,380 kilogrammes of urea based fertiliser, 260 litres of ammonium nitrate and 400 electric fans were found on the second floor of the building. The police also discovered many pairs of slippers, A4 paper and 400 table fans on the ground floor.

The terror suspect told investigators that the terrorist group had not been planning attacks in Thailand. It just wanted to hide the components in Thailand. They were then to be concealed inside table fan boxes and shipped to other countries, according to the suspect, Pol Gen Priewpan said.

And then there’s this quote:

“Mr Atris wanted to tell the Thai people that they should not be worried as there will be no terrorist attacks in Thailand, definitely,” said the police chief.

(All emphasis mine.)

On that note, I’m off to bed.

Hasta mañana.

Categories
Thailand

Al Jazeera Video Report on Bangkok Terrorism Threat

Al Jazeera’s Wayne Hay (@wayne_hay) has a video package summing up the latest in the Bangkok terrorism threat story.

The report includes some pictures of police carting away the suspected bomb making materials. Worth a watch.

The YouTube video is embedded above and online here.