Supply Chain Trends Reshaping Small Business Operations

In a sprawling palace in western India, the “queen” or Maharani of Baroda welcomes guests with fragrant rose petals, presenting torchlit dances of Hindu myths. Dressed in glittering finery, Radhikaraje Gaekwad is a queen in name only, a modern businesswoman presiding over a world her ancestors once ruled. “The key has been that we have adapted,” the 48-year-old said in her vast Lakshmi Vilas Palace, describing how India’s former royals have found new roles, from cultural ambassadors to...

President Lee Jae Myung’s overseas trips have again drawn attention to South Korea’s shifting political standards, adding to a familiar cycle of disputes over presidential golf and the presidential plane whenever power passes between conservative and liberal administrations. The controversies centre on taxpayer money and the public’s attitudes towards presidential privilege, with governing parties defending certain activities as necessary for diplomacy or official duties and the opposition...

An analysis by Japan’s GMO Internet Group found that a North Korea-linked hacking group was likely behind the cyberattack on the company last month, sources close to the matter said, citing characteristics of the malware used and other traces left by the perpetrators. The company appears to have already reported the matter to the government and will now focus on determining the full circumstances. Kyodo News, working with security experts, also found that five IP addresses used to access a...

Bangkok’s firefighters do more snake catching than firefighting, and Pinyo Pukpinyo trains them. But he refuses to kill the snakes, and he’s running out of containers.

Video game companies have long been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence, using it in its more nascent form to dictate non-player character behaviour, simulate crowds and adjust game difficulty on the fly years before the advent of chatbots like ChatGPT. Today, the technology is increasingly being deployed to write code, create visual assets and even synthesise real-time voice-overs, supplanting humans who would have otherwise done the work. Yet studios do still pay people to animate their...

When Chinese leader Mao Zedong and then US president Richard Nixon ended more than two decades of hostility in the early 1970s and began restoring ties, one powerful force pulling them together was a shared adversary in the form of the Soviet Union. Fast forward to today. The United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, have spent eight years locked in competition and confrontation, from trade and investment to technology, amid mounting fears that they are on a path to inevitable...

Tens of thousands gathered in India’s capital in a clamor of banging drums, chants and billowing flags, with participants from across the country.

Pinyo Pukpinyo, Thailand’s most famous snake catcher, has found the critters slithering in nooks and crannies all over Bangkok. He refuses to kill them.

Tens of thousands of volunteers helped raise 108 Buddhist stupas in Bhutan on Sunday, marking the Himalayan kingdom’s ambitious plans for a “mindfulness” city aimed at driving economic growth. The 15-metre tall solid towers – sacred Buddhist monuments found across the Himalayas – stretch along 12 kilometres (7.5 miles) of riverbank near the Indian border, at the site of the future Gelephu Mindfulness City. More than 40,000 volunteers took part in building the structures as “a physical form of...

Using artificial intelligence to build even smarter systems will make artificial general intelligence (AGI) more achievable, though it would need to be done safely, leading Chinese computer scientist Tang Jie said at an event in Shanghai on Saturday. The remarks underscore how AI companies in the US and China are both chasing the holy grail of recursive self-improvement (RSI), where increasingly powerful AI systems also become better at improving themselves in an ever-accelerating...

Thousands protested in Delhi on Sunday to demand the resignation of India’s election chief over a revision of voter lists, the latest in more than a month of ‌opposition demonstrations challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Led by Congress party chief Rahul Gandhi, Sunday’s protesters say the controversial revision benefits Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Analysts say the protests and growing support for the opposition form the worst crisis for Modi since he came to power in...

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has previewed a plan for a more autonomous AI agent that can handle multiple tasks with minimal human intervention, as it steps up competition with US rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in developing coding assistants. The proposed system, dubbed super agent, aimed to reduce the need for humans to coordinate multiple AI agents and monitor their progress, addressing a key bottleneck in managing today’s increasingly complex workflows, according to a...