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BANGKOK, Thailand -- China's imported electric vehicles (EVs) are heavily denting U.S. and Japanese car sales in Thailand, so Chinese manufacturers are investing more than a billion dollars to assemble their EVs near Bangkok to expand domestic sales and international exports.

Thailand prides itself as "The Detroit of Asia".

Toyota, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Honda, Ford and other manufacturers dominate a swelling domestic market for traditional internal combustion cars fueled by gasoline, diesel, or LPG.

Thailand is Southeast Asia's biggest exporter of those vehicles, rolling out 2.5 million annually.

Those numbers are expected to grow after China recently began exporting its EVs into Thailand's domestic market, while constructing facilities in Thailand to assemble Chinese EVs for additional sales here and abroad.

If the U.S., Europe and elsewhere enforce strict quotas limiting imports of "Made in China" vehicles, future Chinese cars "Made in Thailand" could challenge that.

While people typically tell the truth more easily than telling a lie, when it comes to Gaza, you intentionally lie, tell half the truth, and distort the truth about the reality, thus creating a false narrative to what truly happened in Gaza. Please, let me explain: 

As the 2020 presidential election entered its final stretch, Christina Bobb was not just covering it as a TV newswoman for the pro-Donald Trump One America News Network (OANN). The tall, dark-haired, clear-speaking ex-marine and lawyer was working to overturn it.

When, as expected, President Joe Biden signs off on the Antisemitism Awareness Act the Department of Education will be empowered to send so-called antisemitism monitors to enforce civil rights law at public schools as well as at colleges to observe and report on levels of hostility towards Jews. The monitors’ reports will eventually wind up in Congress which can propose remedies as required, including cutting funding and recommending civil rights charges in extreme cases. One of the more regrettable features of the act is that it accepts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as it applies to the state of Israel, making criticism of the Jewish state ipso facto antisemitism. Its text includes the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” as an antisemitic act. In reality, however, actual antisemitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans claim.

Original at Tom Dispatch

Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.

I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel — literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.

Identity is fluid, because concepts such as culture, history and collective self-perceptions are never fixed. They are in a constant state of flux and revision. 

 For hundreds of years, the map of the Roman Empire seemed more Mediterranean and, ultimately, Middle Eastern than European - per the geographic, or even geopolitical demarcation of today's Europe. 

 Hundreds of years of conflicts, wars and invasions redefined the Roman identity, splitting it, by the end of the fourth century, between West and East. But, even then, the political lines constantly changed, maps were repeatedly redrawn and identities fittingly redefined.