Affordable internet key to boosting Indonesia's digital economy: govt
Affordable internet access is essential to unlocking a new wave of national digital economic growth, Deputy Minister of ...

"UNLOCKING" · 총 19건
필터 보기현재 지수
49.5
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 80,281건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 49.5(균형)입니다. 긍정 10,015건(12.5%)·중립 57,947건(72.2%)·부정 12,319건(15.3%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 19.9(중도 균형)입니다.
Affordable internet access is essential to unlocking a new wave of national digital economic growth, Deputy Minister of ...

Two-way tourism has been a focus in driving Chinese arrivals back to pre-pandemic levels, said the Association of Thai Travel Agents (Atta) during a roadshow in new potential cities in China.
Unlocking fresh investment in the North Sea could supply the fuel for 20 million cars until the end of the decade, a new analysis has found.
Union Minister G. Kishan Reddy says the Centre is prioritising both surface and underground coal gasification to reduce import dependence while unlocking high-value by-products such as ammonia, methanol, hydrogen, fertilisers, chemicals and petrochemicals
US President Donald Trump has spent years attacking his predecessor Barack Obama for what he called a giveaway to Iran. The image of "pallets of cash" became one of his favorite political talking points, a symbol of what he portrayed as weakness in dealing with Tehran.Yet the irony of the current moment is becoming harder to ignore. As negotiations to end the latest US-Iran confrontation stall, Iran is demanding access to billions of dollars in frozen assets, and the success of any deal may depend on whether Trump agrees to some form of financial relief. The president who built his Iran policy around rejecting Obama's approach may now find himself confronting the same reality that faced previous administrations -- diplomacy with Iran often comes with a price tag.Pay $12 billion now, and $12 billion laterAn indication of how central money has become to the negotiations came from Mohsen Rezaei, military adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, in an exclusive interview with CNN. According to Rezaei, the negotiations have reached a deadlock and the responsibility for breaking it lies squarely with Trump. He said Iran wants the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets, with $12 billion to be made available immediately after an interim agreement is signed and another $12 billion at a later stage.Also Read | Iran says frozen funds key to progress in US talksRezaei termed the demand not a concession from Washington but as a test of American intentions. "If he wants to reach an agreement with Iran, this $24 billion is a test of trust that Iran wants to have with Trump," he told CNN. "This is our own money, not America's money."The significance of the demand extends beyond the amount involved. By publicly linking the prospects of peace to the release of frozen assets, Iran has effectively made financial compensation the central political hurdle in the negotiations.Trump's Obama problemFor Trump, the issue is not as much financial as deeply political. CNN reported that Trump has repeatedly instructed his team that any agreement with Iran must be viewed as stronger than the 2015 nuclear accord negotiated by Obama. Equally important, he wants to avoid anything that resembles the controversial payments that became a focal point of Republican criticism a decade ago.Throughout his political career, Trump has portrayed the Obama administration's handling of Iran as evidence of weak leadership. Recently, he revived his criticism of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, describing it as a horrible deal and insisting that any agreement he reaches will be far better. That political history now threatens to constrain his negotiating options. A deal that includes billions of dollars flowing to Iran could invite immediate comparisons with the very agreement he spent years denouncing.Also Read | Iran retains about 22% of missile stockpile, says TrumpWhat Obama actually didThe comparison is unavoidable because financial relief was also a major feature of the Obama-era approach. The JCPOA, finalized in 2015 after negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers, imposed strict limits on Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. The agreement capped uranium enrichment, reduced centrifuge capacity and established what experts described as one of the most intrusive inspection regimes ever negotiated.The deal also coincided with the release of $1.7 billion to Iran, a figure that Trump and other critics frequently cited as evidence of appeasement. Critics argued that sanctions relief and financial compensation rewarded Iranian behaviour across the region.Supporters of the agreement took a different view. They argued that much of the money involved consisted of Iranian assets that had already belonged to Iran and that the deal successfully halted Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon while providing unprecedented transparency into its nuclear program.Former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who helped negotiate the agreement, told CNBC that the JCPOA's most important achievement was its extraordinary verification system. Arms control experts similarly maintain that the deal effectively constrained Iran's nuclear ambitions before it unraveled.Why the current situation is more difficultThe irony for Trump is that negotiations now are taking place under conditions far less favorable than those that existed in 2015. After the US withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, Iran gradually breached many of the agreement's restrictions. It expanded uranium enrichment, accumulated a much larger stockpile of nuclear material and scaled back some transparency measures.Many think that any new agreement must address a more advanced Iranian nuclear programme and a more complicated political environment. There is also the added challenge of rebuilding trust after years of mutual escalation. That reality means economic incentives have become even more important. Tehran is demanding tangible benefits upfront rather than promises of future relief. From Iran's perspective, accepting new restrictions without immediate financial gains would be politically difficult.Trump's search for a political workaroundTrump's advisers are acutely aware of the political risks. According to CNN, administration officials are exploring mechanisms that would allow Iran to receive financial relief without creating the appearance of a direct US payment. One possibility involves third countries such as Qatar releasing funds. Another would permit access to frozen assets while restricting their use to humanitarian purchases such as food, medicine and agricultural goods. There have also been discussions about creating reconstruction funds financed largely by Gulf states rather than the United States.These proposals reflect an important reality. The debate is no longer about whether Iran should receive economic relief at some stage. It is increasingly about how that relief can be structured so that Trump can claim he has not repeated Obama's mistakes. In that sense, the dispute is becoming as much about political messaging as about financial policy.Leverage versus peaceThe White House remains reluctant to surrender what it views as one of its strongest bargaining tools. Trump has publicly insisted that the United States will retain control over frozen Iranian funds until Iran meets Washington's demands. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similarly emphasised that sanctions relief should follow compliance rather than precede it.The administration's concern is straightforward. Once funds are released, Washington loses a major source of leverage. That leverage could prove critical during the highly technical second phase of negotiations focused on Iran's nuclear program. Iran, however, sees the issue differently. For Tehran, immediate access to frozen assets is evidence that the United States is negotiating in good faith. Without such a gesture, Iranian leaders appear unwilling to commit themselves to a broader settlement. That difference in perspective has created the current impasse.The choice facing TrumpThe strategic dilemma confronting Trump is becoming increasingly clear. He can maintain a hard line and refuse any significant financial concession, preserving political consistency but risking the collapse of negotiations. Or he can accept some form of economic relief for Iran, potentially unlocking a broader peace agreement but exposing himself to accusations that he has embraced a version of the same approach he once condemned.Rezaei's comments to CNN show how central that decision has become. By presenting the release of $24 billion as a test of trust, Iran has effectively challenged Trump to choose between ideological purity and diplomatic pragmatism. For a president who built his Iran policy in opposition to Obama's legacy, that may be the most uncomfortable choice of all. If peace ultimately requires releasing billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, Trump would be seen as eating his words when he had asked Iran for complete surrender.
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IN November 1970, the Bhola cyclone killed up to half a million people in East Pakistan. Yahya Khan’s government introduced a 10 per cent surcharge to fund emergency relief. Bangladesh became independent 13 months later. The affected territory was gone. The levy remained. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government absorbed the revenue into general federal accounts in 1972. No accounting was published. In 1985, Gen Zia introduced the Iqra surcharge, framed as an education fund. The revenue balanced federal operating accounts. No alternative education instrument replaced it when it was abolished under the IMF’s insistence. The template was set. Fifty years later, Pakistan has not deviated from this template. What began as a cyclone surcharge is now a Rs1.55 trillion instrument misclassified as non-tax revenue. The architecture is identical but the scale has changed. Pakistan has pursued this through two parallel tracks. The first collected resources in the name of disaster relief, later rebranded as climate resilience as floods became more frequent. The second imposed non-tax revenue through petroleum pricing. The petroleum development levy (PDL), a general development surcharge dating to 1961, was structurally insulated in 2010 to bypass provincial NFC sharing. It grew steadily, crossing Rs100 billion annually by the mid-2010s and exceeding Rs200bn by FY2018-19. Although never formally framed as a climate instrument, it has acquired a distinct environmental gloss, culminating in the climate support levy of 2026. The flooding track: The 1973 floods wiped out three million houses and erased a year of economic growth. Bhutto created the Federal Flood Commission. Three consecutive 10-year national flood protection plans followed, running from 1978 to 2008 across four governments, each funded through the PSDP with no ring-fencing. Pakistan suffered catastrophic floods throughout. Three decades of federal plans, without a rupee ring-fenced. No relief fund has ever been legally ring-fenced. Since 1992, when Nawaz Sharif’s government first activated the prime minister’s relief fund model, Pakistan has deployed the same instrument at least five times across floods and earthquakes. The design is deliberate: by classifying flood revenue as voluntary donations rather than taxation, governments simultaneously escape parliamentary scrutiny, judicial challenge and NFC distribution requirements. Benazir Bhutto deployed the identical model after the 1994 floods. So did every government after 2010. The 2010 floods affected 20m people and caused $43bn in damages. The government announced a flood relief surcharge projecting Rs40bn, collected it, and absorbed it into the federal consolidated fund while simultaneously negotiating IMF targets. After the 2022 floods, the government quietly renamed its existing super tax: Section 4B, whose stated purpose was rehabilitation of temporarily displaced persons, became Section 4C, a super tax on high-earning persons. The humanitarian justification was dropped without explanation. The revenue mechanism stayed the same. Three findings hold across every instrument. No relief fund has ever been legally ring-fenced: every prime minister, president and chief minister relief fund is credited to the account of the federation, making it general government money. International pledges substitute for domestic accountability rather than supplementing it. And every fund since 2005 has carried a public commitment to publish an independent audit. None has been published. Justice Saqib Nisar’s 2018 dam fund collected Rs11.5bn from the public in the name of water security, earned Rs2.2bn in mark-up over six years, and was quietly transferred to the public account of the federation in 2024 without a single rupee spent on the stated objective. If money raised under the highest judicial authority in the country can still end up in the general budget, no argument remains that any executive fund can be trusted to do otherwise. The petroleum track: Climate change has been weaponised as a justification to tax citizens. Gen Musharraf used clean-fuel rhetoric to justify development surcharges during the CNG transition without a single rupee being traced to a cleaner fuel outcome. In 2009, the Supreme Court under chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry ruled that revenue collected without a verifiable service to the payer is a tax, not a surcharge, and that imposing it by executive notification violates Article 77. The response was the Petroleum Products (Development Levy) Amendment Act, 2009, that satisfied the court’s procedural requirement while eliminating any ring-fencing obligation. The consequences are calculable. At Rs1.55tr, the PDL represents 10-11 per cent of total federal revenue. Under the seventh NFC Award, provinces are entitled to 57.5pc of all taxes. If correctly classified, Punjab would receive Rs461bn annually, Sindh Rs219bn, KP Rs13bn and Balochistan Rs81bn. They receive zero. It is a tax called a levy because of the NFC Award. The classification is deliberate. PML-N elevated PDL margins in 2016 on the justification that the premium would fund cleaner fuel production. The revenue went instead to IPP capacity charge payments and circular debt service, which reached Rs1.14tr by FY2017-18. The revenue collected in the name of cleaner fuel financed the liabilities of a fossil-fuel-dependent power grid. The PTI then scaled the PDL to Rs424bn, the highest in Pakistan’s history, while branding it a carbon instrument aligned with its Ten Billion Tree Tsunami project. In March 2022, it froze the levy at zero for political reasons. The IMF suspended a $1bn tranche within weeks. A climate-labelled levy had become a macroeconomic emergency. Across 23 programmes since 1958, the IMF has required Pakistan to enhance the PDL without requiring it to distribute the revenue constitutionally. The way forward: Can the PDL be ring-fenced or audited? Ring-fencing 15pc of PDL collections into a sovereign climate fund (SCF) would deploy Rs232bn annually, shared with provinces under the NFC Award and structured as a statutory trust. Following global benchmarks, it can leverage private investment at a ratio of one to four, unlocking approximately Rs900bn in total climate finance conditioned on climate resilience outcomes aligned with Pakistan’s commitments. The IMF objection is predictable but answerable. The SCF does not reduce total PDL collections. Tabled in the next programme negotiation as a structural benchmark rather than a provincial concession, the IMF’s incentives align with the reform rather than against it. The question is not whether Pakistan can create such a fund. It is whether any government is willing to surrender a revenue stream that it has prized too much to ring-fence. The writer is a climate expert. Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2026
With the race effectively deadlocked, even modest shifts among one group of voters could help determine who emerges from one of the most competitive mayoral primaries Los Angeles has seen in years.
Hungary's new PM Peter Magyar commits to a sweeping package of anti-corruption and rule-of-law reforms.
According to the statement, the EAEU member states support "unlocking the potential of artificial intelligence systems and ensuring their inclusive, safe, and responsible application in the economic sectors of member states"
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How a new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium A new method for extracting lithium could cut costs and emissions from one of the world’s most important materials for EVs…
[New Zimbabwe] President Emmerson Mnangagwa has underscored the importance of access to water as a key enabler to unlocking the African continent's potential to develop and industrialise.
About 20 years ago, I lived in a European city where everything seemed to work against me. No matter how hard I tried, nothing moved. The heavens felt like brass, and every effort produced frustration instead of progress. After three years of unfruitfulness, I threw myself into intense prayer, seeking clarity from the Lord. In […] The post The three secrets for unlocking stubborn gates, By Ayo Akerele appeared first on Premium Times Nigeria.
Thailand envoy Siriporn Tantipanyathep advocates for unlocking the Andaman Islands’ potential to enhance regional growth through tourism and trade cooperation
Over the next few decades, billions of autonomous, AI-powered robots will work alongside people in factories, perform tedious tasks in warehouses, care for the elderly, assist in unsafe disaster areas, deliver packages and food to our doorsteps, and eventually help out in our homes. Some will look like us, and many won’t. What is certain is that regardless of form factor, robots will all rely heavily on AI in order to deliver real-world value. In 2025, total investments in robotics companies reached a record US $40.7 billion, accounting for 9 percent of all venture funding. The multibillion dollar question therefore is this: What will it take for AI-powered robots to begin to have a serious economic impact? Many of today’s robotics and AI companies are making bold claims, such as that humanoid robots will soon be coming into our homes, but there’s still a big gap between promise and reality. The promise of robots that live and work alongside us has been the stuff of science fiction for a very long time. And while many programmers have tried to make that promise a reality, the physical world is just too complicated for traditional computer programs to handle the endless complexity it presents. Thanks to AI, robots are no longer being programmed—instead, they learn to operate in the real world. With enough practice, they can learn to perceive and understand the world around them, reason about that world, and use that reason and understanding to perform tasks that are useful, reliable, and safe. The two of us have worked at the forefront of AI and robotics for the last decade, as a Professor in Robotics at Oregon State University and Co-Founder of Agility Robotics, and as former CEO of the Everyday Robots moonshot at Google X. Our experience deploying AI-powered robots in real-world settings has given us a perspective on where AI can be used to great benefit in complex robotic systems in the near term and where we are still on the frontier of science fiction. We believe AI will enable an inflection point in robotics advances, but that it will be through the well-engineered application of coordinated systems of different AI tools rather than a single ChatGPT-style breakthrough. As the excitement around AI is matched only by the uncertainty of what will be possible, here are five hard truths that will define AI in robotics. 1. The YouTube-to-Reality Gap Is Real For years, we have been seeing videos on YouTube with humanoid robots performing amazing moves on everything from a dance floor to an obstacle course. The inside knowledge in robotics is to “never trust a YouTube robot video.” The gap between real robots that can perform real work in unstructured human environments and carefully scripted and edited robot performances remains significant. The latest performance to get a lot of attention was a martial arts show featuring Unitree humanoid robots performing with children at the Chinese 2026 Spring Festival Gala. While impressive, this falls into a long lineage of tightly scripted robotic performances, where everything has been carefully choreographed and planned in advance. The low-level controls, synchronization, and choreography were stunning, yet the Spring Gala robot performance showed a level of autonomy and intelligence much closer to industrial robots building cars in a factory than something that will show up in your living room any time soon. Seeing these kinds of demos nevertheless raises questions about where robotics really is. If robots can perform kung fu moves and do backflips and dance, why aren’t they also showing up on factory floors yet? And why can’t they do the dishes in my home after dinner? The simple answer is this: Making AI-powered robots capable of performing general tasks in varied human environments is still really hard. While impressive technological feats like those at the Spring Festival may make it look like we could be very close, the use of AI in these demos is only for low-level motor control (to keep the robots from falling over) and therefore is only a small part of the solution for robots to be general purpose in the real, unstructured spaces where we humans live and work. 2. Data Is An Unsolved Challenge Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude were initially trained on an internet-scale database of text. The world woke up one day in late 2022 to ChatGPT demonstrating that AI computers could suddenly “speak” to us in prose or verse and about seemingly any topic. LLMs have turned out to generalize well and are now able to take multimodal input (text, images, video) and produce multimodal output. Importantly, the corpus of training data was both enormous and human-generated, which are characteristics that form the gold standard for AI training. The fastest path to robots as part of everyday life may emerge through a range of robot forms performing increasingly sophisticated applications and employing a range of AI tools.Agility Robotics Giving AI a body (in the form of a robot), so that it can engage with people in the physical world, continues to be a very difficult and broadly unsolved problem. AI models for general-purpose robotics must simultaneously satisfy multiple, often conflicting, physical, geometric, and temporal limitations while operating in unstructured, dynamic environments. In order to generalize, robot models need to be trained on data gathered in a high-dimensional configuration space, where “dimensions” represent text, lighting conditions, degrees of freedom, joint limits, velocities, force, and safety boundaries, just to mention a few. Importantly, this must be good data—it must contain many examples from what amounts to an infinite number of possible configurations in the physical world. Since there are very few existing sources of data like this, approaches like teleoperation, video analysis, motion capture of humans, and self-exploration in simulation and in the real world are all seen as important ways to collect data. It’s a herculean task. For example, at Everyday Robots at Google X, we ran 240 million robot instances in our simulator over the course of 2022 to collect training data, mostly to train a trash-sorting model. Similar amounts of data will be needed for every skill to get to a similar level of capability, which is not yet human level. 3. There Will Be No Single Robot AI We are far away from a moment where a single AI model might allow general-purpose robots to live and work alongside us. General-purpose robots can have wheels or legs. They can have one, two, three, or more arms. Some have propellers and can fly, while others may be designed to operate under water. Some will drive on busy roads. The physical world is infinitely varied and complex. And then there are all the people and other animals that will be surrounding the robots. How do you train a model to operate a robot safely and reliably in all of these settings? The simple answer is: You don’t. At least not for quite some time. We believe the winning AI architecture leading to the next big breakthroughs in general-purpose robotics will be “agentic AI” for robots, which are high-level coordinating models that can reason, plan, use tools, and learn from outcomes to execute complex tasks with limited supervision. Agentic, high-level models running on robots will invoke a system of specialized ones for different types of tasks. We will likely soon see multiple robots collaborating and coordinating with each other through their onboard agentic AI models. AI tools are unlocking new and powerful capabilities in robotics, which in turn will enable new solutions and new markets. It’s encouraging to see these new models being made broadly available, some even as open-source solutions. This availability is akin to what happened with the internet: Real progress occurred when it became ubiquitous. We anticipate an inevitable democratization of complex behaviors in robotics with wide access to these AI tools and technologies. 4. Hardware Is Still Very Hard Robots are complex systems with many parts that all need to work together with great precision. For a robot to be useful and safe, every part of it must be coordinated, from its perception systems to the computer controlling it, all the way down to its individual actuators. Actuators—that is, the motors and gears—are a good example of an important part of the robot where what got us here won’t get us there. The actuators used at scale by most industrial robots will not work for robots that will operate in human environments. If these robots accidentally collide with an obstacle, the resulting impacts are harsh, forces are high, and things break. Humans don’t move in this way. We are far more compliant in how we interact with the world, and we’re constantly making contact with our environment and using that contact to help us accomplish things. Consider the challenge of inserting a key in a lock: Humans typically don’t do this by aligning the key perfectly with the keyhole. Instead, we just feel for the edge of the keyhole and jiggle the key in. Robots need to be able to operate in novel ways to achieve comparable capabilities by using a new class of actuators that are sensitive to force and able to have a compliant interaction with the environment. While these kinds of actuators do exist, they are not yet generally available at scale for robot systems designed to operate around people. 5. Real Value Comes From “Easy” Tasks There’s a big difference between tasks that look impressive and real-world tasks that provide value. Robotics is a perfect example of Moravec’s paradox, which states that tasks that are hard for humans are easy for computers (like multiplying two big numbers), and tasks easy for humans (like a toddler’s movements) are extremely difficult for computers and robots. Serving customers is an unforgiving reality check, because customers only care about solving the real problems they have. If we are to deploy AI-based robot solutions, they must outperform the way things are currently done while demonstrating reliable performance metrics and safety. Agility Robotics’ early work to deploy our humanoid robot Digit in customer locations led to the realization that our first obstacle was safety: Robots that balance and manipulate objects in human spaces bring new types of risk to the workplace. In the first humanoid deployments, physical barriers were necessary, and Agility kicked off a multi-year engineering effort to solve the safety challenge, touching nearly every aspect of robot design and relying heavily on new AI-based approaches to human detection and behavior control. Everyday Robots at Google deployed robots in 2019 that worked autonomously in office buildings doing chores like cleaning cafe tables and sorting trash. We quickly learned how “messy” and difficult the real world is for a robot. This experience informed the architecture and deployment of our AI systems while also gathering real-world data that could be combined with simulation data for training and improving models. This focus on creating a product to meet specific customer needs and deploying robots in real-world settings is the only way to inform the structure of the AI tools and infrastructure for near-term utility on a path towards long-term broader capability and generality. There will be no “aha” moment, no silver bullet algorithm, and no volume of data sufficient to produce a general-purpose robot without extensive real-world experience. AI Robots Are Coming, One Step at a Time As we look to the future, there is no doubt that the world is bringing AI into the physical world through robots. We are at the beginning of a “Cambrian explosion“ of useful, intelligent machines. We believe AI is not one tool, but a huge frontier of technical approaches that is unlocking new capabilities so powerful, they will define our economy moving forward. This will happen not in one single definitive moment, but as an ongoing set of small and large breakthroughs, where AI-driven robots begin to provide real value in a few tasks, and then a few more, with impacts unfolding across numerous $100 billion-plus markets that will dramatically improve the quality of our lives.
Break the pattern of unlocking your phone for one thing and then getting sucked into something else. Set up your lock screen to show all the information you need at a glance.
Officials estimate roughly US$170 billion sits outside banks. Unlocking even a fraction of that by putting it to work in the formal financial system could help revive Argentina's economy. Leer más