Thailand-Cambodia face-off: Borders shut, F-16 deployed, civilian killed
Tired of too many ads? go ad free now
Tensions spiked after a landmine blast wounded five Thai soldiers, prompting Thailand to expel the Cambodian ambassador and close all northeastern border crossings. Cambodia retaliated by downgrading diplomatic ties and evacuating its embassy in Bangkok. Military exchanges have since been reported at several flashpoints near the border provinces of Surin and Oddar Meanchey.
Here are 10 key points about the Cambodia-Thailand conflict:
Fighting breaks out near ancient temples
The clashes began early Thursday morning around the Ta Muen and Ta Moan Thom temples, areas long claimed by both countries.
According to the Thai army, Cambodian troops fired first after Thai soldiers spotted a drone and then six armed soldiers approaching. The Thai side said it responded after coming under fire. Cambodia, however, claimed its troops were defending national territory against a Thai 'armed assault'.
Civilian and military casualties mount
At least one Thai civilian has been killed and three others injured, including a five-year-old boy, due to artillery fire from Cambodia, Thai officials say.
Thailand also reported that seven of its soldiers have been wounded. In a Facebook post, the Thai army accused Cambodian forces of firing BM-21 rockets into Surin's Kap Choeng district, hitting civilian areas.
Cambodia accuses Thailand of bombing and aggression
Cambodia's Ministry of National Defence accused Thailand of 'brutal and illegal military aggression,' claiming Thai jets dropped bombs on Cambodian territory and used heavy weaponry. A spokesperson said these actions 'violated international law' and ASEAN norms, while adding that Cambodia's forces were prepared to defend its sovereignty 'at all costs'.
Tired of too many ads? go ad free now
Thai hospital reportedly attacked by Cambodia
According to a Thai army Facebook post, Cambodian artillery targeted Phanom Dong Rak Hospital in Surin province. While details remain limited, the alleged strike on a medical facility escalated fears of civilian targeting, leading Thailand to issue evacuation warnings and bolster border defences in affected areas.
Thailand closes borders, urges evacuation
Thailand responded by closing all border checkpoints with Cambodia and advising Thai nationals to evacuate Cambodia if possible.
The Thai embassy in Phnom Penh posted alerts urging citizens to leave unless absolutely necessary. A livestream video from Thai border villages showed civilians fleeing into bunkers as explosions echoed nearby.
Diplomatic ties collapse rapidly
In less than 48 hours, both countries expelled each other's ambassadors. Cambodia downgraded diplomatic ties to their 'lowest level', pulling most staff from its Bangkok embassy. These moves followed Thai claims that Cambodia planted new landmines in contested territory—a charge Phnom Penh has denied.
Landmines ignite the latest flare-up
Wednesday's landmine blast that injured five Thai soldiers was the immediate trigger. Thailand claims the mines were newly planted Russian-made devices, violating a previous agreement that marked the area as safe. Cambodia insisted the blast occurred on its side of the border and blamed leftover unexploded ordnance from past wars.
Cambodia's conscription and military posture
In a notable domestic development, Cambodia recently announced it would revive a dormant mandatory military draft law to conscript civilians starting next year.
Prime Minister Hun Manet declared Cambodia had "no choice but to respond with armed force against armed aggression", emphasising military readiness amid growing hostilities.
Political fallout in Thailand
The dispute has triggered political instability in Thailand. Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra was suspended from office earlier this month over an ethics probe linked to her handling of the crisis. A leaked call between her and former Cambodian leader Hun Sen—criticised as undermining the Thai military—has deepened divisions at home.
Historical disputes and ICJ rulings
The border row, especially around the 1,000-year-old Preah Vihear temple, is not new. The International Court of Justice awarded the temple to Cambodia in 1962, but Thai nationalist groups continue to contest the ruling. Fresh ICJ intervention in 2011 reaffirmed Cambodia's claim, yet tensions have persisted, erupting periodically into armed confrontations.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
The chatbot culture wars are here
For much of the past decade, America's partisan culture warriors have fought over the contested territory of social media — arguing about whether the rules on Facebook and Twitter were too strict or too lenient, whether YouTube and TikTok censored too much or too little and whether Silicon Valley tech companies were systematically silencing right-wing voices. Those battles aren't over. But a new one has already started. This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased. Conservatives have been taking aim at AI companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading AI developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech. And this month, Missouri's Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a 'new wave of censorship' by training their AI systems to give biased responses to questions about President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called 'woke AI.' 'Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,' he said in a speech. 'The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries.' The order was announced alongside a new White House AI action plan that will require AI developers that receive federal contracts to ensure that their models' outputs are 'objective and free from top-down ideological bias.' Republicans have been complaining about AI bias since at least early last year, when a version of Google's Gemini AI system generated historically inaccurate images of the American Founding Fathers, depicting them as racially diverse. That incident drew the fury of online conservatives, and led to accusations that leading AI companies were training their models to parrot liberal ideology. Since then, top Republicans have mounted pressure campaigns to try to force AI companies to disclose more information about how their systems are built, and tweak their chatbots' outputs to reflect a broader set of political views. Now, with the White House's executive order, Trump and his allies are using the threat of taking away lucrative federal contracts — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI were recently awarded Defense Department contracts worth as much as $200 million — to try to force AI companies to address their concerns. The order directs federal agencies to limit their use of AI systems to those that put a priority on 'truth-seeking' and 'ideological neutrality' over disfavored concepts such as diversity, equity and inclusion. It also directs the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to agencies about which systems meet those criteria. If this playbook sounds familiar, it's because it mirrors the way Republicans have gone after social media companies for years — using legal threats, hostile congressional hearings and cherry-picked examples to pressure companies into changing their policies, or removing content they don't like. Critics of this strategy call it 'jawboning,' and it was the subject of a high-profile Supreme Court case last year. In that case, Murthy v. Missouri, it was Democrats who were accused of pressuring social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to take down posts on topics such as the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud, and Republicans challenging their tactics as unconstitutional. (In a 6-3 decision, the court rejected the challenge, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.) Now, the parties have switched sides. Republican officials, including several Trump administration officials I spoke to who were involved in the executive order, are arguing that pressuring AI companies through the federal procurement process is necessary to stop AI developers from putting their thumbs on the scale. Is that hypocritical? Sure. But recent history suggests that working the refs this way can be effective. Meta ended its long-standing fact-checking program this year, and YouTube changed its policies in 2023 to allow more election denial content. Critics of both changes viewed them as capitulation to right-wing critics. This time around, the critics cite examples of AI chatbots that seemingly refuse to praise Trump, even when prompted to do so, or Chinese-made chatbots that refuse to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. They believe developers are deliberately baking a left-wing worldview into their models, one that will be dangerously amplified as AI is integrated into fields such as education and health care. There are a few problems with this argument, according to legal and tech policy experts I spoke to. The first, and most glaring, is that pressuring AI companies to change their chatbots' outputs may violate the First Amendment. In recent cases like Moody v. NetChoice, the Supreme Court has upheld the rights of social media companies to enforce their own content moderation policies. And courts may reject the Trump administration's argument that it is trying to enforce a neutral standard for government contractors, rather than interfering with protected speech. 'What it seems like they're doing is saying, 'If you're producing outputs we don't like, that we call biased, we're not going to give you federal funding that you would otherwise receive,'' Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said. 'That seems like an unconstitutional act of jawboning.' There is also the problem of defining what, exactly, a 'neutral' or 'unbiased' AI system is. Today's AI chatbots are complex, probability-based systems that are trained to make predictions, not give hard-coded answers. Two ChatGPT users may see wildly different responses to the same prompts, depending on variables like their chat histories and which versions of the model they're using. And testing an AI system for bias isn't as simple as feeding it a list of questions about politics and seeing how it responds. Samir Jain, a vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said the Trump administration's executive order would set 'a really vague standard that's going to be impossible for providers to meet.' There is also a technical problem with telling AI systems how to behave. Namely, they don't always listen. Just ask Elon Musk. For years, Musk has been trying to create an AI chatbot, Grok, that embodies his vision of a rebellious, 'anti-woke' truth seeker. But Grok's behavior has been erratic and unpredictable. At times, it adopts an edgy, far-right personality, or spouts antisemitic language in response to user prompts. (For a brief period last week, it referred to itself as 'Mecha-Hitler.') At other times, it acts like a liberal — telling users, for example, that human-made climate change is real, or that the right is responsible for more political violence than the left. Recently, Musk has lamented that AI systems have a liberal bias that is 'tough to remove, because there is so much woke content on the internet.' Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that 'controlling the many subtle answers that an AI will give when pressed is a leading-edge technical problem, often governed in practice by messy interactions made between a few earlier decisions.' It's not, in other words, as straightforward as telling an AI chatbot to be less woke. And while there are relatively simple tweaks that developers could make to their chatbots — such as changing the 'model spec,' a set of instructions given to AI models about how they should act — there's no guarantee that these changes will consistently produce the behavior conservatives want. But asking whether the Trump administration's new rules can survive legal challenges, or whether AI developers can actually build chatbots that comply with them, may be beside the point. These campaigns are designed to intimidate. And faced with the potential loss of lucrative government contracts, AI companies, like their social media predecessors, may find it easier to give in than to fight. 'Even if the executive order violates the First Amendment, it may very well be the case that no one challenges it,' Lakier said. 'I'm surprised by how easily these powerful companies have folded.'
The Hindu
2 hours ago
- The Hindu
Social media companies not liable for 2022 Buffalo mass shooting, New York court rules
Several social media companies should not be held liable for helping an avowed white supremacist who killed 10 Black people in 2022 at a Buffalo, New York grocery store, a divided New York state appeals court ruled on Friday. Reversing a lower court ruling, the state Appellate Division in Rochester said defendants including Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram, Google's YouTube, and Reddit were entitled to immunity under a federal law that protects online platforms from liability over user content. The case arose from Payton Gendron's racially motivated mass shooting at Tops Friendly Markets on May 14, 2022. Relatives and representatives of victims, as well as store employees and customers who witnessed the attack, claimed the defendants' platforms were defective because they were designed to addict and radicalise users like Gendron. Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Other defendants included Alphabet, Discord, 4chan, Snap and Twitch, all of which Gendron used, the mid-level state appeals court said. Writing for a 3-2 majority, Justice Stephen Lindley said holding social media companies liable would undermine the intent behind Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, to promote development of and competition on the internet while keeping government interference to a minimum. While condemning Gendron's conduct and "the vile content that motivated him to assassinate Black people simply because of the color of their skin," Lindley said a liability finding would "result in the end of the Internet as we know it." "Because social media companies that sort and display content would be subject to liability for every untruthful statement made on their platforms, the Internet would over time devolve into mere message boards," he wrote. Justices Tracey Bannister and Henry Nowak dissented, saying the defendants force-fed targeted content to keep users engaged, be it videos about cooking or puppies, or white nationalist vitriol. "Such conduct does not maintain the robust nature of Internet communication or preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet contemplated by the protections of immunity," the judges wrote. Gendron pleaded guilty to state charges including murder and terrorism motivated by hate, and was sentenced in February 2023 to life in prison without parole. He faces related federal charges that could lead to the death penalty. Questioning of potential jurors in that case is scheduled to begin in August 2026, court records show.
News18
2 hours ago
- News18
Thailand-Cambodian PMs To Meet In Malaysia For Peace Talks Border Conflict Anwar Ibrahim
Thailand's acting Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai and Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Manet will meet on Monday in Malaysia for peace talks over their border conflict, Bangkok said on Thai premier's office said the talks would be hosted by Malaysian Prime Minister and ASEAN chair Anwar Ibrahim, 'with Hun Manet, Prime Minister of Cambodia, to personal News18 Mobile App -
