New Delhi — India’s government revoked an order on Wednesday that had directed smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung to install a state-developed and owned security app on all new devices. The move came after two days of criticism from opposition politicians and privacy organizations that the “Sanchar Saathi” app was an effort to snoop on citizens through their phones.  

“Government has decided not to make the pre-installation mandatory for mobile manufacturers,” India’s Ministry of Communications said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. 

The initial order, issued privately to phone makers by the ministry late last month, was leaked to Indian media outlets on Monday. It directed all phone makers to preinstall the Sanchar Saathi (which means Communication Partner in Hindi) app on new phones within 90 days, and also on older phones through software updates. 

The order, reported from Monday by numerous Indian media outlets and later acknowledged by the government, had asked manufacturers to ensure that the functions of the app could not be “disabled or restricted.”

There was an immediate backlash on Monday, with opposition political parties quickly labelling the government software a “snooping app” and drawing parallels to Pegasus, the hacking spyware developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group.

On Tuesday, India’s national Minister of Communications Jyotiraditya Scindia insisted to journalists outside the parliament that the Sanchar Sathi app was non-compulsory and in line with democratic principles. He said smartphone owners could activate the app at their convenience to access its benefits, and they could also delete it from devices at any time. 

He did not, however, say anything on Tuesday to deny or change the order to phone makers to ensure the app was pre-installed. 

On Wednesday, Scindia insisted that “neither is snooping possible, nor it will be done” with the app.

While the order for it to be installed universally was revoked, the government continued defending the app on Wednesday, saying the intent had been to “provide access to cybersecurity to all citizens,” and insisting that it was “secure and purely meant to help citizens.” 

Opposition politicians say “it is a snooping app” 

The government’s U-turn came after sharp criticism from opposition political parties and digital rights advocates.

“It is a snooping app. It’s ridiculous. Citizens have the right to privacy. Everyone must have the right to privacy to send messages to family, friends, without the government looking at everything,” Priyanka Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party, told reporters outside India’s parliament on Tuesday.

“They brought in Pegasus and have been unable to keep it under control. MPs and MLAs all say that their phones are being tapped. For the last 11 years, basic rights of the Indians have been taken away… This is the real violation of National Security,” said Renuka Chowdhury, another Congress member.

Digital privacy advocates also raised concerns about the government order, saying it would breach citizens’ right to privacy in a country with more than 1.2 billion cell phone users.

“No government will ever be expected to acknowledge that a government app is a snooping tool, even in China and Russia, where such apps have been mandated,” Indian technology analyst Prasanto K. Roy told CBS News on Wednesday. “A government statement alone is not adequate to inspire confidence in this.”

Roy said the government should restrict the default permissions settings that enable the app to access data on smartphones to the absolute minimum, and explain why those permissions were deemed necessary. He added that the code for the app should be open-source and published online, to enable independent security professionals to scrutinise it.

“In plain terms, this converts every smartphone sold in India into a vessel for state-mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse, control, or remove,” the Internet for Freedom organization said in a statement Tuesday, before the government revoked its order. “For this to work in practice, the app will almost certainly need system level or root level access … so that it cannot be disabled. That design choice erodes the protections that normally prevent one app from peering into the data of others, and turns Sanchar Saathi into a permanent, non-consensual point of access sitting inside the operating system of every Indian smartphone user.”

Technology analyst Roy told CBS News the real issue was “not about faith in the government’s benevolence,” but rather “concerns about potential access to a wide range of data by many junior or mid-level officials in government or law enforcement,” as there was no clarity about what data could be accessed via the app, or who would have access to it.

Major phone makers did not publicly react to the government order, but the Reuters news agency reported that Apple had planned to refuse to comply.

Indian government says it’s just trying to help

The government argues that the app allows users to track, block and recover lost or stolen smartphones using the device’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), a unique code assigned to all handsets sold around the world. 

It also enables users to check how many unique mobile data connections are registered under their name, which it says will help people identify and disable fraudulent numbers and accounts opened by scammers. 

Other features include tools to report suspected fraudulent calls and to verify the authenticity of devices being used to make purchases, according to officials.

The government said in its multiple statements that the app had already been downloaded 14 million times, and used to help trace 2.6 million lost or stolen phones. It said Sanchar Sathi had helped in the disconnection of over 4 million fraudulent connections, based on citizen reports.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California ramped up its efforts to curb plastic pollution Friday — suing three plastic-bag makers, alleging the companies falsely claimed their products were recyclable.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said companies Novolex Holdings, Inteplast Group and Mettler Packaging violated a state law passed in 2014 that banned plastic bags at grocery store checkouts that weren’t recyclable.

Under the law, shoppers could pay 10 cents for thicker plastic bags that needed to be reusable and recyclable. But the makers of the bags labeled them as recyclable even though they were not — recycling facilities cannot process them and they end up dumped in landfills, incinerated, or in the state’s waterways, Bonta said.

“In California, we’re making it clear,” he said at a news conference. “Truth matters. Public trust matters. Environmental protection matters.”

The companies did not respond to email and phone requests for comment.

The state filed a similar lawsuit against ExxonMobil about a year ago over the oil giant’s plastic products. The lawsuit said the company deceived the public by falsely promising that its plastic products would be recycled. The oil giant said California’s recycling system was ineffective and that the state should have worked with the company to keep plastics out of landfills.

California lawmakers later decided the 2014 law didn’t go far enough. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law last year that will ban all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores starting next year.

At least a dozen states have some type of statewide plastic bag ban, according to the environmental advocacy group Environment America Research and Policy Center. Hundreds of cities also have their own bans.

Bonta announced Friday the state reached settlements with four other companies California alleged violated the 2014 law: Revolution Sustainable Solutions, Metro Poly, PreZero US Packaging and Advance Polybag. The businesses agreed to collectively pay the state nearly $1.8 million and halt plastic bag sales in California after selling the rest of their existing stock.

The lawsuit and settlements hold companies accountable for mislabeling their products as recyclable, said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for environmental group Californians Against Waste.

“Plastic bags are a uniquely wasteful product,” he said in an email. “Nothing we use for minutes should pollute our environment for centuries, especially something so lightweight that it’s practically designed to become litter.”

Chipmaker Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a partnership announced Monday that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centers to ramp up the computing power for the owner of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

Per the letter of intent signed by the companies, the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026. Nvidia and OpenAI said they would be finalizing the details of the arrangement in the coming weeks.

“This partnership complements the deep work OpenAI and Nvidia are already doing with a broad network of collaborators, including Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank and Stargate partners, focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure,” the companies said in a release.

The Nvidia-OpenAI partnership comes about 10 days after OpenAI said it had reached a new tentative agreement that will give Microsoft a $100 billion equity stake in its for-profit corporation. OpenAI is technically controlled by its nonprofit.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and its nonprofit board has continued to control the for-profit subsidiary that now develops and sells its AI products.

OpenAI’s corporate structure and nonprofit mission are the subject of a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk, who helped found the nonprofit research lab and provided initial funding. Musk’s suit seeks to stop OpenAI from taking control of the company away from its nonprofit and alleges it has betrayed its promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.

Earlier this month, the attorneys general of California and Delaware warned OpenAI that they have “serious concerns” about the safety of ChatGPT, especially for children and teens.

The two state officials, who have unique powers to regulate nonprofits such as OpenAI, noted “deeply troubling reports of dangerous interactions between” chatbots and their users, including the suicide of one young Californian after he had prolonged interactions with an OpenAI chatbot. The parents of the 16-year-old California boy, who died in April, sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, last month.

OpenAI says it has 700 million weekly active users.

Also, just last week Nvidia announced that it was investing $5 billion in fellow chipmaker Intel, which has struggled to keep up with the frenzied demand for artificial intelligence.

TRENTON, N.J. — DuPont and two other companies will pay New Jersey up to $2 billion to settle environmental claims stemming from PFAS, commonly referred to as “forever chemicals,” the companies announced Monday.

State Environmental Commissioner Shawn LaTourette said the deal with DuPont, Chemours and Corteva is the largest such settlement in the state’s history. It calls for the companies to pay $875 million over 25 years and create a remediation fund of up $1.2 billion. The companies will split the costs under the deal, which must still be approved by the courts.

PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of chemicals that have been around for decades and have now spread into the nation’s air, water and soil. They are commonly referred to as “forever chemicals.”

DuPont said the settlement will resolve “all pending environmental and other claims” for ”legacy” contamination claims at four sites where the companies operated in the state. It comes just months after the state said chemical manufacturer 3M has agreed to pay up $450 million to resolve lawsuits over natural resource contamination stemming from PFAS.

“Polluters who place profit above public well-being by releasing poisonous PFAS and other contamination in our State can expect to be held responsible to clean up their mess and fully compensate the State and its citizens for the precious natural resources they’ve damaged or destroyed,” LaTourette said.

PFAS were manufactured by companies such as 3M, Chemours and others because they were incredibly useful. They helped eggs slide across non-stick frying pans, ensured that firefighting foam suffocates flames and helped clothes withstand rain and keep people dry.

The chemicals resist breaking down, though, meaning they linger in the environment.

Environmental activists say PFAS makers knew about the health harms of PFAS long before they were made public. The same attributes that make the chemicals so valuable – resistance to breakdown – make them hazardous to people.

PFAS accumulate in the body, which is why the Environmental Protection Agency set their limits for drinking water at 4 parts per trillion for two common types — PFOA and PFOS — that are phased out of manufacturing but still are present in the environment.

Ice cream makers representing about 90% of the U.S. supply of the frozen treat have pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products in less than three years, federal health officials said Monday.

The move is the latest voluntary effort by food manufacturers to heed calls from the Trump administration to remove synthetic dyes over concerns about potential health effects. In recent weeks, companies including Nestle, Kraft Heinz and General Mills said they would pull artificial colors from their foods, too.

“This is a Renaissance moment for health in America,” U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary said at a news conference.

About 40 makers of ice cream and frozen dairy desserts said they would remove seven petroleum-based dyes from their products by 2028, according to Michael Dykes, president of the International Dairy Foods Association. The colors are Red 3, Red 40, Green 3, Blue 1, Blue 2, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. The trade group wouldn’t identify the firms, although Turkey Hill Dairy chief executive Andy Jacobs joined the gathering.

The national focus on artificial food dyes is “a good step to take,” but officials should not ignore larger known contributors to chronic disease, including the added sugars and saturated fat commonly found in ice cream, said Deanna Hoelscher, a University of Texas nutrition expert.

“Just taking out or changing the food dye source is not necessarily going to make it a healthy option,” she said. “It still is a food that should be consumed in moderation.”

However, Makary also hinted that new federal dietary guidelines, expected later this year, would challenge established links between saturated fat and heart disease, ending what he called “a 70-year demonization of natural saturated fat.”

The average American eats about 4 gallons of ice cream a year, the IDFA said.

Health advocates have long called for the removal of artificial dyes from foods, citing mixed studies showing that they may cause some neurobehavioral problems, such as hyperactivity and attention problems, in some children. The Food and Drug Administration has maintained that approved dyes are safe and that “most children have no adverse effects” when consuming foods made with them.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has criticized the dyes and pressured manufacturers to remove them from foods. In their place, manufacturers should use dyes made from fruit juices, plant extracts and other sources, federal officials said.

The FDA has approved new natural color additives in recent months, including a new blue color made from the fruit of the gardenia announced Monday. Gardenia (genipin) blue is approved for use in sports drinks, candies and certain other products, the agency said.

Makary also sent a letter to food manufacturers on Monday that “encourages” them to speed up removal of the dye known as Red 3, which was banned in January. Food makers have until 2027 to remove the dye, which was found to cause cancer in laboratory rats, but not humans.

Some food companies have said they will stop using artificial dyes, but relying on voluntary action rather than regulatory requirements won’t guarantee compliance, said Thomas Galligan, a scientist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.

“Talk is cheap,” Galligan said. “It’s easy for companies to make promises to look like they’re being compliant and generate goodwill among consumers and the Trump administration, but it remains to be seen if they will actually follow through.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

NEW YORK — A New York state law holding gun manufacturers potentially liable when their weapons are used in deadly shootings was upheld Thursday by a federal appeals court.

The ruling Thursday by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan affirmed a decision by an Albany judge.

A three-judge appeals panel said the 2021 New York state law was not unconstitutional or vague. The opinion written by Circuit Judge Eunice C. Lee said a lawsuit seeking to stop the law’s implementation did not show that the law was “unenforceable in all its applications.”

The law requires the gun industry to create reasonable controls to prevent unlawful possession, use, marketing or sale of their products in New York and allows them to be sued for unlawful acts that create or contribute to threats to public health or safety.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association of firearms manufacturers that ships firearms into New York, had sued over the law, saying it was pre-empted by the federal 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which blocks litigation that could destroy the firearms industry.

In May 2022, Judge Mae A. D’Agostino threw out the lawsuit, rejecting arguments that the law’s language did not adequately explain what was prohibited. She said the law closely tracked the language of New York’s general public nuisance law, which has been “good law since 1965.”

Lawyers for the gun manufacturers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Eric Tirschwell, executive director of the nonprofit Everytown Law, praised the ruling. He said the law creates “a new pathway for victims and their families to hold bad actors in the gun industry accountable for their role in fueling the epidemic of gun violence that is ravaging communities across the Empire State.”

Everytown Law and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence were among gun violence protection groups that filed an amicus brief in the case, arguing that the new law “simply does not create the free-for-all” that gun makers predicted.

Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs concurred in the ruling, despite some reservations. He wrote that New York had “contrived a broad public nuisance statute that applies solely to ‘gun industry members’ and is enforceable by a mob of public and private actors.”

And he added: “The intent of Congress when it closes a door is not for States to thus jimmy a window.”

Jacobs, citing a recent Supreme Court ruling, said he agrees with the other two judges on the panel that the law could be applied consistent with the federal law and the U.S. Constitution.

But he also wrote that the New York gun law is “nothing short of an attempt to end-run” the federal law, noting that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said when he signed it that it would “right the wrong” done by the federal law.

“There is some legitimate reach to the law, which suffices for us to affirm the dismissal of this facial challenge. Just how limited that reach is must await future cases,” Jacobs said.

OpenAI is suing Elon Musk for unfair competition and interfering with its business relationships with investors and customers, escalating a legal battle between the ChatGPT maker and the billionaire who helped bankroll the artificial intelligence start…

OAKLAND, Calif. — OpenAI is suing Elon Musk for unfair competition and interfering with its business relationships with investors and customers, escalating a legal battle between the ChatGPT maker and the billionaire who helped bankroll the artificial intelligence startup a decade ago.

The allegations against Musk were filed Wednesday in a federal court in California as a counterclaim to Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which is heading to a jury trial next year.

Musk, an early OpenAI investor who now runs his own AI firm, xAI, began a legal offensive against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman more than a year ago, suing for breach of contract over what he said was the betrayal of its founding aims as a nonprofit research laboratory.

A federal judge in March denied Musk’s request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musk’s claims. She offered to hold a trial later this year, but it has been pushed back to March 2026.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump toured a Boeing airplane to check out new hardware and technology features and highlight the aircraft maker’s delay in delivering updated versions of the Air Force One presidential aircraft, the White House said Saturday.

Trump visited the 13-year-old private aircraft parked at Palm Beach International Airport.

“President Trump is touring a new Boeing plane to checkout the new hardware/technology,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. “This highlights the project’s failure to deliver a new Air Force One on time as promised.”

Air Force One is a modified Boeing 747. Two exist and the president flies on both of the more than 30-year-old planes. Boeing Inc. has the contract to produce updated versions, but delivery has been delayed while the aircraft maker has lost billions of dollars on the project.

Delivery initially was set for 2024, but has been pushed to some time in 2027 for the first plane and in 2028 — Trump’s final year in office — for the second, according to the U.S. Air Force.

Trump has railed against the project’s cost and delivery delays. He told Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk during an online chat in 2024 on Musk’s X social media platform that he was able to cut more than $1 billion from the project by playing hard ball with Boeing during his first term in office.

“Over a course of about four weeks, by my saying I’m not going to do it, I got the price reduced by $1.6 billion for the exact same plane, other than we had a nicer paint job, if you want to know the truth, but for the exact same plane,” Trump said.

Musk, a billionaire, helped bankroll Trump’s 2024 campaign and is leading a new Department of Government Efficiency that is working to shrink the size of government by cutting spending, eliminating agencies and slashing the federal workforce. Musk has been criticized for his methods.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said last month that Musk is working with the company to help speed delivery of the Air Force One replacements.

Trump is also interested in changing the color scheme of Air Force One from light blue to a darker blue. An earlier attempt by Trump to switch the colors was dropped by then-President Joe Biden after a study concluded that doing so would require additional testing and cause further delays, adding to the cost.

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Investors have piled into a bond and loan deal that will hand private equity giant Brookfield a huge $4.5bn dividend, overcoming fears from some money managers that Donald Trump could torpedo a tax break for the company issuing the debt.

The deal is likely to rank among the largest dividend recapitalisations ever completed by a leveraged buyout group, according to PitchBook LCD.

Clarios, a battery maker owned by Brookfield and Canadian pension fund CDPQ, raised $5bn this week in a sign that lenders do not expect the next US president to axe the subsidies in Joe Biden’s marquee Inflation Reduction Act, a move that would put Clarios’s finances at risk.

Clarios was a beneficiary of the IRA, which provides tax credits to companies making batteries in the US. The company makes about a third of the world’s low-voltage car batteries and expected to receive a $1bn benefit in 2024, as well as big tax savings in the coming decade, boosting profits and providing a large dividend to its owners.

But investors have questioned the permanence of those tax breaks during meetings with banks marketing the debt, according to people familiar with the calls. Without the IRA credits, they said the company’s leverage — a measure of its indebtedness compared with its profitability — would look particularly high.

“Even if you take the credit out, [the business] still works,” said one high-yield portfolio manager. “It will still generate cash — but it’s highly leveraged.”

An investor presentation seen by the Financial Times indicated leverage would rise to six times the company’s annual earnings if the tax breaks were scrapped, compared with four times if they remained intact.

President Biden’s landmark climate law included $370bn in subsidies, tax breaks and grants, making the US one of the world’s most attractive destinations for cleantech manufacturing.

Trump, who will be inaugurated into office next week, has vowed to gut key parts of the IRA, which he calls the “green new scam”, injecting uncertainty for cleantech investors.

Analysts with the rating agency S&P Global warned that they would downgrade Clarios’s credit ratings deep into junk territory if it lost its IRA tax break.

The $5bn capital raise will be a boon to investors in Brookfield funds, given private equity firms have struggled to exit investments and return cash to their limited partners over the past three years.

Brookfield’s investors, including CDPQ, will receive a total of $4.5bn in dividends from Clarios, about 1.6 times their original $2.9bn equity investment when they bought the company from industrial conglomerate Johnson Controls in 2019, according to people briefed on the matter.

Clarios will use some of the proceeds from the debt offering to pay down some loans maturing in 2026, according to investors familiar with the transaction.

Brookfield considered selling a minority equity stake in Clarios to large investors such as sovereign wealth funds, but found that buoyant debt markets made the dividend an appealing way to return billions in cash while retaining full ownership.

Demand for the debt was so high that banks increased the size of the capital raise by $500mn to $5bn. Clarios secured a $3.5bn loan that carried an interest rate 2.75 percentage points above the floating interest rate benchmark, or about 7.05 per cent. It also raised a $700mn bond and was finalising a further €800mn loan on Wednesday.

Brookfield declined to comment.

The new deal follows a roughly $9bn dividend raised last year by Belron, a windscreen repair company backed by Clayton Dubilier & Rice, Hellman & Friedman, BlackRock and GIC.

Additional reporting by Amanda Chu

BANGKOK —  Japanese car factories in Thailand — which for decades has been the premiere hub of auto manufacturing in Southeast Asia — are shutting down or scaling back.

Subaru said it will stop producing cars at its plant this month. Suzuki plans to cease operations by the end of 2025. And Honda and Nissan say they are reducing production.

The primary culprit: Chinese electric vehicles.

As the world embraces zero-emission vehicles, Thailand has been courting Chinese automakers, which in their quest for global dominance have spent more than $1.4 billion here as of last year to build EV factories.

“Japanese automakers are under significant pressure to cut costs to compete with Chinese brands,” said Larey Yoopensuk, chairman of the Federation of Thailand Automobile Workers. “They are now questioning whether staying in Thailand is still worthwhile.”

Thailand’s government — which wants 30% of the cars it produces to be electric by 2030 — sees Chinese investment as a crucial piece of the future of its auto industry, which now accounts for 800,000 jobs and 10% of the country’s GDP.

The paradigm shift has become a source of anxiety for Thai auto workers, who have long helped produce Japanese cars and the parts that go into them, including exhaust pipes, brakes and doors. Even if Chinese factories replace Japanese ones, Yoopensuk worried that there may not be a place for him or his colleagues in the new order.

One reason is that Chinese companies in Thailand have historically been intolerant of labor unions.

“Over the past decade, this industry has been booming, with unionized workers achieving better living conditions and high incomes,” said Yoopensuk, who has worked in auto manufacturing for 35 years. “If forced out, many workers — particularly older ones — may struggle to find jobs elsewhere.”

He was also concerned that Chinese EV manufacturers would use more automation and favor immigrants from China and Vietnam over Thai workers when hiring.

“This is an issue we’re pushing back against, encouraging these companies to also create employment opportunities here,” he said.

China’s foray into Thailand’s auto industry could herald what’s to come in other parts of the world, as EV adoption grows and Chinese brands go global. Last year, the Chinese behemoth BYD, which opened a factory in Thailand this summer, briefly surpassed Tesla in global sales.

“I don’t think there is any real precedent where those Chinese EV manufacturers are reshaping the industrial landscape in another country,” said David Williams, an expert on labor standards and supply chains in Asia for the International Labor Organization.

Thailand exports just over two-thirds of the cars it makes, with the biggest share going to Australia followed by Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Its most important market is domestic, and the news has been dismal. Total passenger car sales in Thailand fell 23% through September compared to the same period last year. Experts blamed rising household debt and increasingly stringent rules for securing auto loans.

Electric cars — nearly all of them Chinese — were the one bright spot, with sales up 11%.

Gasoline-powered cars still make up more than 90% of all sales in Thailand, but that is expected to fall as the government continues its push for EVs with subsidies for buyers and manufacturers.

BYD said its new plant would eventually generate about 10,000 jobs and produce 150,000 vehicles a year. When the company launched in Thailand, its distributor offered steep discounts on several models, bringing the cheapest models below $25,000.

That has intensified a price war that further threatens Japanese brands, which are fighting to keep up with cleaner cars of their own.

According to the Thai government, they have committed to investing more in local production of hybrids — which run on both battery motors and internal combustion engines — and electric pickup trucks. Honda started producing EVs in Thailand last December.

As gas-powered cars fall out of favor, some auto parts will be rendered obsolete, such as hydraulic-based steering systems and alternators.

The Thai Auto Parts Manufacturers Assn. has reportedly estimated that only about a dozen of the more than 600 auto parts makers in Thailand will be able to supply Chinese EVs.

Those that can transition to making parts for electric cars may still struggle to compete with Chinese rivals. Some auto parts suppliers have already shuttered as business has contracted.

Supat Ratanasirivilai, managing director of Thai Metal Aluminum, which produces aluminum-made parts for Japanese and American cars, said he has been negotiating with Chinese automakers since the start of the year.

But those talks have stalled since Chinese companies told him that his prices are 30-40% too high.

“We were hoping that when the Japanese carmakers’ production dropped, we may get some benefit from the Chinese carmakers,” he said. “But obviously they are not buying from the Thai suppliers.”

His company is pushing the Thai government to implement more protective measures for local workers, such as requiring EVs to be built with more locally sourced parts.

“The Thai government is really opening up everything for the Chinese carmakers. It has been very difficult for us,” he said. “I don’t know what’s to come next.”

Special correspondent Poypiti Amatatham in Bangkok contributed to this report.

MIAMI, Okla. — Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes grew up playing video games, including “probably hundreds of hours” colonizing a distant planet in the 1999 title Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

So when that same game studio, Firaxis, approached the tribal nation a quarter-century later with a proposal to make a playable character out of their famous leader Tecumseh in the upcoming game Civilization 7, Barnes felt a rush of excitement.

“I was like, ‘This can’t be true,’” Barnes said. “Do they want us to participate in the next version of Civilization?”

Beloved by tens of millions of gamers since its 1991 debut, Meier’s Civilization series sparked a new genre of empire-building games that simulated the real world while also diverging into imaginary twists. It has captivated nerdy fans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a young Barnes with its intricate and addictive gameplay and rich historical context.

Choosing among leaders that can range from Cleopatra to Mahatma Gandhi, players build a civilization from its first settlement to a sprawling network of cities, negotiate with or conquer neighbors, and develop trade, science, religion and the arts. Circana, which tracks U.S. game sales, says it’s the bestselling strategy video game franchise of all time.

But things have changed since the early days of Civilization. Of course, video game technology has advanced, but so too has society’s understanding of cultural appropriation and the importance of accurate historical framing.

Firaxis dropped plans to add a historical Pueblo leader in 2010 after tribal leaders objected. The game incorporated a Cree leader in 2018 but faced public criticism in Canada after its release.

Developers knew that to properly represent the Shawnee leader, they would need the input and blessing of the Shawnee people.

For Barnes, it was an opportunity to not only showcase the power and might of the Shawnee but also a way for tribal citizens to see themselves represented in popular culture in a new, imagined future for the tribe.

“For us, it’s really about a cultural expression of cultural hegemony,” Barnes said. “Why not us? Why not? Of course we should be in a video game title. Of course we should see ourselves reflected in every media. So we took advantage of the opportunity to make our star shine.”

For designers at Firaxis, the partnership represented a chance to improve a game development system that has been criticized by Indigenous leaders for misrepresenting their cultures, and for the Shawnee, it was a way to promote their language and history in a new way.

In interviews with The Associated Press, series founder Meier and other studio executives acknowledged past missteps in the Civilization franchise’s casual treatment of history, including how it incorporated Indigenous groups and colonization more broadly.

That led to careful thought and months of collaboration to “make sure it’s an authentic, sincere recreation” of Shawnee culture, said game producer Andrew Frederiksen, speaking on a September visit to the tribe’s headquarters. That meant asking the Shawnee questions about what a Shawnee university or library building of the future would look like and creating new Shawnee words to describe futuristic concepts.

Meier, who started developing computer games in the 1980s, said the Shawnee partnership is “kind of special” and was borne out of meetings with Barnes where the chief talked about the challenges of preserving the Shawnee language. As part of the partnership, Firaxis and its publishing label 2K Games — subsidiary of gaming giant Take-Two Interactive — are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in language revitalization programs and facilities.

When Shawnee actor Dean Dillon auditioned for a part that involved speaking the Shawnee language, he didn’t know he’d be voicing Tecumseh. The military and political leader from what is currently Ohio united a confederation of Native American tribes to resist U.S. westward expansion in the early 19th century.

“I just gave it my best shot,” Dillon said. “And then a few weeks later, I heard back and they said, ‘We’d like to offer you the role of Tecumseh.’ And my head exploded and I ran around the house yelling, ‘My gosh! My gosh!’”

“It was surreal, to say the least, to see Tecumseh’s face but to hear my voice come out of that,” Dillon said.

While the franchise has always had Indigenous leaders, starting with Montezuma of the Aztecs in the original 1991 game, Meier said game developers at the time were looking for familiar figures without much thought into the weight of history. Playable characters in that game included Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, whose totalitarian regimes were still in many people’s memory.

“We never realized people would take it as seriously as they do,” Meier said. “We always kind of felt, ‘Here’s a way that you can change history.’ Maybe we can make Stalin a good guy. But that might have been stretching things a little too far.”

“We learned a lot as time went on,” he added. The seventh edition, due out in February, will for the first time do away with barbarians — or at least no longer use that term for hostile characters that are not part of a playable civilization. Players can instead create diplomatic relations with them.

And as the game’s audience expanded beyond the U.S. and Europe, with more than 70 million games sold worldwide, so too did players want their societies or heritage reflected. More recent editions include themed music and spoken languages from dozens of playable civilizations, from the Māori people of New Zealand to the Mapuche of South America.

“It is now a badge of honor for a nation to be included in Civilization,” Meier said. “We’ve been lobbied by different countries, et cetera.”

That’s not to say everyone has been happy about their inclusion in a game centered around settling land and exploiting resources. Civilization is one of the pioneers of the genre known as 4X — for “explore, expand, exploit and exterminate.”

After the franchise added a 19th-century Cree leader to its gameplay in 2018, a prominent Cree leader complained to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that it “perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land. That is totally not in concert with our traditional ways and worldview.”

One of the game’s two resident historians, Andrew Johnson, said the studio wanted to make Tecumseh a playable leader, but after reaching out to some academics, “we were told repeatedly, ‘No, this is a really bad idea, and nobody’s going to sign off on this.’”

So Johnson suggested reaching out to Shawnee leaders directly to ask what they think, and how it could help them.

“I think so often you get people assuming that representation in Civ is a reward of some sort. It’s not,” said Johnson, who’s also an anthropologist who studies Southeast Asia. “This is a company and we’re selling a product and we’re using an image and likeness to make a profit. And getting your ‘civ’ in Civilization doesn’t really help you very much if you’re struggling to preserve your culture.”

The game studio and the tribal nation decided on a partnership that would help the Shawnee people preserve and expand some of that culture, particularly language. Chief Barnes said the tribe was in dire need of resources for language education, and creating dialogue for a Shawnee civilization of the future was another way to help revitalize their language.

“Firaxis was asking questions about language we never would have thought to ask,” Barnes said in September at the opening of a new language education center in northeastern Oklahoma.

Barnes hasn’t had a chance to play the new version of the game yet, but he is already imaging the future he can build virtually, as well as how doing so will inspire other Shawnee gamers. “What I do know is that with the efforts we’re making here today, I expect Shawnee to be spoken in 2500.”

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O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.