H. Rahman is a Jadetimes news reporter covering Business
Image Credit: BLOOMBERG
The U.S. government’s recent decision to impose a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applicants is expected to reshape the country’s skilled labor landscape, potentially limiting opportunities for foreign workers and prompting changes in hiring practices across the technology and finance sectors.
The H-1B visa, which allows employers to hire foreign nationals in specialty occupations, has long been a pathway for skilled talent from countries such as India, contributing significantly to the U.S. workforce. Historically, visa holders often spent brief periods in the U.S., providing expertise while facilitating international perspectives within companies, particularly in grading and professional assessments.
Experts suggest the steep fee will likely restrict companies to sponsoring only highly paid and strategically critical employees. For many fresh graduates or relatively inexperienced professionals, the dream of working in the U.S. may now be effectively unattainable. Analysts warn that this could impact sectors heavily reliant on H-1B talent, including the technology industry, where foreign workers have been instrumental in innovation.
However, the policy change could also yield domestic and international benefits. U.S. companies may increase investment in training local talent, improving job prospects for domestic graduates in the face of AI-driven disruption. Meanwhile, countries like India could retain more skilled workers, potentially boosting domestic entrepreneurship and economic growth.
Despite fewer H-1B entrants, U.S. firms can still access global talent through overseas operations and remote collaboration, maintaining competitiveness and innovation. The U.S. also continues to wield soft power through education, media, and cultural influence, ensuring international engagement regardless of reduced visa inflows.
For certain countries, including Singapore and Chile, citizens remain exempt under the H-1B1 visa scheme, avoiding the new fees and retaining access to U.S. work opportunities.
While the fee hike prioritizes domestic employment and social cohesion, it underscores the need for balance: protecting local labor markets while sustaining economic dynamism in a globalized world. For prospective migrants, opportunities in Asia and other growing economies may increasingly rival traditional paths to the U.S. workforce.
H. Rahman is a Jadetimes news reporter covering the Asia
Image Source: Getty Image
A Thai court has sentenced Ekkalak Paenoi to life imprisonment for the January assassination of prominent Cambodian opposition figure Lim Kimya in Bangkok. Lim, who held dual Cambodian and French nationality, was shot in public hours after arriving in the Thai capital with his wife. Ekkalak fled to Cambodia following the attack, where he was arrested and deported back to Thailand.
Initially sentenced to death, Ekkalak’s punishment was reduced to life imprisonment after he confessed to the killing, the court announced on Friday. He was also found guilty of carrying and using a firearm and ordered to pay approximately $55,000 to Lim’s family. A separate defendant accused of driving Ekkalak to the Cambodian border was cleared, with the court ruling that he was unaware of the planned killing.
Lim Kimya was a former parliamentarian with Cambodia’s main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which nearly defeated the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party in the 2013 elections. The CNRP was banned in 2017 after founder Hun Sen accused it of treason, barring members from political activity. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who succeeded Hun Sen in 2023, has denied any government involvement in Lim’s assassination.
Security footage from the scene showed Ekkalak calmly parking his motorbike and walking across the road before opening fire. While Lim’s widow has expressed tentative satisfaction with the verdict, she continues to question who ordered the killing and urges authorities to investigate further.
Human rights groups note that activists fleeing Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand have increasingly faced cross-border pursuit, disappearances, or killings. Some analysts suggest an unwritten regional understanding allows security forces from these neighboring countries to target dissidents across borders, raising broader concerns about political repression in Southeast Asia.
The verdict marks a rare instance of judicial accountability in a politically sensitive killing, but questions remain about the broader forces behind the attack and the safety of opposition figures in the region.
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter and sub-editor covering science and geopolitics.
One researcher says it would have been extraordinarily difficult for life to develop on early Earth.
Credit: (uchicago/NASA/Getty)
Here is what you’ll learn in this story:
A new study used mathematical formulas and demonstrated that it’s highly unlikely life began on Earth.
Instead, the researcher points to panspermia, a theory that life or the ingredients for life came to Earth from elsewhere in the universe.
The theory is highly controversial among experts who can't seem to agree if any branch of the theory is a logical explanation for how life evolved.
In the second century C.E., Lucian of Samosata - a satirist - wrote a tale of interplanetary travel, aliens, and a space war. His story is often regarded as the first written mention of aliens, and for centuries since he wrote it, humans have had their eyes on the sky - but what if we actually descended from extraterrestrial life?
Panspermia is the controversial theory that life evolved elsewhere in the universe and - some way or another - made it here, where it developed into the diversity we see on Earth today. Perhaps the most exciting (and science fiction-esque) version of the theory, called directed panspermia, suggests extraterrestrials intentionally seeded life on Earth - in other words, aliens brought life here. Another version of the theory assumes resilient forms of life, like bacteria, could have travelled across space on debris, accidentally collided with Earth, and propagated. Yet a third version suggests that the building blocks of life, such as amino acids, could have come from elsewhere in the universe, eventually evolving into life on our little blue dot. Needless to say, experts can’t seem to agree which line of thinking is the most legitimate - or if there’s reason to believe in any of the theories at all - but a recent paper provides new evidence to support that life on Earth might have been extraterrestrial all along.
Robert Endres, PhD, author of the paper and professor at Imperial College London, is trying to understand the likelihood of the first cell, or a protocell, spontaneously forming on Earth, a process otherwise known as abiogenesis. Needless to say, it’s highly unlikely. As described in a new paper published on the online preprint platform arXiv, Endres tested several complex mathematical models to figure out how long it would take for life to evolve. He demonstrated that molecules would have to merge into microbial life forms impossibly fast because they degrade so quickly on their own. In other words, the molecules that make up life would need to be in the right place, at the right time, in the right concentrations. Think of it as trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle by throwing the pieces in the air and hoping they slot together perfectly as they fall to the floor - it’s a system that’s highly unreliable.
According to the paper, a major barrier to life forming spontaneously is entropy. Also known as the second law of thermodynamics, it states that all systems, when left to their own devices, will move from order to disorder. So, it’s unlikely that a disordered chemical “soup,” as Endres describes it, would spontaneously become something as complex as a living cell. But just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Perhaps you throw that jigsaw puzzle an inconceivable number of times - maybe it does slot together perfectly at some point. Endres’ work doesn’t rule out the possibility. However, the researcher also points to panspermia as a “speculative but logically open alternative” to explaining how life arose out of primordial chaos.
“Today, humans seriously contemplate terraforming Mars or Venus in scientific journals,” Endres writes. “If advanced civilizations exist, it is not implausible they might attempt similar interventions - out of curiosity, necessity, or design.”
While the possibility sounds exciting, Endres does note that the idea of directed panspermia violates Occam’s razor, or the principle that favors simpler explanations over ones that require many chance qualifications. It’s also important to note that, no matter how “logically open” the theory of panspermia may be, it isn’t without criticism from other experts.
“I consider deliberate panspermia to be a beautiful science fiction idea, but unfortunately unlikely,” says Simon George, PhD, a researcher at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) who studies the origins of life and life in extreme conditions.
Another study, published in the journal Science Advances in August, affirms that Earth may have needed some extra help to get life started, though it doesn’t credit aliens for the planet’s habitability. The team’s analysis of meteorite and terrestrial rock samples suggests primordial Earth was originally dry and rocky. The researchers believe Earth collided with a Mars-sized object called Theia, which introduced all of the elements that made life possible here, including water.
“The Earth does not owe its current life-friendliness to a continuous development,” Klaus Mezger, PhD, co-author of the Science Advances paper and professor of geochemistry at the University of Bern, said in a press release, “but probably to a chance event - the late impact of a foreign, water-rich body.”
To George, the idea that life evolved under the right planetary conditions - rather than because of a chance event, like panspermia would suggest - is most appealing. He says it’s possible Earth may have received a “chemical boost,” but questions why “we need these molecules to be made in space,” emphasizing that planetary conditions were very different when life began.
Among other experts, a universal critique of panspermia is that it doesn’t address exactly why life began, it merely pushes it off to another celestial world. In the same vein, panspermia complicates humankind’s search for extraterrestrial life in a broader sense, because panspermia might have worked the other way around - Earthling space adventures could have brought life to other parts of the cosmos.
“Is it possible that Earth is or has been a source of panspermia?” George asks. “If we do discover evidence of life elsewhere in the Solar System, sorting out whether it [has] just seeded Earth life is going to be an important challenge.”
