Flooding affects electronics production

Production of various consumer electronics items has been hit by the flooding in Thailand, a major manufacturing center for such products, experts said. The Thai situation is coming at a time when the electronics industry in Japan is beginning to recover from the March 11 earthquake-tsunami, CNNMoney reported. Manufacturing units of many of the Japanese electronics firms are in Thailand. Thailand has been hit by its worst flooding in 50 years, resulting in the closure of hundreds of industries across the country. The Thai flooding has forced suspension of production of critical items including computer hard drives, cameras and microchips, sparking concern throughout the industry and their parent companies, the report said. The report said the shortage of these items could impact the availability of devices like laptops and set-top boxes. Consumer electronics-makers are not the only ones hit by the Thai flooding. Major automakers also have suspended production at Thai plants. His party holds a razor-thin parliamentary majority. If Papandreou's government falls, it would be Europe's third to topple under the weight of austerity measures demanded by European debt relief. Irish and Portuguese governments also fell after accepting bailouts from the European Union and the IMF. In addition, Slovakia's government fell last month over whether to participate in the EU's rescue package. Papandreou told his Cabinet the dilemma was not which party has a parliamentary majority -- "the dilemma is yes or no to the agreement, yes or no to Europe, yes or no to the euro," the prepared remarks of his Cabinet address indicated.