THAILAND
Sixteen people, mainly district officials and hospital staff, have been arrested for enabling the children of Chinese couples to obtain Thai citizenship through false paternity registrations. Dozens of others are under suspicion, including 18 men who are alleged to have acted as ‘fake fathers’. One of them is a shareholder in China Railway No. 10 with a 10.2 per cent stake, and is suspected of acting as a Thai frontman for the company, which was implicated in the collapse of a building in Bangkok during the March 2025 earthquake.
MALAYSIA
Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, will launch his own avatar in the coming days, created using artificial intelligence by the company Zetrix AI Bhd and named PMX AI – a reference to Anwar’s role as the country’s tenth prime minister. PMX AI has been trained using speeches made by Anwar to date, so that when it speaks, its appearance and tone are unmistakably those of the prime minister. It will help people navigate government services.
CHINA
A fire broke out at a shoe factory in the city of Jinjiang, in south-east China, causing at least 28 deaths. Images published by the state news agency Xinhua showed huge plumes of black smoke and people who appeared to be trapped on the roof. Jinjiang, in Fujian province, is often referred to as the ‘shoe capital of China’ as it is estimated to produce 20 per cent of the world’s sports shoes.
JAPAN
Over 70 per cent of hotels in Japan are facing staff shortages whilst tourist numbers remain high. A government report on the subject, published today, highlights the need for greater investment in automation – including self-service check-in and robots in the catering sector – and for better incentives to attract workers. In 2025, the number of foreign visitors to Japan exceeded 40 million for the first time. The government aims to reach 60 million by 2030.
PAKISTAN
Islamabad has launched mediation efforts between the two rival authorities in Libya. However, according to analysts, even if these attempts were to succeed, they would be unlikely to benefit Pakistan, which has forged ties with the faction led by Khalida Haftar: in December, Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir visited Benghazi, in eastern Libya, where he met Haftar. In June, Haftar’s son, Saddam Haftar, visited the Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpindi to discuss with Munir the expansion of bilateral defence cooperation.
TURKEY
At the end of the summit in Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented NATO leaders with personalised pistols loaded with live ammunition to highlight the importance of Turkey’s defence sector, which is central to the country’s exports and an increasingly important instrument of foreign policy for Turkey. The revolver was probably a Gumusay .357 Magnum, a rare six-shot pistol produced by the Turkish arms manufacturer MKE in the 1990s. Several heads of state were unable to take the gift back to their countries due to immigration laws.
ARMENIA – EU
The European Union has supplied Armenia with remote-controlled mine-clearing vehicles weighing around 20 tonnes, which will be used in humanitarian mine-clearing operations in areas considered dangerous. Eduard Petrosyan, director of the Centre for Mine Clearance, stated that this “will significantly reduce risks, minimise accidents and, in essence, contribute to the socio-economic development of the territories” of the five regions (Tavush, Syuni, Vayots Dzor, Ararat and Gežarkunik) where explosive remnants of war remain following the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
RUSSIA
The military court of Russia’s Southern District has found Evgenij Žadan, a 17-year-old from Donetsk in Ukraine, guilty of treason, preparing a terrorist attack, participating in a terrorist organisation and the illegal trafficking of explosives. He was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in a re-education colony; no criminal proceedings were brought against him as he was a minor, and the evidence supporting the charges was not disclosed, but he was nonetheless added to the Russian list of terrorists and extremists.
