Vietnam on Thursday accused a Chinese survey vessel and its escorts of violating its sovereignty, and demanded that Beijing remove the ships from its waters.

Vietnam and China have long been embroiled in a territorial dispute over a potentially energy-rich stretch in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which more than $3 trillion of commerce passes annually.

An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents — assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S. National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people.

The US and its G7 partners have slapped more than 300 economic sanctions on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine over a year ago. Initially, Washington and Brussels pitched the idea of sanctions as a strategy to paralyze Moscow. However, Western sanctions have backfired as Russian companies are redrawing commodity flows from the West to Asia. 

I’ve been sticking my head in the WEF site to see how many Thai members are knocking about. You could try doing this wherever you are in the world, by typing ‘weforum people [insert nationality / country here]’. It’s strange that the weforum.org/people page is a blank non-listed directory, although does yield individual search results.

The ‘Young Global Leaders’ site is easier to navigate, being able to search by region.

The party of East Timor independence hero Xanana Gusmão has won the most votes in the country’s parliamentary election, according to preliminary results, boosting his chances of returning as prime minister.

Gusmão’s National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) won about 42 percent of votes after all ballots had been counted, according to election commission data carried by national broadcaster Radio-Televisão Timor Leste.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Monday that his country could withdraw from Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), in a fresh show of discontent over the lack of support from its ally Russia.

Yerevan has grown increasingly frustrated over what it calls Russia’s failure to protect Armenia in the face of military threats from Azerbaijan.

“I am not ruling out that Armenia will take a decision to withdraw from the CSTO,” if the bloc fails to respect its treaty obligations, he told a news conference in Yerevan.

Laos – a landlocked communist state in Southeast Asia, wedged between China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar – has the potential to be a nexus of sorts for the entire region. However, its cooperation with Beijing has come under fire from the West.

China’s president Xi Jinping on Friday laid out an ambitious plan for co-operation with Central Asian countries on defence and security, pushing into a region traditionally seen as Russia’s backyard at a moment when Moscow is distracted by the war in Ukraine.