Rescuers in Laos have found five villagers alive inside a flooded cave after they were trapped for a week following heavy rain and landslides. Two people are still missing, rescue teams said. Footage shared by the rescuers showed cave divers crawling through narrow, muddy passageways. The seven people were part of a group of villagers who had gone into the cave in search of gold deposits and wildlife, but could not get out as the cave's entrance was blocked. Could a football match soften North Korea-South Korea relations?

A blast at a fireworks factory in China's Hunan province has killed 21 people and left 61 wounded, according to state media. The explosion at the Changsha Liuyang Huasheng Fireworks plant happened at around 16:40 local time (08:40 GMT) on Monday, in the city of Liuyang, leading rescuers to evacuate everyone within a 3km (1.9mi) radius of the plant. Authorities deployed nearly 500 personnel to conduct search and rescue operations and treat the injured, while robots were used to help find those trapped within the building. Police, who are investigating the cause of the blast, have taken control measures against the person in charge of the fireworks company, Chinese state media reported. Authorities said that two gunpowder warehouses within the factory area posed a high risk amid rescue efforts, state media reported.

Current dataset collection methods typically scrape large amounts of data from the web. While this technique is extremely scalable, data collected in this way tends to reinforce stereotypical biases, can contain personally identifiable information, and typically originates from Europe and North America. In this work, we rethink the dataset collection paradigm and introduce GeoDE, a geographically diverse dataset with 61,940 images from 40 classes and 6 world regions, with no personally identifiable information, collected by soliciting images from people around the world. We analyse GeoDE to understand differences in images collected in this manner compared to web-scraping. We demonstrate its use as both an evaluation and training dataset, allowing us to highlight and begin to mitigate the shortcomings in current models, despite GeoDE's relatively small size.

A 2025 survey in the forests of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia uncovered several rare and endangered animals. A pig-tailed macaque is caught on camera in a Cambodian forest. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The results of a new camera-trap survey in Southeast Asia is revealing a bevy of hidden biodiversity tucked within the Annamites mountain range . This largely unexplored wildlife hotspot has a forest stretching 683 miles (1,100 kilometers) across the countries of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

Stock markets had a stellar run in 2025. From North America to Europe and Asia, markets racked up some of the biggest gains in years. The globally-focused MSCI ACWI Ex-US index had its strongest performance since 2009, when the global financial crisis was in full swing. The index, which tracks non-US stocks in more than 40 markets, was on Wednesday on track to finish 2025 up about 30 percent, compared with the nearly 18 percent return of the benchmark S&P 500. The bullish streak marks a break from the decade-plus trend of US stocks dominating global indexes.

Cardinal Stephen Chow, the bishop of Hong Kong, speaks during Mass in Hong Kong in November 2023. During the opening Mass a three-day event to draft guidelines for the clergy's use of artificial intelligence in the region Asia, he described AI as a gift from God. | REUTERS Catholic bishops and priests from across Asia are set to conclude a three-day event in Hong Kong on Friday, during which they drafted guidelines for the clergy's use of artificial intelligence in the region. The Federation of Asian Bishops -- a 55-year-old institution that includes representatives from across the region, including Indonesia, Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Japan -- discussed AI and its impact on humanity, the church, and how it can serve as a tool to conduct scripture searches. They also discussed the principles for use of AI in evangelization. The theme of the meetings was a call to embrace AI responsibly.

The creation of large-scale image datasets has enabled advances in the performance of computer vision models.

US President Donald Trump is arriving in Asia for a whirlwind week of diplomacy, which includes a much-anticipated meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Top of the agenda between the two will be trade - an area where tensions between the world's two biggest economies have once again been ramping up. Trump lands in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, as a summit for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, begins on Sunday. He will then visit Japan and finally South Korea, where the White House says he will meet Xi. So what are the wins Trump and other leaders are hoping for, and what are the pitfalls?