VIETNAM: French President Emmanuel Macron called for closer co-operation between Vietnam and France today in an increasingly unstable global landscape as he visited Hanoi as part of a south-east Asia tour.
President Macron emphasised the need for “an order based on law” at a time of “both great imbalance and a return to power-driven rhetoric and intimidation.”

SOUTH KOREA: A mother has filed a lawsuit against South Korea’s government and its largest adoption agency, alleging systematic failures in her forced separation from her toddler son who was sent to Norway without her consent.
Choi Young Ja searched desperately for her son for nearly five decades before their emotional reunion in 2023.
South Korea faces growing pressure to address the extensive fraud and abuse that tainted what’s seen as history’s largest foreign adoption programme.

AUSTRIA: A court in Vienna today acquitted former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of making false statements to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged corruption in his government.
The finding reverses a verdict from last year in which Mr Kurz was given a suspended prison sentence.
The case centered on Kurz’s testimony to an inquiry that focused on the coalition he led from 2017, when his conservative Austrian People’s Party formed a coalition with the far-right Freedom Party.

UGANDA: The Ugandan army said today that it was suspending military co-operation with Germany after accusing its ambassador, Mathias Schauer, of engaging in “subversive activities” and being “wholly unqualified” to be in the east African state.
A German Foreign Ministry spokesperson called the accusation “absurd and without merit,” according to the Reuters news agency.