Vietnam delivered a historic karate performance at the 33rd Southeast Asian Games by finishing first in the discipline after securing six gold medals during four days of competition in Thailand earlier this month. The results placed Vietnam atop the karate medal table on gold count and completed an unprecedented hat-trick following its successes at SEA Games 31 and 32.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote a New York Times essay published Wednesday promoting a large-scale national project, including a moon base, that he hopes would provide Americans with a shared sense of purpose.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement sustained its most serious legal and political setbacks in years over the weekend. Jimmy Lai, the outspoken founder of Apple Daily, was found guilty Friday on three charges related to foreign collusion and sedition, following a 118-day trial involving evidence from newspaper articles and interviews. The next day, the Democratic Party, the only remaining opposition party with elected officials, voted to disband after being blocked from local elections since 2021.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan urged Democratic leaders last week to end their criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, declaring “I don’t wanna bury anybody else” even as no agent deaths have been publicly reported this year.

A Chinese national who filmed detention facilities in Xinjiang at great personal risk now faces removal from the U.S., drawing widespread calls for his protection from members of Congress, human rights organizations and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists his evidence helped support.

FBI Director Kash Patel faces renewed criticism following his premature announcement about a person of interest in the Brown University shooting, compounded by backlash over a podcast appearance with his girlfriend amid the ongoing manhunt.

The two suspected gunmen in a terror attack that left 16 dead at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach last weekend had traveled to an Islamist militant stronghold in the Philippines weeks before the massacre, authorities said Tuesday.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Derek Tran (D-Calif.) introduced a bicameral resolution on Dec. 11 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement in the U.S.

Emails released last month by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee show former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers reducing a young Asian academic to a single, racially charged nickname: “peril.” In the correspondence, Summers forwarded the woman’s professional emails to convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, seeking advice on turning a professional relationship into a romantic one, revealing both the racialized lens through which he viewed her and his ongoing ties with Epstein.

Christine Choy, the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who helped force a national reckoning with anti-Asian violence, died Dec. 7 in New York City at 73. No cause of death was released. Her landmark 1987 film “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” became a defining work of Asian American cinema and a touchstone in civil rights history. Choy’s career spanned more than four decades of documenting power, race and resistance.