Paul Biya, the world’s oldest serving head of state, has been declared the winner of Cameroon’s election, granting him an eighth term that could keep him in office until he is nearly 100.
The country’s constitutional council said Biya won 53.66% of the vote, while his former ally turned challenger, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, got 35.19%.
Biya, 92, took office in 1982 and has held a tight grip on power ever since, doing away with the presidential term limit in 2008 and winning re-election by comfortable margins.
Cameroon has been on edge in recent weeks while the country waited for the official results. Four people were killed on Sunday in clashes between security forces and supporters of the opposition in the economic capital, Douala.
Tchiroma had claimed victory two days after the election, which took place on 12 October, publishing a tally that showed he had secured 54.8% of the votes, to Biya’s 31.3%. His team said his victory was based on results representing 80% of the electorate that they had collated.
He also called for protests if the constitutional council were to announce “falsified and distorted results”. The ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement dismissed his claims, urging him to wait for the official results.
The situation has been particularly volatile in the northern city of Garoua, Tchiroma’s home town, , where youths on motorcycles gathered with crude weapons outside his residence in anticipation of a possible arrest.
There have also been protests in the capital, Yaoundé, as well as in neighbourhoods in other parts of Cameroon including Bafoussam and Douala, two of the country’s most populous cities. In a video posted on social media at the weekend, Tchiroma claimed security personnel had attempted to breach his residence to arrest him.
Biya is only the second head of state to lead Cameroon since independence from France in 1960. He has ruled with an iron fist, repressing all political and armed opposition, and holding on to power through social upheaval, economic disparity and separatist violence.
Fears are growing for hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in El Fasher after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said it had captured the city, which it has been besieging for more than a year in Sudan’s civil war.
The group said on Sunday that it had seized control of the army’s main base in the city in Darfur, where famine was declared in a displacement camp last year. It then released a statement saying it had “extended control over the city of El Fasher from the grip of mercenaries and militias”.
The Popular Resistance, a local pro-army militia, responded on Sunday that the army was in “more fortified positions” and that residents were still “resisting in the face of terrorist militias”.
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, said he was “deeply alarmed” by reports of fighters pushing further into the city and cutting off escape routes, calling for an immediate ceasefire, access for humanitarian aid and safe passage for civilians who wanted to leave.
However, the RSF said it was committed to providing “safe corridors for all those who wish to move to other locations, as well as the necessary protection for all those in the city”.
Sudan has been torn apart by civil war since April 2023, when a power struggle between the military and the RSF descended into open warfare in the capital, Khartoum, and spread rapidly across the country.
Although Sudan’s army recaptured Khartoum in March 2025, enabling many residents to return, fighting has continued to rage in the country’s south and west. In May 2024, the RSF laid siege to El Fasher, in the western Darfur region.
A telecommunications blackout and Starlink satellite internet outages are preventing access to independent information from El Fasher.
If the RSF’s capture of the city is confirmed, it would mean the militia – led by the warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti – controls all five of Darfur’s states. Analysts have warned that this could herald the effective partition of Sudan.
Dagalo was sworn in as head of the RSF’s parallel government in August, in the city of Nyala. The militia also increased the intensity of the siege of El Fasher.
This month, RSF drone and artillery strikes killed at least 60 people in a displacement shelter in the city.
Sudan’s army and the RSF have been accused of committing war crimes in the civil war. The RSF and allied militias have attacked non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, with fighters saying they would force women to have “Arab babies”, according to a UN report published in November 2024.
Investors sent major global indexes higher on optimism that President Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, could reach a wider agreement this week.
小马科斯补充道，“就在最近，我们的北方邻国宣布在马辛洛克浅滩（Bajo de Masinloc、中方称黄岩岛）或斯卡伯勒礁设立所谓的‘国家级自然保护区’。我们强烈抗议这一声明。马辛洛克浅滩是菲律宾长期以来不可分割的一部分，菲律宾对其拥有主权和管辖权。菲律宾同样拥有在其领土和相关海域设立环境保护区的专属权力”。
After meeting some political traitors, Dante and Virgil have come across Count Ugolino, who is gnawing the back of the head of Archbishop Ruggieri as a dog chews a bone. Their story is one of the most famous and horrific in the whole of the Divine Comedy.
Ugolino raises his mouth from the cleric’s head and wipes his lips on his victim’s hair. He then introduces himself and the Archbishop. He explains how he, a leading politician at the time, was imprisoned with his young sons and left to starve to death. In his hunger he tried gnawing his own hands, but his sons suggested that their father should eat them instead.
Pierino da Vinci (1530–1553), Count Ugolino and his Children in Prison, Visited by Hunger (date not known), pen and black ink, brown wash, and pierre noire, 24 x 23.7 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille, France. Wikimedia Commons.Jan van der Straet, alias Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), Canto 33 (A) (1587), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839), Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri (1825-28), fresco, dimensions not known, Casa Massimo, Rome, Italy. Image by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons.William Blake (1757–1827), Count Ugolino and His Sons in Prison (c 1826), pen, tempera and gold on panel, 32.7 x 43 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. The Athenaeum.
This glue tempera painting by William Blake is one of the few that isn’t taken from his last works illustrating the Divine Comedy, but is a prior work. Unfortunately, its equivalent in Blake’s last series got no further than a pencil sketch before the artist’s death.
Gustave Doré (1832–1883), Ugolino gnawing the Head of Ruggieri (c 1857), engraving, dimensions and location not known. Image by Karl Hahn, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ugolino stopped gnawing his own flesh, and sat in silence day after day, watching his sons die in front of him. By the time the last was dead, the Count himself had gone blind. Once confident there was no life left in their bodies, his hunger overcame his grief.
In history, Ugolino was born into a Ghibelline family in the city of Pisa. He soon changed allegiance to the Guelphs, whom he helped in their quest for power in Pisa. When that was unsuccessful, the Count was imprisoned and exiled, but later led Pisan naval forces against its rival Genoa, for which he was made Pisa’s leader.
In an act of political expediency, Ugolino then handed over Pisan castles to Lucca and Florence, following which he conspired with Ghibellines including Archbishop Ruggieri. This backfired on him, and the Archibishop had him imprisoned with his two sons, two grandsons, and another young man. After eight months there, the door was locked and nailed shut, and its key thrown into the river. Ugolino and the five young men died fairly quickly of starvation.
Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon (1770-73), oil on canvas, 52 x 72 cm, The National Trust, Knole, England. Wikimedia Commons.
As far as I’m aware, this painting of Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon is the only work by Joshua Reynolds taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, nearly five hundred years after the death of the Count, I’m not aware that Reynolds had access to any contemporary images of his subject.
Artist not known, Portrait of Ugolino della Gherardesca (1775-78), engraving in Johann Caspar Lavater’s Fragments of Physiognomy, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.
It’s therefore revealing that this slightly later copy was one of many images of the faces of the famous and infamous on which Lavater based his textbook of physiognomy, which in turn was popular among painters, making it a self-fulfilling fantasy.
Jan van der Straet, alias Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), Canto 33 (B) (1587), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.
Dante and Virgil move on from Ugolino’s tragedy to meet more traitors frozen into Lake Cocytus in Hell, as they make their way towards the bottom of its pit, and Lucifer himself.
The artists
William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.
Pierino da Vinci (1530–1553) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, the son of Leonardo da Vinci’s younger brother. He died of malaria, which was still endemic in much of Europe at that time, at the age of only 23, leaving few examples of his work.
Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso.This article looks at his paintings.
Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.
Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) was a Swiss poet and philosopher who was a friend of the painter Henry Fuseli. Between 1775-78, he published an early textbook on physiognomy, in which he related physical appearance, particularly of the face, to specific character traits of individuals. He did this using many illustrations of famous and infamous people. This attracted a popular following, including many artists.
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) was the major portrait painter of his day, one of the co-founders and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He enjoyed royal patronage, and moved in the highest of artistic circles. However, his work and teaching were lambasted by William Blake, and some of his paintings have suffered serious problems in their paint layer as a result of his experimentation with pigments and technique.
Jan van der Straet, also commonly known by his Italianised name of Giovanni Stradano (1523-1605), was a painter who started his career in Bruges and Antwerp in Belgium, but moved to Florence in 1550, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Mannerist in style, he worked with printmakers in Antwerp to produce collections of prints, including an extensive set for The Divine Comedy.
Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.
Prison governors in England and Wales will need to provide assurance that enhanced checks have been carried out when inmates are released from Monday.
The government has introduced the new mandatory procedures after a migrant was mistakenly released from HMP Chelmsford on Friday and then re-arrested.
Senior prison staff have told the BBC that the new checks will only add to their workload and put more pressure on a system that is already struggling to cope.
Justice Secretary David Lammy will outline the shape of an independent inquiry in Parliament on Monday into how asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu was mistakenly released.
A prison officer has been suspended pending investigation but a senior prison staffer told BBC News the release was "down to a series of mistakes probably because staff are overworked and in short supply".
Kebatu was arrested in the Finsbury Park area of north London at 08:30 GMT on Sunday, bringing an end to a 48-hour manhunt that began after he was let go in error from prison.
Kebatu, who was sentenced last month for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in Epping while living in an asylum hotel, was due to be deported when he was mistakenly set free by prison staff.
His initial arrest in July sparked protests outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, where he had been living since arriving in the UK on a small boat.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said an investigation was already under way, adding: "We must make sure this doesn't happen again."
Watch: Kebatu expected to be deported this week, Lammy says
A report from His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service said 262 prisoners in England and Wales were released in error between April 2024 and March 2025, up from 115 in the previous 12 months.
Asked why figures for wrongful releases were rising, Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, said the Labour government "inherited a system that was collapsing [from the Conservatives]".
Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the BBC on Sunday that the arrest was a "huge relief" and said Kebatu will "now be deported".
He added: "The justice secretary has ordered an investigation into how on earth it was that a dangerous man who was due for deportation was instead released onto our streets.
"That work is under way, we will be open and transparent with the public about what went wrong and what we're going to do about it."
He had earlier said the Prison Service was under enormous pressure "but even against that backdrop it doesn't explain or excuse the release of people on our streets who have no business being there".
Former Conservative Justice Secretary Alex Chalk said an inquiry was necessary in order "to learn lessons", and suggested the incident was symptomatic of wider problems with the prison system.
He told BBC Breakfast on Sunday: "The entire annual budget of the Ministry of Justice is spent by the Department for Work and Pensions in two weeks.
"My constant plea is to try to ensure the prison service gets the resources it requires to ensure we are recruiting and retaining people with skills and experience to make sure these problems don't happen."
The Liberal Democrat MP for Chelmsford, Marie Goldman, said Kebatu "must now be deported" and also pushed for a national inquiry.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the incident showed that the UK's "once-trusted institutions", including the police and prisons, were "disintegrating before our eyes".
Lando Norris said his dominant victory in the Mexico City Grand Prix has boosted his confidence that he can win his first world title this year.
The Briton's lights-to-flag victory put him into the championship lead for the first time since he lost it to McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri after the Australian's victory in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the fifth race of the season back in April.
More than that, though, it was confirmation of a strong run of form by Norris. He has clawed back 35 points on Piastri in the five races since he retired from the Dutch Grand Prix with a fuel-line failure at the end of August.
"It gives me confidence," said Norris. "One race performing well I don't think means anything. Two, three or four in a row does, so I think the last few months I've been good."
It was also a timely reminder that, with four races now remaining as the season approaches its climax, McLaren have been the team of the year, not Red Bull.
The talk coming into the weekend was all about the threat Max Verstappen posed after three victories and a second place in the past four races had seen the Dutchman cut Piastri's lead by 64 points.
It did not take a maths genius to work out that if Verstappen kept that up, he would win his fifth consecutive world title at the end of the season.
But, after a few races in which they felt they had underperformed as a team, Norris delivered a statement win for McLaren - and himself.
The 25-year-old was in total control of the weekend from the minute he hit the track for the start of second practice, having handed his car to Mexican Indycar driver Pato O'Ward for the first session on Friday as one of the team's mandatory rookie sessions.
He went on to take pole with one of the stand-out laps of the season. He brushed off the threat of the slipstream from those behind on the long run to the first corner and dodged the mayhem that unfolded behind.
The only time he lost the lead was as a result of Ferrari's Charles Leclerc cutting the third corner in the midst of his battle with team-mate Lewis Hamilton just behind Norris.
Once Leclerc had made amends for passing Norris illegally by letting the McLaren back past on the run to Turn Four, Norris disappeared into the distance.
"In a way, I think it's just my best performance through a whole weekend," added Norris. "You know, all my laps in qualifying, all my practice, all my race."
Norris has been through the mill this year. He started his campaign with a win in Australia, but Piastri then took control of the season and had won four races before Norris took a second.
Norris could not get on with the car, which was not giving him the feelings he needed to be quick. But, following a tweak to the front suspension for the Canadian Grand Prix in June, he has slowly been working his way back into it.
His win this weekend was his fourth since then. In that time, Piastri has taken only two - the last one in Zandvoort when Norris retired.
At the time, that looked like a body blow to Norris' hopes. Piastri had been so convincing, so solid, that making up that sort of margin looked impossible.
Norris said: "You put that behind you, right? You forget about that as much as you can, and you just focus on every race coming up.
"Every weekend's new and you have a fresh start to try new things and try to do better than before. And I feel like that's what I've done very well this weekend."
As Norris has found his form, Piastri started to go off the boil a little straight after Zandvoort. Norris was quicker in Italy. Piastri had a nightmare weekend in Baku, crashing three times and jumping the start.
There was a bit of controversy at the start in Singapore, when Norris barged past into third place. But Piastri has been simply slow over the past two races in the US and Mexico.
"The last few have been decent," said Norris. "But still a long way to go, so I just have to keep doing what I'm doing, keep trying to be consistent against some very quick guys around me. And, yeah, I think that'll be good.
"But it doesn't mean because I'm ahead or behind or whatever that I have to drive or do anything differently."
Norris admitted after the race in Mexico that there had been times earlier this year when he "certainly did" doubt himself.
"When the car was winning, and Oscar was winning, the last thing I could do was use the excuse that my car wasn't good enough," he said.
"I wasn't getting to grips and finding a way to make it work and I'm finding a better way to make it work now, so it's as simple as that."
It is now Piastri facing that feeling, after two difficult weekends during which he has been a fair way off the pace.
"For some reason, the last couple of weekends have required a very different way of driving," said Piastri.
"What's worked well for me in the last 19 races, I've needed something very different the last couple of weekends. Trying to wrap my head around why has been a bit of a struggle."
After qualifying 0.588 seconds and seven places behind Norris in Mexico, Piastri spent Saturday night deep in the data with his engineers, trying to come up with some answers.
The race was about trying to apply them - even if he was not able to get a definitive answer as to whether they had worked, given he spent most of it stuck behind other cars on his way to a fifth place that will have felt painful, but in reality amounted to a solid recovery and exercise in damage limitation.
"Ultimately today was about trying to experiment with some of those things," said Piastri. "Because driving the way I've had to drive these last couple of weekends is not particularly natural for me."
Team boss Andrea Stella had an explanation for Piastri's struggles.
He said that Norris excels in low-grip conditions, whereas Piastri's driving style tends more towards high-grip levels, and he pointed out that, in only his third season, Piastri still has things to learn about adapting to different conditions.
"In the final four races, no reason to think that one may favour one driver or the other," said Stella, pointing to Las Vegas as the most problematic potentially for the team.
"For Lando and Oscar, there's no problem in terms of track layout coming in the next four races. If anything, we need to make sure that from a McLaren point of view, we are in condition to extract the full performance that is available in the car, like we have been able to do here in Mexico.
"The confidence in terms of the championship is increased. It's increased because we have proven that we have a car that can win races and in some conditions can dominate races.
"This is the most important factor to put Lando and Oscar in condition to pursue the drivers' championship."
As for Verstappen, so buoyant after his win in Austin, he was feeling a lot more subdued after a messy first part of the race before fighting back to finish third behind Norris and Leclerc.
Verstappen's deficit to the championship leader has reduced - from 40 points to 36. But he had clearly found Norris' pace a chastening experience.
"I lost 10 [points] to Lando, if you look at it like that," said Verstappen. "I said before the weekend, everything needs to go perfect to win. And this weekend didn't go perfect. So that's your answer.
"It's going to be tough, but let's see what we can do in other tracks. I hope, of course, we won't experience a weekend like this again, but it still shows that we're not quick in every scenario. And that's what we need to understand a bit better."
Norris, though, sees it another way.
"Max has still caught me over the last - what? - six, seven weekends.
"I've been keeping my head down, keeping focus, doing my own thing, and that's all you can do. But every weekend's new, every weekend's different, and still a long way to go."
Sheffield Wednesday's joint administrator says they have "four or five" serious bidders and the club could have new owners by the end of the year.
Kris Wigfield is leading the search for new ownership after Dejphon Chansiri put the Championship club into administration on Friday.
Wigfield says the Owls have to remain on the market for 28 days under EFL rules and claims they have already received concrete interest.
He told BBC 5 Live's Wake Up to Money programme he hopes the new owners are in place to sign new players in the January transfer window.
Wigfield said: "As always, you get a lot of interested parties that probably aren't going to meet the criteria, but within the numerous inquiries we've had, we certainly think that there are already four or five interested parties that look like the real deal.
"There are two criteria that new owners basically need to satisfy to then open dialogue and there to be an opportunity where they can make an offer.
"The first thing is they need to show the administrators that they could make the football club viable. So they've got to show that they've got sufficient funds to be able to fund it for the next few years.
"And secondly, we have to be satisfied that they will pass the EFL fit and proper persons test, and if they can satisfy both of those, then we'll start talking to them seriously."
Wigfield hopes the sale process will move quickly and a group could have preferred-bidder status next month, with a view to completing the purchase of Wednesday before the end of the year.
"Due to EFL rules, we have to market the club for 28 days," he said. "So it'll be at least 28 days before we're getting close to a preferred-bidder status.
"So I'm hopeful that by the end of November, if things go well, we might know who's going to buy the football club.
"Then hopefully a deal can be concluded this calendar year, so that the new owner is in for... the January transfer window, if the EFL allows the new owner to buy players."
Wednesday fans returned in their thousands on Saturday after their previous boycott and a season's best crowd of 27,261 witnessed the 2-1 loss to Oxford at Hillsborough.
Wigfield says supporters have already spent more than £500,000 on tickets and in the club shop to keep the Owls going.
"We had no money to start with, but the fans have already put in over half a million pounds since Friday through buying tickets and merchandise," he added.
"So the response has been incredible, but we need to keep raising money to be able to pay the wages next Friday.
"So more tickets are going on sale for the next home games today and we need the fans to keep purchasing stuff. It's quite a difficult circumstance, but that's what we need."
Petrofac has offices in Aberdeen, London, Woking and Greater Yarmouth
Offshore energy firm Petrofac has filed for administration.
The energy services provider, which employs about 2,000 people in Scotland, said its North Sea business would continue to operate as normal.
In a statement, the group said it had applied to appoint administrators for its holding company, but that alternative restructuring options were being explored.
It added that administrators would work to "preserve value, operational capability and ongoing delivery".
The firm, which has UK offices in Aberdeen, London, Woking and Greater Yarmouth, said further information on the administration process would be provided in due course.
Founded in Texas in 1981, Petrofac had been undergoing a financial restructuring over the past year.
US President Donald Trump and Malaysian PM Anwar Ibrahim oversaw the signing ceremony on Sunday
As US President Donald Trump boarded Air Force One in Kuala Lumpur, it was at the end of a busy 24 hours that, by the White House's account, included a flurry of deals that brought "peace and prosperity" to the region.
The headlines will follow Trump as he flies to Japan and then South Korea, for a much-awaited meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
But getting him to the Asean Summit gave the grouping of South East Asian nations its biggest moment in the sun, at a time when many have been questioning its relevance.
For Trump the biggest draw was that he got to preside over a "peace deal" between Thailand and Cambodia whose long standing border dispute erupted into open conflict in July.
He wanted this in his ongoing quest to clinch a Nobel Peace Prize for resolving wars, although the Thais were reluctant to call it a "peace deal".
This came on the back of another rare win for Asean, whose chair, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, brokered the initial ceasefire between the two countries.
Part of these successes could be attributed to Anwar himself, a veteran politician who could leverage his long-term relationships with the Cambodians and Thais, while charming Trump – even getting away with a sensitive joke about jailtime.
But in the end it was clearly US pressure that sealed the deal, with Thailand and Cambodia quick to cease hostilities following Trump's economic threats.
Sunday's signing was accompanied by announcements of US trade deals with Cambodia and Thailand, with Trump making it plain he intends to use business deals to pressure countries to make peace.
For most leaders, the main bonus of Trump's appearance was that they got precious face time with the president at a crucial point in US tariff negotiations.
Many of Asean's member states are export-dependent economies - with the US being a key market. Besides Thailand and Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam also signed deals with the US. And while they were not able to budge tariff rates, they managed to negotiate some goods exemptions.
"Trump was here for a photo op… this was just another feather in his cap," says Joseph Liow, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.
But, he adds, the thinking was that "since he'll be here, let's make the best of it" and Asian leaders would have leveraged on his attendance to "broaden his aperture about the convergence of interests between US and Asia".
Watch: Trump claims to have ended another war. Will it last?
Formed in 1967 as a bulwark against Communism, these days Asean acts as a platform for diplomatic dialogue and trade talks.
Its main advantage is that it can draw larger countries, who see the summit as a easy way to engage all of the region's leaders in one room. This year, besides Trump, leaders from China, the European Council, Canada, Brazil and South Africa also attended the summit.
It's had some achievements over the years on the economic front, developing a more integrated economy across the region and securing free trade agreements with other world powers.
But many have increasingly questioned its effectiveness in solving regional issues, from air pollution caused by Indonesian forest fires to competing South China Sea claims.
Its inability to end Myanmar's civil war that erupted in 2021 has been seen as one of its biggest failures.
Even at this week's summit, the grouping continued to urge the military government to stop the war and seek a peaceful solution - requests that the junta has ignored these last four years.
The grouping also noted the junta's invitation to observe their upcoming general election in December and responded by stressing "the importance of free and fair" elections and the need to stop the violence first. This was as tough as Asean could get.
One reason is because it is not a trade or economic bloc like the European Union, nor does it maintain any standing troops like Nato or the UN. Asean therefore has very little levers at its disposal to put pressure on member states, apart from diplomacy.
But the main reason, experts say, is its core principle of non-interference in member states' internal affairs. Asean advocates says this is what keeps it united, and that it can quietly exert pressure effectively behind the scenes – but detractors say it makes it toothless.
"When it comes to political crises, it's mission impossible for members to give up sovereignty and give in to the Asean greater good," says Huong Le Thu, deputy of the Asia programme at the International Crisis Group, who adds that this was "Asean's weakest link".
While another of Asean's fundamental principles is settling disputes peacefully, in reality it "does not really have a major appetite for conflicting countries to sit down and thrash things out", notes Prof Liow.
"People who criticise Asean for its inability to get its house in order, they are absolutely right. So unless Asean can handle more pressing issues, its relevance will always get called into question… And really the fundamental question for Asean is, at what cost unity?"
The fact that the grouping could not prevent simmering border tensions between Thailand and Cambodia from erupting into war in July, is yet another example of "Asean fragility", points out Dr Le Thu, given that South East Asia prides itself as a region with little violent conflict between member states in recent decades.
It is criticism like this, though, that make the resolution of the Thai-Cambodia war a rare win for Asean, with Trump's visit burnishing that success. Experts say that while the agreement signed on Sunday does not actually resolve the fundamental border dispute, it is still a positive start with concrete steps for de-escalation.
And there were other victories too.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
East Timor Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao said joining Asean was a "dream realised" for his country
Kuala Lumpur also saw US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reach a "framework deal" on rare earths and US tariffs with his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng, at a time when many are watching how the latest US-China trade war will end.
The deal lays the groundwork for a much anticipated meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea.
And, in a highly symbolic moment of unity, Asean formally welcomed East Timor as a member.
Its accession means South East Asia is now geographically completely represented in Asean, and the tiny country of 1.4 million hopes that integrating its economy with the rest of the region will boost development.
Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao said in an emotional speech that joining Asean was "a dream realised" for East Timorese, as clips of the East Timor delegation crying and thanking Asean attendees went viral online.
It was a moving moment to witness at the summit, proving that despite its flaws Asean can still hold relevance - and even be cherished.
Zilan Qian is a fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and an MSc student at the Oxford Internet Institute.
This “AGI Bar” recently opened in Shanghai, where people openly poke fun at the hype surrounding AGI by stating that this bar is “all about bubbles.”
Many big tech, VC, and AI startups like ByteDance, ZhenFund, and Z. ai sent congratulatory flower baskets when the AGI bar opened.
Not many people would point to this bar and say that China is racing towards AGI. Otherwise, the U.S. has zero chance of winning, because AGI is diffused to even bars in China. AGI is a buzzword for business in this context, period.
This is the consideration needed for people who want to know whether China is taking AGI seriously. Before you ask anyone who works on China and AI how AGI-pilled China is, ask yourself two questions: what do you mean by AGI, and who do you mean by China?
This post provides one piece to the picture by looking into a giant AGI wiki made by an open-source community in China. As this piece will show that, for AI hobbyists in China, “AGI” stands for Western tech aura and a desire for quick money.
What is “Way to AGI”?
Created in April 2023, the “Way to AGI” wiki is a collaborative knowledge hub hosted on the Bytedance-developed platform Feishu 飞书 (known internationally as Lark). It functions much like a shared giant Notion workspace — users can upload documents,1 create events, and leave comments on each other’s posts.
Since its launch, the wiki has attracted over 2 million unique visitors and generated 4.5 million total views for its front page. For context, the actual Wikipedia page on “artificial general intelligence” received about 2.1 million views globally during the same period.
The wiki is maintained by the Way to AGI community, an open-source AI collective boasting 8 million members interested in AI and 200,000 active developers,2 according to data published on its community forum. While slightly smaller than the largest AI-focused subreddit, r/ChatGPT (11.2 million members), it far exceeds r/OpenAI (2.5 million members) and the r/agi subreddit (82,000 members)3. The community appears to receive implicit support from tech companies, notably ByteDance — which owns both the Feishu platform and Coze, an AI app frequently discussed on the wiki. It also claims to form collaborations with other tech organizations and AI startups like Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, Zhipu AI, and Moonshot AI.4
Driven by the belief that “AI will reshape the thinking and learning methods of everyone, and bring them unprecedented powers,” the group shares a wide range of AI-related resources on this wiki as part of its collective journey — the “way to AGI.”
Or so they believe they are. This is a “Way to AGI” if and only if the following formula holds:
1. AGI = Silicon Valley
“When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.”
The AGI community may not be AGI-pilled, but they are definitely Silicon Valley-pilled. Discussions, learning paths, and citations overwhelmingly reference Western, especially Silicon Valley, sources. “AI leaders”, recommended podcasts, and must-listen talks come predominantly from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Proof 1: Silicon Valley > Nobel/Turing Prize > Chinese CEOs >> Musk: Ranking the AI leaders
The wiki has a “top AI leader” leaderboard, which is regularly updated to include the top voices of what are perceived as “AI leaders” worldwide.5 On this board, Silicon Valley dominates by a landslide. Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman lead the rankings, with Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li placed even higher than the three canonical AI “godfathers” — Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio.
The first China-based figure on the leaderboard is Robin Li 李彦宏, Baidu’s CEO, ranked ninth (Times AI 100 2023). His high position is somewhat surprising, given that ERNIE, Baidu’s flagship LLM, isn’t considered China’s strongest model. But Baidu has been an OG player in China’s AI ecosystem, investing in research long before the current LLM wave. It has also invested in full-stack AI development, including the recent open-source AI platforms PaddlePaddle 5.0 and Baige 4.0.
Other Chinese names on the list include:
Liang Wenfeng 梁文峰— CEO of DeepSeek (Times AI 100 2025)
Zeng Yi 曾毅— Professor on AI ethics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Times AI 100 2023)
Wang Xingxing 王兴兴— CEO, Unitree Robotics (Times AI 100 2025)
In total, seven people from China made the top 26 list compiled by Chinese AGI watchers themselves, with mostly CEOs from private tech companies, and several do not explicitly focus on frontier AI research. The list is likely also heavily influenced by Western rankings, as at least 23 of the 26 have appeared in the Times 100 AI rankings during 2023-2025. (’s Metis list does not appear to be an influence…). Profile photos of Clem Delangue and Marc Raibert are also directly taken from Times 100 AI 2023. However, the latest updated date (July) is before the release of Times 100 AI 2025, so the ranking foresaw Liang Wenfeng and Wang Xingxing’s debut on the 100 AI list.
Among all people listed, Elon stands out. He is the only one with a unique non-professional picture taken from a 2018 prank post for the release of the Tesla Model 3.
Despite many of these “leaders” being AGI-pilled, the ranking itself is not. With each leader having one selected quote to highlight their beliefs in AI, only two of the 26 selected quotes discuss AGI. Others focus on AI’s commercial promise, industry potential, and future trends. For instance, the selected quote from Liang Wenfeng, likely one of the most prominent voices in China advocating for AGI, is about open source as a strategy for both commercial value and brand reputation.
Proof 2: Commercial Success > Technical Depth >> AGI Research: Curating Western AI Voices
While hero-worshipping Silicon Valley leaders might be dismissed as superficial fandom, the community’s choice of information sources reveals deeper structural biases.
The section of “recommended foreign information outlets” has 129 sources, with 24 starred as must-read recommendations. Stratechery tops the list, while Lex edges out Dwarkesh. Most of the recommended sources have deep Silicon Valley associations, with one-third focusing on investment. The rest are C-suite executives or top researchers from big-name tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. Although some of the figures from big tech are AGI-focused, the list itself does not appear to be curated for AGI expertise. Rather, the even distribution of top profiles from big tech, mixed with prominent VC voices, reads more like a collection of Silicon Valley’s most commercially successful figures.
The 24 “must-read” outlets.
When we zoom out to the full list, the AGI flavor dissipates further. Among the remaining 105 sources, approximately 25-30% focus on investment, while 35-40% feature key figures from big tech companies and AI startups. About 15-20% come from U.S. universities, predominantly California institutions like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Caltech. Around 10% consists of journalism and media outlets covering Silicon Valley and venture capital culture, while only a handful represent more independent technical sources like Stephen Wolfram, Nathan Lambert, Lex Fridman, Sebastian Raschka, and SemiAnalysis.6
Out of 129 total sources in a wiki titled “Way to AGI,” only three are explicitly AGI-focused: Eliezer Yudkowsky (founder of MIRI and LessWrong), Ben Goertzel (who helped popularize the term AGI), and John Schulman (chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab and co-founder of OpenAI), with perhaps two others (Demis Hassabis and Ilya Sutskever) operating in AGI-adjacent territory. Thus, if one wants to “study AGI” through these sources, they are probably learning how big names in Silicon Valley think about AI. And while Silicon Valley thinks about AI in many ways, the most appealing one to this community seems to be how AI can be used to make money.
2. AGI = Quick Money Knowledge:
But emulating Silicon Valley success requires significant time and capital investment. For users seeking faster returns, the wiki pivots from Western voices to Chinese practice: offering step-by-step guides for building and monetizing AI products domestically. Eager novices come here for quick profits, while the “AI pros” they aspire to become are simultaneously seeking to profit from them.
Step 1: Learn just enough
Following the “syllabus” of this wiki, the first step is an introduction to AI, where it uses “what is ChatGPT…and why does it work” as a basic guide. From there, you then learn how to install and subscribe to ChatGPT (step-by-step from how to register a Google account to how to add your credit card, and of course, using a VPN7). There are seven “must-read” entry-level documents, six of which are Chinese translations of English sources, from the book “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?” to articles explaining transformer, stable diffusion, and diffusion models for video generation. The only original content is the seventh section, “Easily Understand 20 AI concepts,” which uses only two or three sentences in Chinese metaphor to explain each concept related to AI, from the chain of thought to the chatbot arena.
The 20th concept: hallucination, briefly explained as AI making up stories. The example goes: “You: Who was China’s first president? LLM: “Li Bai (Chinese poet in 700 AD).” You: What’s your evidence? LLM: “I dreamed of it.
Not every introductory content is that introductory, but they are definitely “quick to learn” and extremely “practical”. You can master “Python + AI Without Coding Experience in 20 Minutes,” or know how to “gather LLM Data” through a 400-word article. For some reason, knowing how to select the best GPUs for model reasoning through comparing 38 kinds of Nvidia’s chips, including the H100 and A100, is also categorized as “entry-level content.”
A partial screenshot of the guide.
Step 2: Developing “skills”
After (supposedly) mastering these “introductory” concepts, you can then dive into area-specific learning: AI agents, AI drawing, AI video, AI music, AI character + audio combination, AI 3D, ComfyUI workflow, or AI coding. Let us take “AI agents”, which seems to be one of the trending focuses for developers on their way to AGI now. Here, you will start with a Chinese translation of Maarten Grootendorst’s A Visual Guide to LLM Agents.
Then you will read guides on how to create your own simple “AI agents” without any coding through ByteDance’s Coze platform by only prompting a few lines of description of the agent’s characteristics. The guide will not teach you to create the next autonomous system that can navigate complex real-world tasks. Instead, it mostly shows you how to build AI chatbots that act like a language teacher, or an AI workflow that generates outreach emails based on company profiles.
Interested in building, but have no idea what to build? There are loads of examples and analyses showing you the potential of integrating these “AI agents” into different real-life scenarios, as well as analyses of what’s trending in the AI agent market right now. Here, AI chatbots, workflows, and agents literally mean the same thing. Participation matters more than precision under the buzzing excitement of AGI.
Coze’s platform with different “agents,” which are not very agentic.
Step 3: Practice in contests
After learning how to create your AI “agent”, you can participate in various “Agent co-learning pop-up contests (智能体共学快闪比赛)” to exchange with other people about how to build better bots/agents. Some smaller contests and workshops usually range from a few hours to a day online, with participants entering their own “agents” and experienced developers as judges to see who the winners are. Winners of these small skill contests receive a virtual certificate of “the coolest AI agent.”
The certificate of the winning “agent,” an “anti-scam assistant for parents,” in the May 2024 contest.
Meatier contests also exist, such as the “AI Agent Olympics 2025.” This “global” contest was co-hosted by Rednote, Weibo, Z.ai (which builds the frontier LLM GLM-4.5), and flowith.ai, with “Way to AGI” as one of the guest collaborators. Branding itself as “the first AI agent creation contest in 2025 worldwide,” the contest offers winners monetary awards (15000 RMB, or about US$2100) as well as social media exposure (via Weibo and Rednote). Despite sponsorship from Z.ai — the only AI startup in China openly claiming to be interested in AGI besides DeepSeek — and “Way to AGI,” there is no single mention of “AGI” on the contest website. Instead, the contest’s organizers state that “the rights to intelligence (智能) should not belong to any corporation, but instead should belong to a community of mankind (人类共同体),” with the last phrase strikingly similar to the CCP’s diction “a community of shared future for mankind (人类命运共同体).”
Don’t expect to see some crazily AGI-pilled individuals or the next DeepSeek founder in this contest. According to the bios of group members published on the platform, your peers will likely have some professional background related to AI, perhaps as a prompt engineer, as a product manager at a big Chinese tech firm, or as a full-stack developer. But you will also likely see people who were previously working as graphic designers, visual editors, or real estate agents — jobs that are very susceptible to AI replacement and were hit hard by China’s economic crisis — asking to form groups for related competitions. The poster of the AI Agent Olympics 2025.
Step 4: Believe that you can monetize your agents, while actually being monetized yourself
The way to AGI may be important, but perhaps the way to money is more important. The final step tackles the question of how to quickly monetize your new knowledge. Massive materials on product management are available in this section: how to understand and create demand for agents, where AI agents integrate into companies’ workflows, and experiences shared by so-called “AI agent product managers.” However, even with this general knowledge, there is still a real gap between your immature “AI agents” and AI products that can actually earn money.
There are many “AI pros” who first offer some free learning materials claiming to fill that gap. They will share some introductory content that showcases the great potential of the AI agent market and how easy it is for people with no background to make a profit. Later, they introduce paid core lessons that they argue offer “systemic structure, professional guidance, personalized plans, and feedback” for more efficient learning. Effectively, this so-called “open-source AGI community” becomes the first step for some people to hook novices into their closed-source AI coaching business.
Some titles of AI pros: “Top blogger for the RedNote-AI drawing course; officially partnered content creator with MidJourney; Senior design expert at a Fortune 500 company; former Creativity Lead and VP at a Fortune 500 company; guest lecturer for Posts & Telecommunications Press; and author of MidJourney AI Drawing: Business Case, Creativity, and Practice”
For example, in the AI Agent co-learning section, one member “shares” a piece of great paid content she “recently came across” (she is likely the person who runs the paid course). The screenshot below is how she justifies having paid for lessons (up to 5000 RMB/700 USD) in the open-source community: “It is like exercising in your home or going to the gym for guidance. Different people have different demands. The open-source community offers a wealth of resources suitable for disciplined self-learners. Recently, there have been many new entries to this community, and everyone is asking if there are suitable entry-level courses. Compared to learning from the text in the wiki, most people prefer the teachers to teach step-by-step.”
3. AGI ≠ Deep and Grand Knowledge: The Abandoned Projects
The emphasis on quick monetization comes at a cost. Buried beneath the layers of get-rich-quick content lie the remnants of more ambitious intellectual projects, which now serve as evidence of the roads not taken on the way to AGI.
AGI≠ AI Research
This community did attempt serious scholarship. Early projects included comprehensive translations of Google DeepMind research papers, philosophical explorations tracing the concept of “agent” back to ancient Greece, and an ambitious database cataloging AI agent papers from research groups worldwide, complete with translated Chinese abstracts.
But these initiatives couldn’t compete with monetized content for sustained attention. The AI agent paper database, launched in mid-2023, aimed to index AI agent research papers, provide reviews, and translate English abstracts into Chinese, but was abandoned by December 2023.
AGI ≠ AI Governance
Another abandoned project is the “Global AI Law Handbook (全球AI法规手册).” Originally conceived as an ambitious project to track, summarize, and translate AI-related legislation worldwide, it ceased updating Chinese regulations in mid-2024 and coverage of other jurisdictions by late 2023. Lost within its archived pages are translations of significant policy documents: the official EU AI Act interpretation from 2023, the UK Parliament’s pro-innovation AI regulation framework, Biden’s AI safety and security standards, and the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Some of these regulations remain active today; others, like the project itself, have been abandoned.
The handbook section has since pivoted toward narrower, more commercially oriented content — focusing on practical AI copyright guidance in China, including analysis of AI-generated artwork copyright disputes, while increasingly hinting at paid legal consultation services for users.
AGI ≠ AGI: the missing debate
Perhaps the most telling irony of this massive “AGI wiki” is what’s conspicuously absent: any serious discussion of AGI itself. Among hundreds of documents covering everything from GPU comparisons to monetization strategies, only two articles specifically address AGI as a concept — both written by the same author reviewing industry trends in 2023 and forecasting those in 2024.
The 2023 review reveals the community’s priorities starkly: the author spent literally zero percent of the text explaining what AGI actually is, and dedicated one brief section to “the Road to AGI (迈向AGI之路)”, mainly to forecasting GPT-5’s 2024 release and near-AGI capability (both did not happen), synthetic data training, and emergent behaviors. Then he dives into five detailed sections on development trends and business opportunities.
The 2024 forecast still devotes its main content to analyzing business and investment trends in AI products. After devoting 75% of the article to business trends and 20% to geopolitics, the author finally begins to discuss how actors might control and monopolize AGI technology. However, this discussion ends up going nowhere, with the author pointing out how individual voices are increasingly unheard under grand narratives put forward to celebrate the promise of AI. “I don’t want to talk more about the problems of AGI, because there is no point simply talking about this problem.”
This article captures the irony of “Way to AGI” well. Even though this wiki is titled “Way to AGI,” serious analyses of AGI are packaged in massive amounts of business buzzwords to attract attention. Only glittering investment bubbles and Western tech jargon can survive along the way to AGI, while more serious learning finds no way out.
Rather than leading to AGI, this wiki serves as a way for individuals to feel empowered and hopeful by engaging in AI discussions driven mostly by business interests. The motivation that drives many to this platform — the economic anxiety from AI disruption and China’s macroeconomic recession — gets buried beneath the promise that “AI will reshape the thinking and learning methods of everyone, and bring them unprecedented powers.”
The deeper paradox is: while “Way to AGI” promises to empower people through AI and make the path to AGI accessible to everyone, the only serious discussion of AGI feels profoundly disempowered. The community’s only AGI analysis retreats from complexity and laments powerlessness in the face of larger forces. To some extent, this AGI wiki is similar to the AGI bar, where people indulge in bubbles and avoid reality. Perhaps only by avoiding serious engagement with AGI itself can people maintain the promise and excitement that AGI represents. The moment AGI becomes real, with its implications for power, control, and human agency, the bubble begins to burst.
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However, this figure should be interpreted with caution. The community’s definition of ‘active developers’ likely includes users who create AI-generated content (videos, audio, images) and those who use no-code/low-code AI tools, rather than exclusively traditional programmers.
It is likely that these relationships are not formal “collaboration” per se, but more informal and minor associations like sponsoring one event hosted by the community.
Using a credit card online might seem like a basic skill for most Westerners, but it is not often encountered in China. People usually use other digital payment methods, mostly commonly scanning QR codes.
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