Tacos al pastor, the Mexican street food built around a rotating spit of pork, grew out of Middle Eastern shawarma. Around 36,000 people from Ottoman lands moved to Mexico between the late 1800s and early 1900s, many of them from the Levant, and they brought their cooking with them. By the 1930s, restaurants serving shawarma existed in Mexico. In the 1960s, Mexican-born children of these Lebanese migrants began using the same vertical rotisserie, but they swapped lamb for pork and marinated it in red chili, creating tacos al pastor. The name means 'in the style of the shepherd', a nod to the original lamb version. The word shawarma itself comes from the Turkish 'çevirme', meaning turning.

Indonesian Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka handed his resignation to parliament after questions were raised about his eligibility for office and his academic credentials. Gibran is the son of former president Joko Widodo, and his resignation came as Widodo publicly backed the president, Prabowo Subianto. Gibran had been elected vice president in 2024 as Prabowo's running mate. His candidacy was made possible by a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling on the minimum age for candidates, which was itself controversial. Parliament will now consider the resignation.

Angkor, near Siem Reap in northern Cambodia, was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia between roughly the 9th and 15th centuries. At its height the city spread across about 3,000 square kilometres, making it the largest pre-industrial city on Earth by area. Its growth depended on water: huge reservoirs called barays, along with canals and embankments, stored monsoon rain and carried it to rice fields. That system let farmers harvest more than once a year and fed a very large population through the dry season. The temple complex of Angkor Wat, built in the early 12th century, is the best-known monument and still stands at the heart of the park.