Three-month-old Tayabullah is quiet and motionless. His mother Nigar moves the oxygen pipe away from his nose and puts a finger below his nostrils to check if she can feel him breathing.

She begins to cry as she realises her son is fading.

At this hospital in Afghanistan, there is not a single working ventilator.

Mothers hold oxygen tubes near their babies' noses because masks designed to fit their small faces are not available, and the women are trying to fill in for what trained staff or medical equipment should do.

Every day, 167 children die in Afghanistan from preventable diseases, according to the UN children's fund Unicef - illnesses that could and should be cured with the right medication.

It is a staggering number. But it's an estimate.

And when you step inside the paediatric ward of the main hospital in the western province of Ghor, you will be left wondering if that estimate is too low.

Multiple rooms are full of sick children, at least two in each bed, their little bodies ravaged by pneumonia. Just two nurses look after 60 children.

In one room, we saw at least two dozen babies who appeared to be in a serious condition. The children should have been continuously monitored in critical care - impossible at this hospital.

Yet, for the million people who live in Ghor, this basic facility is still the best equipped public hospital they can access.

Mothers are left distraught at this Afghanistan hospital where children die of preventable or curable diseases


Public healthcare in Afghanistan has never been adequate, and foreign money which almost entirely funded it was frozen in August 2021 when the Taliban seized power. Over the past 20 months, we have visited hospitals and clinics across this country, and witnessed them collapsing.

Now the Taliban's recent ban on women working for NGOs means it's becoming harder for humanitarian agencies to operate, putting even more children and babies at risk.

Already defeated by a lack of resources, medics at the Ghor hospital used whatever little they had to try to revive Tayabullah.

Dr Ahmad Samadi was called in to check his condition, fatigue and stress visible on his face. He put a stethoscope to Tayabullah's chest - there was a faint heartbeat.

Nurse Edima Sultani rushed in with an oxygen pump. She put it over Tayabullah's mouth, blowing air into it. Then Dr Samadi used his thumbs to perform compressions on the boy's tiny chest.

Watching on looking stricken was Tayabullah's grandfather Ghawsaddin. He told us his grandson was suffering from pneumonia and malnutrition.

"It took eight hours on rubble roads to bring him here from our district Charsadda," Ghawsaddin said. The family, who can only afford to eat dry bread for meals, scraped together money to pay for the ride.

For half an hour, the efforts to revive his grandson continued. Nurse Sultani then turned towards Nigar and told her Tayabullah had died.

The sudden silence which had enveloped the room was broken by Nigar's sobs. Her baby boy was wrapped in a blanket and handed over to Ghawsaddin. The family carried him home.

Tayabullah should be alive - every disease he had was curable.

"I'm also a mother and when I saw the baby die, I felt like I've lost my own child. When I saw his mother weeping, it broke my heart. It hurt my conscience," said Nurse Sultani, who frequently does 24-hour shifts.

"We don't have equipment and there is a lack of trained staff, especially female staff. When we are looking after so many in serious conditions, which child should we check on first? There's nothing we can do but watch babies die."

There are no oxygen masks in the hospital small enough to fit a baby's face


Minutes later, in the room next door, we saw another child in severe distress, with an oxygen mask on her face, struggling to breathe.

Two-year-old Gulbadan was born with a heart defect, a condition called patent ductus arteriosus. It was diagnosed six months ago at this hospital.

Doctors have told us the condition is not uncommon or hard to treat. But Ghor's main hospital is not equipped to perform routine surgery that could fix it. It also doesn't have the medicines she needs.

Gulbadan's grandmother Afwa Gul held down her small arms, to try to prevent the little girl from pulling down her mask.

"We borrowed money to take her to Kabul, but we couldn't afford surgery, so we had to bring her back," she said. They approached an NGO to get financial help. Their details were registered but there's been no response since then.

Gulbadan's father Nawroze stroked her forehead, trying to soothe his daughter who winced with every breath she took. Stress etched on his face, he pursed his lips and let out a sigh of resignation. He told us Gulbadan had recently begun to talk, forming her first words, calling out to him and other members of their family.

"I'm a labourer. I don't have a stable income. If I had money, she would never have suffered this way. At this moment, I can't even afford to buy one cup of tea," he said.

I asked Dr Samadi how much oxygen Gulbadan needs.

"Two litres every minute," he said. "When this cylinder gets empty, if we don't find another one, she will die."

When we went back later to check on Gulbadan, we were told that's exactly what had happened. The oxygen cylinder had run out, and she died.

The oxygen production unit at the hospital isn't able to produce sufficient oxygen because it only has power at night, and there isn't a steady supply of raw material.

In a matter of a few hours, two children died of diseases that could have been prevented or cured. It's a crushing but all too familiar blow for Dr Samadi and his colleagues.

"I feel exhaustion and agony. Every day we lose one or two beloved children of Ghor. We have almost got accustomed to it now," he said.

Walking around the rooms, we saw an overwhelming number of children in distress. One-year-old Sajad's breathing was raspy. He's suffering from pneumonia and meningitis.

In another bed is Irfan. When his breathing became more laboured, his mother Zia-rah was given another oxygen pipe to hold near his nose.

Wiping tears that rolled down her cheeks with her upper arm, she carefully held both pipes as steady as she could. She told us she would have brought Irfan to the hospital at least four or five days earlier if the roads had not been blocked by snow.

So many simply can't make it to hospital, and others choose not to stay once they get there.

"Ten days ago a child was brought here in a very critical condition," Nurse Sultani said. "We gave him an injection, but we didn't have the medicines to cure him.

"So his father decided to take him home. 'If he has to die, let him die at home'," he told me.

Mothers sit alongside children with oxygen cylinders - but the hospital is unable to provide sufficient quantities


What we saw in Ghor raises serious questions about why public healthcare in Afghanistan is crumbling so quickly, when billions of dollars were poured into it by the international community for 20 years until 2021.

Where was that money spent, if a provincial hospital doesn't have a single ventilator for its patients?

Currently there is a stop-gap arrangement in place. Because money can't be given directly to the internationally unrecognised Taliban government, humanitarian agencies have stepped in to fund salaries of medical staff and the cost of medicines and food, that are just about keeping hospitals like the one in Ghor running.

Now, that funding, already sorely inefficient, could also be at risk. Aid agencies warn that their donors might cut back because the Taliban's restrictions on women, including its ban on Afghan women working for the UN and NGOs, violates international laws.

Only 5% of the UN's appeal for Afghanistan has been funded so far.

A burial ground in the hills near the hospital in Ghor, where at least half of the new graves belong to children


We drove up one of the hills near the Ghor hospital to a burial ground. There are no records or registers here, not even a caretaker. So it's not possible to find out who the graves belong to, but it's easy to distinguish big graves from small ones.

From what we saw, a disproportionate number - at least half - of the new graves belong to children. A man who lives in a house close by also told us most of those they are burying these days are children.

There may be no way to count how many children are dying, but there is evidence everywhere of the scale of the crisis.

The July launch links credit-card spending and rewards to Kimi memberships and AI computing benefits, although some claims about conversational banking functions go beyond what the companies’ official materials currently confirm.
Chinese artificial-intelligence company Moonshot AI has launched a Kimi-branded credit card with Agricultural Bank of China and American Express, bringing AI subscriptions and computing-related rewards directly into a mainstream banking product.

The card became available in mainland China on July 10, 2026, after opening for reservations in June.

Kimi and some reports have described it as the world’s first “AI-native” credit card, although that designation is a marketing description rather than an independently established industry category.

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The most significant verified feature is not that artificial intelligence replaces the bank’s conventional credit-card infrastructure.

Instead, Kimi services are built into the card’s membership and rewards proposition.

Kimi’s own explanation says an AI-native credit card embeds Kimi membership, credits and related benefits into card opening and points-based spending, while also offering AI-oriented activities such as prompt courses and sharing sessions.

Agricultural Bank of China remains responsible for the credit-card account and associated banking functions.

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The card is offered in standard and premium platinum versions tied to different Kimi membership levels.

Published product information says the standard card corresponds to Kimi’s Andante membership tier and carries a main-card annual fee of 580 yuan, with the first year waived and subsequent annual fees waived after ten qualifying transactions.

The premium platinum version corresponds to the higher Allegretto tier and carries an annual fee of 880 yuan, which can be offset with 200,000 qualifying points.

Cardholders can obtain Kimi-related benefits including memberships and access to AI resources such as Agent and Kimi Code usage, alongside opportunities connected to new Kimi models.

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Agricultural Bank of China is also using introductory incentives to attract customers.

During a campaign running from July 10 through September 30, first-time applicants for the premium platinum card who spend at least 5,888 yuan within the qualifying period can receive a Kimi-branded NFC accessory and two monthly Allegretto memberships.

A separate promotion for eligible new Agricultural Bank of China credit-card customers offers Kimi-related rewards after three purchases of at least 18 yuan each.

The card is currently available only in mainland China.

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Some descriptions of the product have gone considerably further, portraying the card as a conversational financial assistant capable of examining transaction histories, answering natural-language questions about spending, planning repayments, blocking purchases when budgets are exceeded and identifying suspicious transactions before authorization.

Those functions have appeared in secondary coverage of the launch.

However, the official Kimi and Agricultural Bank of China materials reviewed for the product do not clearly establish that these capabilities are currently integrated into the live credit-card account.

The verified launch is therefore better understood as a credit card deeply tied to Kimi’s AI ecosystem and digital benefits rather than, on the available evidence, an autonomous AI system managing a customer’s credit account.

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The distinction matters because it changes the privacy implications.

A card that merely awards AI subscriptions or computing credits creates a different data relationship from one that gives a large language model direct access to a customer’s full transaction history, credit profile and repayment behavior.

Official campaign terms show that some personal information is shared where necessary to deliver Kimi memberships and promotional rewards, but they do not establish that Moonshot AI routinely receives complete card transaction histories for conversational analysis.

Claims about AI-driven lending decisions, personalized credit scoring or continuous surveillance of cardholder spending therefore remain unconfirmed for this product.

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The launch nevertheless reflects a broader shift in China’s financial sector.

Several Chinese banks have recently introduced cards or banking products that exchange ordinary spending activity for access to AI models, cloud-computing resources or tokens.

China Merchants Bank, Ping An Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and MYbank have all been associated with similar initiatives involving technology companies or cloud providers.

The emerging competition is aimed particularly at developers, technology workers and heavy users of generative AI, turning computing resources into a new category of credit-card reward.

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For Moonshot AI, the card gives Kimi another distribution channel beyond conventional AI subscriptions.

For Agricultural Bank of China, it offers a way to attract technology-oriented customers in a Chinese credit-card market that has been contracting.

American Express contributes the card-network component to the three-party product.

The experiment could become more consequential if future versions connect conversational AI securely to banking data and account controls.

For now, however, the clearest innovation is more modest and more concrete: spending on a conventional bank-issued credit card can generate benefits that consumers use inside an AI platform.

The next test will be whether that model appeals beyond developers and intensive AI users strongly enough to become a lasting category of financial product rather than a specialized co-branded rewards card.
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Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are directing more capital toward Southeast Asian digital finance, biotechnology and hospitality, with Thailand seeking to attract investment through regulatory reforms and its established tourism infrastructure.
Multinational companies are expanding production in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia as they adapt to changing trade conditions, increasing the region’s importance as an alternative manufacturing and export base.
Investment in semiconductor packaging, printed circuit boards and hyperscale data centers is pushing Thailand and Malaysia toward higher-value positions in the global technology supply chain as artificial intelligence demand accelerates.
TikTok Shop and local delivery companies are forming an integrated logistics network across Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, intensifying competition with established regional e-commerce platforms.
The Thai government is partnering with international entertainment and streaming companies to develop music, festivals and other creative industries as sources of tourism income and consumer exports.
The ASEAN Regional Mine Action Center is urging member states to use spatial data and mapping technologies to accelerate clearance of unexploded ordnance that continues to affect agriculture and infrastructure across the Mekong region.
Indonesia has begun relocating major economic and defense ministries to Nusantara on Borneo, presenting the administrative move as a demonstration of the new capital’s long-term viability to international investors.
Mekong countries are seeking broader consultations with Cambodia over the environmental and geopolitical effects of the Chinese-backed Funan Techo Canal, including concerns about agricultural water security and changing maritime routes.
Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have begun urgent discussions over historically low reservoir levels in the lower Mekong basin, seeking to balance hydropower generation with water needs for agriculture.
The Philippines is strengthening maritime coordination with the United States and Japan and deploying advanced coast guard vessels after confrontations involving Chinese maritime militia ships near offshore energy areas.
Thai authorities have mobilized disaster response teams and warned of flash flooding across northern and northeastern provinces through mid-August as a powerful monsoon system threatens agricultural areas and regional transport links.
Indonesia and Vietnam are developing closer cooperation on electric vehicle component production as Chinese investment expands, seeking to strengthen Southeast Asia’s position as a major export base for electric mobility.
Energy regulators in Vietnam and Singapore have reached a key regulatory milestone for a major subsea transmission cable that would allow surplus Vietnamese offshore wind power to be supplied directly to Singapore.
Major US technology companies are committing additional capital to hyperscale data centers and subsea cable networks in Singapore and neighboring Johor, Malaysia, supporting the region’s expanding digital infrastructure.
Penang has secured new investment from European and Taiwanese chipmakers focused on advanced semiconductor packaging and testing, reinforcing Malaysia’s role in the downstream global chip supply chain.
Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds have provided substantial new funding to a consortium developing Thailand’s first fully digital banking ecosystem, highlighting growing financial links between Gulf investors and Southeast Asia’s digital economy.
The average cost of corporate data breaches in Southeast Asia has surpassed four million US dollars, prompting companies across the region to increase cybersecurity spending as automated threats become more sophisticated.
Thailand’s health ministry has introduced streamlined regulations to attract pharmaceutical partnerships and international medical specialists, building on the country’s healthcare infrastructure and demand from high-value medical tourists from the Middle East and China.
Economic officials from all eleven ASEAN member states have moved forward with regional agreements intended to expand cross-border digital commerce and strengthen Southeast Asian supply chains against geopolitical disruptions.
Airports of Thailand is bringing forward expansion plans at Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang airports to increase passenger capacity and luxury retail space as the country prepares for exceptionally strong international tourism during the coming high season.
DHL Express has introduced a daily Boeing freighter service between Shanghai and Bangkok, strengthening Thailand’s role as a logistics gateway for Southeast Asian exports to Europe and the Middle East as regional manufacturing links deepen.
New industry data shows a sharp recovery in Thai manufacturing investment, with foreign capital concentrated in the Eastern Economic Corridor as technology companies build printed circuit board plants and hyperscale data centers.
Thai private-sector groups have raised their annual growth forecast after technology and electronics exports jumped forty-five percent, with the Eastern Economic Corridor attracting foreign investment linked to surging global demand for artificial intelligence hardware.
New cultural directives and security measures targeting minority communities in Indonesia have drawn criticism from international rights groups, while the developments are raising concerns among multinational companies about the country’s social environment.
Malaysia is seeking diplomatic solutions after a change in British regulations disrupted practice pathways for Malaysian medical students studying at international campuses, raising concerns over the country’s investment in overseas medical education and its future healthcare workforce.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has defended the government’s economic reform agenda during a parliamentary dispute over management of the Tabung Haji pilgrimage fund, as opposition tensions expose divisions over strategic state investment.
Manufacturers across Southeast Asia are preparing for possible changes in US bilateral trade policy that could redirect more Chinese industrial goods into regional markets while encouraging companies to shift investment toward ASEAN production bases.
Thailand’s tourism authorities are shifting greater attention toward high-spending and long-stay international visitors as localised tensions along the Cambodian border complicate some cross-border tourism flows.
Thailand plans to use the influx of international delegates for the World Bank meetings to promote geographical indication products, premium jasmine rice, and heritage textiles, combining economic diplomacy with cultural promotion.
Merck is upgrading its Singapore operations with an advanced biosafety testing laboratory, strengthening the city-state’s role as a regional research and biomanufacturing centre serving healthcare and biotechnology markets across Asia-Pacific.
The use of an artificial intelligence-generated video in Singapore’s national day celebrations has prompted debate over human filmmaking, intellectual property, and the role of AI in the city-state’s creative economy.
Vietnamese automaker VinFast is rapidly adding authorised dealerships and service centres across Indonesia, intensifying competition with established Japanese manufacturers and Chinese electric vehicle brands in one of Southeast Asia’s largest markets.
Vietnam is preparing new tax incentives for high-tech foreign manufacturers that maintain at least thirty percent domestic equity and transfer core technologies to local partners as the government seeks to move higher up the manufacturing value chain.
Vietnamese satellite startup VinSpace has secured a dedicated launch arrangement with SpaceX as Hanoi seeks to strengthen its domestic space industry and expand its role in regional satellite communications.
Singapore is accelerating agreements to import renewable electricity from neighboring ASEAN countries as rapidly expanding data centers and artificial intelligence infrastructure increase energy demand and put pressure on the city-state’s carbon reduction goals.
Severe monsoon rains have displaced more than five hundred thousand people across Manila and thirty-three provinces, prompting the Philippine government to redirect funding from its Build Better More infrastructure programme toward disaster recovery and economic support.
US defense officials have called for greater domestic defense spending during high-level consultations with the Philippines, signalling a more pragmatic approach to regional security partnerships as maritime tensions rise in the South China Sea.
Thailand’s Finance Ministry says timely approval of the national budget will allow funding for major infrastructure projects to continue without interruption, supporting public investment and development across the Eastern Economic Corridor.
Southeast Asian economic ministers are advancing plans for digital payments, cross-border data flows, and more unified supply-chain rules as the region seeks greater economic resilience amid rising global trade tensions and tariff risks.
Bangkok is preparing to host more than fifteen thousand delegates for the October IMF and World Bank annual meetings while promoting the Bangkok Blueprint, a policy framework focused on digital public infrastructure and climate finance.
DHL Express has introduced a daily Boeing 767 freighter service linking Shanghai directly with Bangkok as cross-border trade and manufacturing activity between China, Thailand, and mainland Southeast Asia continues to expand.
Foreign investment in Thailand reached one hundred eighty-seven billion baht in the first half of the year, prompting the Finance Ministry to raise its growth outlook as advanced technology and manufacturing projects benefit from the Thailand FastPass investment scheme.
Deputy Prime Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow has travelled to Moscow to finalise a new strategic consultation plan and expand trade with Eurasia, reinforcing Thailand’s effort to maintain active neutrality while deepening ties with major global powers.
The Republic of Singapore Air Force has carried out a helicopter medical evacuation of an ill crew member from a commercial vessel, highlighting Singapore’s role in maritime emergency response along some of the world’s busiest shipping routes.
The ASEAN Secretariat has launched a regional workshop aimed at accelerating the clearance of legacy landmines and unexploded ordnance in affected member states, with the goal of making land available for agriculture and infrastructure development.
Singaporean health and technology experts are advocating regulations that would require social media companies to modify how algorithms deliver content to young users, moving beyond simple limits on overall screen time.
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