ASEAN leaders pet koala at Australian summit

Australia’s native wildlife took a break from violently killing people and stretching the limits of evolutionary understanding to greet a selection of Southeast Asia’s great and powerful. Australia is the home of this year’s special summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), marking 50 years since Australia joined the bloc as its first non-southeast Asian partner nation. Australian Prime Minister Antony Albanese decided to greet his fellow leaders by pacifying a local koala, and placing it into a small tree covered by a parasol, as dictated by international protocol. Leaders were invited to shake hands with Albanese before petting the koala and making an offering of a branch increasingly shorn of eucalyptus leaves, as the koala looked on in mild confusion. Topics for discussion at the summit include the admission of East Timor into the bloc, thus granting the country koala-petting privileges at future Australian diplomatic functions, and the continued violence in Myanmar, who currently do not have koala-petting privileges.