Asia (except ME & Indian SC)

MANILA, Sept. 30 (Xinhua) -- Philippine troops killed four rebels in a clash in the central Philippine Negros Occidental province on Thursday, a military report said.

According to the report, the four New People's Army (NPA) rebels were killed in a 30-minute fighting that broke out around 2:00 a.m. local time in Manapla town.

No soldiers were wounded or killed in the clash, the report added.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte restarted the talks to end the decades-old insurgency when he came to power in 2016, but the negotiations faltered.

JAKARTA, Sept. 29 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia's Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries said Wednesday that it has seized an illegal Malaysian-flagged fishing vessel in Indonesian waters in the Malacca Strait.

The captain and all the four crew members on board are Indonesians, it said.

The ministry's Director-General of Marine Resources and Fisheries Supervision, Adin Nurawaluddin, said the vessel was caught on Sunday while poaching with prohibited trawler.

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept. 30 (Xinhua) -- The planned move to supply the Australian navy with nuclear-powered submarines through the security partnership between Australia, Britain and the United States, known as AUKUS, is likely to harm regional stability and raise tensions, several experts have said.

MITO, Japan (AP) — Fumio Kishida, the man soon to become Japan’s prime minister, says he believes raising incomes is the only way to get the world’s third-largest economy growing again.

Kishida says he wants to promote a “new capitalism” that would be more equitable, with fairer distribution of national wealth — the only way to get frugal Japanese families to spend more.

VUNG TAU, Vietnam (AP) — Vietnam will lift the lockdown in its largest city on Friday, ending nearly three months of restrictions on movement to curb a coronavirus surge.

People in Ho Chi Minh City, a metropolis of 10 million, will be able to leave their homes, restaurants can serve take-away meals and other essential businesses can open, the city said on its website Thursday.

SINGAPORE (AP) — Living through the coronavirus pandemic in Singapore, Joys Tan followed the rules that helped the city-state keep its cases low: keeping her distance from others, wearing a mask and getting herself vaccinated.

Nobody in her family had contracted the virus, and it was with confidence that she had dinner at her godmother’s house earlier this month, even with infections rising rapidly, fueled by the delta variant, as the government pushed ahead with a strategy of “living with COVID” as an endemic disease with a gradual relaxation of restrictions.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea leader Kim Jong Un expressed his willingness to restore stalled communication lines with South Korea in coming days while shrugging off U.S. offers for dialogue as “cunning ways” to conceal its hostility against the North, state media reported Thursday.

BEIJING, Sep 29 (APP): ioncom (Hong Kong) Technology Ltd. is looking for original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and internet services providers to re-launch its wireless networking devices brand TOTOLINK in Pakistan.

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed firm first entered the Pakistani market before the outbreak of COVID-19.

However, the nascent sales network was soon disintegrated after cross-border goods transport between China and Pakistan was affected by the pandemic, China Economic Net (CEN) reported on Wednesday.

BEIJING, Sep 29 (APP): A Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson on Wednesday said that India forward policy and illegal encroachment upon the Chinese territory across the border considered as the root cause of tensions between the two countries.

India has long been following the forward policy and illegally encroached upon China territory across the border. This is the root cause of the tensions, Hua Chunying said during her regular briefing while commenting on India deployment of sophisticated weapons on China-India border along the LAC with China in Eastern Ladakh.

BEIJING, September 29. /TASS/: The creation of AUKUS, a trilateral security pact in the Indo-Pacific Region by Australia, the UK, and the US, came as a result of efforts aimed at deliberately abusing a loophole in international law, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry Hua Chunying told a regular briefing on Wednesday.