Asia (except ME & Indian SC)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s prime minister on Tuesday apologized for “failing to carefully take care of the health” of hundreds of sailors who contracted the coronavirus on a navy ship taking part in an anti-piracy mission off East Africa.

The outbreak aboard the destroyer Munmu the Great is the largest cluster South Korea’s military has seen. A total of 247 of the ship’s 301 crew have tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days and two military planes had to be dispatched to fly them all home.

FUKUSHIMA, Japan (AP) — Skippy the yellow kangaroo with green paws was affixed to the first base dugout railing, watching the Australia Spirit become the first team to work out at Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium, seven weeks after they became first foreign athletes to arrive at the Olympics.

Coach Laing Harrow hit grounders and flies to his women starting at 9 a.m. Tuesday, exactly 24 hours before the eighth-ranked Aussies step to the plate when host Japan, the No. 2-ranked softball team, throws the very first pitch of the very first event of the pandemic-delayed Olympics.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Muslims across Indonesia marked a grim Eid al-Adha festival for a second year Tuesday as the country struggles to cope with a devastating new wave of coronavirus cases and the government has banned large gatherings and toughened travel restrictions.

Indonesia is now Asia’s COVID-19 hot spot with the most confirmed daily cases, as infections and deaths have surged over the past three weeks and India’s massive outbreak has waned.

BEIJING, July 19 (APP): Export of Pakistani cosmetics to Chinese customers particularly Muslims community would be a good opportunity for Pakistani products as China has a huge and approachable market, said Ahmad Zafar, director of Beauty Expert (Pvt) Ltd.

“China is a huge market and it is an approachable market as well. Targeting the Muslim community is a viable option in China. We have a plan in near future of exporting our products”, he said.

SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in has decided not to visit Japan for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics which is slated to begin on Friday, the presidential Blue House said on Monday.

Park Soo-hyun, senior Blue House secretary for public communication, told a press briefing that the governments of South Korea and Japan had discussed a possibility for the summit on the occasion of the Tokyo Olympics.

TOKYO (AP) — Global shares fell Monday amid deepening pessimism over rising COVID-19 infections in much of Asia.

Oil prices dropped further after oil producing nations agreed to raise production limits.

France’s CAC 40 shed 1.1% in early trading to 6,388.62, while Germany’s DAX was down 1.1% at 15,370.28. Britain’s FTSE 100 dipped 1.5% to 6,906.69. The future for the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.8% to 34,283.5. The future for the S&P 500 lost 0.6% to 4,294.38.

TOKYO (AP) — A Tokyo court handed down prison terms for the American father and son accused of helping Nissan’s former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, escape to Lebanon while awaiting trial in Japan.

Michael Taylor was sentenced Monday to two years in prison, while his son Peter was sentenced to one year and eight months.

They were charged with helping a criminal in the December 2019 escape of Ghosn, who hid in a big box that was flown on a private jet via Turkey to Lebanon. Lebanon has no extradition treaty with Japan.

TOKYO (AP) — After a yearlong delay and months of hand-wringing that rippled across a pandemic-inflected world, a Summer Games unlike any other is at hand. It’s an Olympics, sure, but also, in a very real way, something quite different.

BEIJING (AP) — The Chinese host of this year’s meeting of the U.N. World Heritage Committee has defended the body’s proposal to label the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger” against Australian government suspicion that China influenced the finding for political reasons.

The committee, which is meeting both virtually and in the Chinese city of Fuzhou for the next two weeks, will consider the draft decision on Friday.

July 18 (Reuters) - For a week, 21-year-old student Phoe Thar has been out by dawn to gather oxygen cylinders from the homes of coronavirus sufferers in Myanmar's second city of Mandalay.

He and fellow volunteers line the tanks up outside charities for filling and returning, trying to save lives in a country whose health system has largely collapsed since a Feb. 1 coup and which now faces its worst surge of COVID-19 infections.