Top Asia Pacific Breaking News: Latest Updates

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - China imposed new export controls Monday on 40 Japanese entities it says are contributing to the country's "remilitarization," as tensions with Tokyo rise. Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have been increasingly tense since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year implied Japan could intervene if China used military force against Taiwan, an island democracy China claims as its own. Meanwhile, Japan has accelerated its military expansion, especially by adding offensive capabilities, which Beijing has condemned. China's Commerce Ministry on Monday placed 20 Japanese entities, including several subsidiaries of Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, on a control list, which prohibits Chinese and foreign exporters from selling to them dual-use items made in China.

BEIJING (AP) - China's leader held up his country's rapid industrialization as a new pathway for developing nations in a speech Wednesday that projected a growing confidence both at home and on the world stage. Xi Jinping, now in his 14th year in power, noted that China achieved in a few decades what it took centuries for rich countries to do. "We advocate the building of a community with a shared future for humanity, providing Chinese wisdom, Chinese solutions and Chinese strength for addressing major issues facing humanity," he said at an event marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist Party.

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) - Mourners gathered Wednesday in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore to bury 14 schoolchildren who were killed when the roof of a tutoring center collapsed on Tuesday. Police are investigating whether negligence during ongoing construction work caused the collapse that left another eight children injured and hospitalized in stable condition. Residents and preliminary police findings indicate the tutoring center was operating in an aging building. Investigators believe the unfinished roof of the second floor may have collapsed because of poor construction. At least two people, including the building owner, were arrested as investigators tried to determine who was responsible, senior police official Kamran Faisal said, adding that negligence by the owner and construction workers appear to have caused the collapse.

The great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court case that established the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, called Tuesday's ruling a victory for all Americans, saying it reaffirmed that precedent. "I don't consider this stuff a personal victory," Norman Wong told The Associated Press. "It's an obligation and a duty for every American to care about this because ultimately we're not fighting for the rights of Chinese or Japanese or whatever. We're fighting for rights for all Americans because these are fundamental rights." Wong, 76, has become an unexpected public face of the movement to protect birthright citizenship.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Indonesia's anti-graft court on Tuesday sentenced one of the co-founders of ride-hailing and payments giant Gojek to 10 years in prison after finding him guilty in a high-profile corruption case stemming from his time as education minister. Nadiem Anwar Makarim was convicted of pushing his ministry to buy Google Chromebook laptops for schools during the COVID-19 pandemic as the American tech giant was considering an investment in Gojek's parent company. Makarim denied wrongdoing. A panel of five judges at Jakarta's Corruption Court ordered Makarim to repay 809 billion rupiah (about $45.2 million) - a figure prosecutors said represented the value to him of Google's investment in PT Aplikasi Karya Anak Bangsa - and imposed a fine of 1 billion rupiah (about $55,870).

The instructions were clear: He had four days to make each victim fall in love. And there were a lot of victims. Online, Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar, impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella. On a typical shift, he said, he chatted with more than 100 people across dozens of profiles at the same time, as supervisors prowled among the desks with electric batons. In just a month, Koorimannil targeted some 50,000 victims from at least 17 countries, according to records he smuggled out to The Associated Press. His "clients" included a widowed tailor in Kurdistan, a pastry chef in Turkey, a sheep farmer in Kyrgyzstan, soldiers in Iraq, an engineer in Russia, a building painter in Germany, a port officer in Argentina, a student in Indonesia, a security guard in Poland and a dairy farmer in the Republic of Georgia.

One thought he was getting to know "Eliza" and was robbed of his life savings. The other was trafficked to a scam compound, beaten and forced to become "Ella" online. Separated by thousands of miles, Chris Colocousis and Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil inhabited opposite sides of the global cyberscam industry. An AP/"FRONTLINE" investigation has found that American technology is present all along the digital supply chains that connect people like Colocousis and Koorimannil. Most public scrutiny has focused on the social media platforms victims see. But the infrastructure exploited to commit fraud begins much farther upstream, from AI models baked into powerful new tools to optimize workflow and create more perfect fakes, to satellite dishes that enable scammers to evade internet crackdowns, to internet service providers that carry traffic from the lawless borderlands of Myanmar to the phones and computers of millions of victims.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Abdul Ahad Momand, Afghanistan 's first citizen in space, has died at age 67, his family and friends said. A national hero, Momand died from cancer on June 21 in a hospital in Stuttgart, Germany, where he had lived since leaving Afghanistan in 1992 during the civil war. "I am deeply saddened by the sudden death of Afghanistan's first and only astronaut, Abdul Ahad Momand," former President Ashraf Ghani wrote on X. "I pray to God to grant Momand a high place in heaven, and I extend my deepest condolences to his wife, children, and other family members." In 1988, Momand - then a 29‑year‑old air force pilot - was selected to join a Soviet space program designed to send representatives from aligned nations into orbit, at a time when Afghanistan was under Soviet control.

KAMAKURA, Japan (AP) - Eiko Kadono, the author behind Japan's most famous - and almost certainly most beloved - literary witch, has a little trouble going up the stairs these days. At 91, she's still writing every day and hasn't stopped loving the color pink, dressing up or believing in the magic of books. "Kiki's Delivery Service," which was first published in 1985 and turned into a 1989 animation film by Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli, is among 200 books she has written. "I never tire of writing," she told The Associated Press at her home in the picturesque seaside town of Kamakura, south of Tokyo.

SRINAGAR, India (AP) - Every morning, long, narrow wooden boats called shikaras move elegantly across expansive Dal Lake in a postcard-perfect scene framed by the Himalayan mountains. But all is not perfect in one of South Asia's best-known lakes. Pollution from local buildings, invasive plant species that threaten biodiversity and declining water levels, in part due to climate-driven heat, are threatening the long-term existence of Dal Lake and hundreds of other lakes in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It takes constant effort by workers employed by the local government to keep Dal Lake's weeds at bay, and they must take precautions to avoid skin irritation from the polluted water.