Top Asia Pacific Breaking News: Latest Updates

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration is preparing to ramp up funding by hundreds of millions of dollars for programs designed to counter China's growing influence around the world, after it had put a halt to many of those initiatives last year during a flurry of budget and personnel cuts. The administration notified Congress late last week that it intends to spend $175.8 million to replace outdated and aging undersea telecommunications cables in the Caribbean and Central America to prevent China from moving in. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the notification on Monday. The administration has expressed deep concern about China's activities in the Americas, pushing back on Chinese ownership of ports at either end of the Panama Canal, infrastructure projects funded by China's Belt and Road initiative in the region, and Chinese investment in the telecommunications sector.

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - The number of survivors of a cargo ship that sank Saturday off a Chinese-occupied shoal in the South China Sea rose to 48 by Tuesday as search and rescue crews hunted for more people who went down with the vessel. A multinational search for 14 people who remain missing was still underway Tuesday afternoon involving Vietnamese, Philippine and Chinese rescuers. Vietnamese authorities announced Monday that three more of the 62 people onboard had been saved but did not provide details of the rescue. The Vietnamese cargo vessel Khoi Nguyen 18 sank late Saturday near Fiery Cross Reef, a Chinese-built island and military outpost in the hotly contested Spratly Islands.

Cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan has killed nearly 500 civilians in Afghanistan and wounded over 1,000 others between October and the end of June, the United Nations said Tuesday. In a report on the human rights situation, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said it had documented 499 civilians killed and 1,216 wounded by the fighting between the neighbors that has defied international peace efforts. In one case, the report said, civilians trying to rescue others from the rubble of an airstrike were hit by a second one. The report also explores other human rights issues, including a deadly crackdown on protests in western Afghanistan over restrictions on women's clothing, and decrees that essentially legalize child marriage.

TOKYO (AP) - A 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook Japan 's southern main island of Kyushu on Tuesday, leaving dozens of people injured or missing after part of a shopping center and a huge chimney at a paper factory collapsed, officials said. A tsunami advisory was issued but quickly lifted. There were fears that at least two people were dead. In Kashima Town, the quake collapsed the second floor of the Aeon Mall shopping center, trapping an unknown number of people there, according to the fire department in the prefectural capital of Kumamoto. Four people were pulled out with injuries and taken to a hospital, while 10 others were unaccounted for, the Kumamoto prefectural emergency response team said.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Gunmen killed a high-ranking local Taliban official in Afghanistan's northwestern province of Badakhshan on Tuesday in a rare targeted killing in the country. Two gunmen shot Zabihullah Amiri, Badakhshan's director of information and culture, as he headed from a local district to the provincial capital Faizabad, the Information Ministry said in a statement. "Immediately following the incident, security guards opened fire on the attackers; one attacker was killed and the second was captured," the ministry said, adding that authorities were investigating the killing. Targeted killings of high-ranking Taliban officials have been rare since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021 in the wake of the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces.

BEIJING (AP) - A remote province in China was struck by two earthquakes just 18 minutes apart late Tuesday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey. The earthquakes in Qinghai province at 11:16 a.m. and 11:34 a.m. had magnitudes of 5.7 and 5.8 at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles), the USGS reported. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Qinghai province in China's northwest is sparsely populated and often experiences earthquakes. A video from state broadcaster CCTV showed dust clouds rising from cliffs as the land shook. The earthquakes also impacted Lanzhou in neighboring Gansu province, one of the largest cities in the area..

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korean authorities ordered civilians to evacuate on Tuesday after a suspected white phosphorus leak at a U.S. military base near the capital, Seoul. Officials in the city of Pyeongtaek urged nearby residents to move to a safe location and avoid skin exposure after the leak at the Osan Air Base was detected at around 5 p.m. The alert was lifted several hours later following the completion of decontamination work, according to text messages sent out by the city. The U.S. 51st Fighter Wing said it established a 300-meter cordon around the base "out of an abundance of caution" after experts conducting a routine inspection identified white phosphorus crystallization that left residue inside a munitions crate.

GENEVA (AP) - The U.N.'s migration agency is warning that criminal networks have been trafficking hundreds of thousands of people - many of them educated English speakers - to work in online scam centers, and the caseload is growing. The International Organization for Migration says victims are often lured by fake job advertisements - mostly through social media - promising work abroad, only to get locked up, have their identity documents seized, and forced through violence, threats and "debt bondage" to participate in the online scams. "We're seeing so many more of these cases emerge right now," IOM Director-General Amy Pope told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.

BEIJING (AP) - Teams recovering bodies from a landslide this month in southwestern China have identified 30 more victims over the past week to bring the overall toll in Chongqing to 41 dead with 20 people still missing, authorities said Tuesday. Ten people also were injured on July 17 when massive amounts of rock and soil washed down a slope and buried at least 10 residential buildings as well as a passenger minibus in the outer Chongqing county of Pengshui. Teams have been working their way through four major sections of the disaster site, and have used DNA analysis to identify remains, the county government said.

A court in Azerbaijan has convicted nine journalists and founders of a top independent news outlet on charges of financial crimes and sentenced them to prison in what international media rights groups denounced Tuesday as a politically driven case to stifle critical voices in the oil-rich Caspian Sea nation. Toplum online TV founder and director Alasgar Mammadli was sentenced to 14 years in prison by the court in the capital of Baku. It gave 15-year prison terms to activists Akif Gurbanov and Ruslan Izzetli, who co-founded the outlet. Other journalists and activists associated with Toplum TV received sentences ranging from 12 to 14 years.