Top Asian News 3:54 a.m. GMT

East Timorese flock to seaside park for Pope Francis’ Mass at site of John Paul II’s historic visit

DILI, East Timor (AP) — Tens of thousands of East Timorese streamed Tuesday toward a seaside park for Pope Francis’ big Mass, held on the same field where St. John Paul II celebrated an historic liturgy during the nation’s fight for independence from Indonesia. The Tacitolu park is said to have been a site where Indonesian troops disposed of bodies killed during their rule. Now it is known as the “Park of Peace” and features a larger-than-life-sized statue of John Paul to commemorate his 1989 visit, when the Polish pope shamed Indonesia for its human rights abuses and encouraged the overwhelmingly Catholic Timorese faithful.

North Korea’s Kim vows to put his nuclear force ready for combat with US

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to redouble efforts to make his nuclear force fully ready for combat with the United States and its allies, state media reported Tuesday, after the country disclosed a new platform likely designed to fire more powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles targeting the mainland U.S. Kim has repeatedly made similar pledges, but his latest threat comes as outside experts believe Kim will perform provocative weapons tests ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. In recent days, North Korea has also resumed launches of trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea. In a speech marking the 76th founding anniversary for his government on Monday, Kim said North Korea faces “a grave threat” because of what he called “the reckless expansion” of a U.S.-led regional military bloc that is now developing into a nuclear-based one.

A robot resumes mission to retrieve a piece of melted fuel from inside a damaged Fukushima reactor

An extendable robot on Tuesday resumed its entry into one of three damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to retrieve a fragment of melted fuel debris, nearly three weeks after its earlier attempt was suspended due to a technical issue. The collection of a tiny sample of the spent fuel debris from inside of the Unit 2 reactor marks the start of the most challenging part of the decadeslong decommissioning of the plant where three reactors were destroyed in the March 11, 2011, magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami disaster. The sample-return mission, initially scheduled to begin on Aug. 22, was suspended when workers noticed that a set of five 1.5-meter (5-foot) add-on pipes to push in and maneuver the robot were in the wrong order and could not be corrected within the time limit for their radiation exposure, the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings said.

In diesel-dependent East Timor, renewable energy transition remains slow despite government pledges

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — East Timor is at an energy development crossroads. While the small Southeast Asian nation — and one of the world’s youngest countries — has made international and domestic pledges to reduce its carbon footprint through untapped solar and other renewable energy potential, it faces a looming economic crisis as the gas fields its economy depends on near depletion, hampering its ability to pay for the high cost of transitioning its energy sector. Access to electricity is a modern development for many of East Timor’s 1.3 million people, after much of the country’s infrastructure was razed by Indonesian forces during the war for independence.

Top leaders of Imran Khan’s party arrested in Pakistan after being accused of inciting violence

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani police arrested Monday several top leaders from former imprisoned Prime Minister Imran Khan’s opposition party, a day after some people clashed with the police a mile from a protest calling for his release. Among the detainees, accused of inciting violence, was the president of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, Gohar Khan, who is not related to the former premier. Videos circulating online showed police taking the party head out of his vehicle before whisking him away to a police station. The PTI said in a statement other top party officials were arrested in multiple ongoing raids but didn’t disclose how many were detained.

How did a popular Philippine televangelist land on the FBI’s most-wanted list?

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — In his heyday, Apollo Carreon Quiboloy was one of the most influential religious leaders and televangelists in the Philippines. Proclaiming himself as the “appointed son of God,” he also was a political kingmaker who backed former President Rodrigo Duterte. An expanded U.S. indictment in 2021 charged him with having sex with women and underage girls and sex trafficking by force, among other crimes. He’s facing similar criminal complaints in the Philippines, where he went into hiding this year. Surrounded by heavily armed police, the 74-year-old preacher and four co-accused surrendered Sunday in his religious stronghold in the south.

Vietnam storm deaths rise to 64 as a bridge collapses and flooding sweeps away a bus

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — A bridge collapsed and a bus was swept away by flooding in Vietnam on Monday, raising the death toll in the Southeast Asian country to at least 64 from a typhoon and subsequent heavy rains that also damaged factories in export-focused northern industrial hubs, state media reported. Nine people died on Saturday after Typhoon Yagi made landfall in Vietnam before weakening into a tropical depression. The rest died in the floods and landslides that followed on Sunday and Monday, state media VN Express reported. The water levels of several rivers in northern Vietnam were dangerously high. A bus carrying 20 people was swept into a flooded stream by a landslide in mountainous Cao Bang province on Monday morning.

The Taliban’s repression of women in Afghanistan is outrageous, the UN rights chief says

ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Taliban’s repressive control over women and girls in Afghanistan is unparalleled and will jeopardize the country’s future, the U.N. rights chief warned Monday. Volker Türk said new morality laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, along with sweeping bans on education and most jobs, were outrageous and amounted to systematic gender persecution. “I shudder to think what is next for the women and girls of Afghanistan,” Türk told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. The Taliban were not immediately available for comment. The Taliban — who took over Afghanistan in 2021 during the final weeks of U.S.

Spanish prime minister visits China during dispute over electric vehicles

BEIJING (AP) — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top officials Monday during his second trip to China in a year and a half that comes during a spat over electric cars. The two leaders both made statements in favor of free trade and promotion of cultural exchanges and tourism, according to state broadcaster CCTV, but did not announce any specifics in the ongoing electric vehicles dispute. “We hope that Spain will continue to provide a fair, equitable, safe and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies to invest and do business in,” Xi said, according to CCTV.

South Korean truth commission says it found more evidence of forced adoptions in the 1980s

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A South Korean commission found evidence that women were pressured into giving away their infants for foreign adoptions after giving birth at government-funded facilities where thousands of people were confined and enslaved from the 1960s to the 1980s. The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Monday came years after The Associated Press revealed adoptions from the biggest facility for so-called vagrants, Brothers Home, which shipped children abroad as part of a huge, profit-seeking enterprise that exploited thousands of people trapped within the compound in the port city of Busan. Thousands of children and adults — many of them grabbed off the streets — were enslaved in such facilities and often raped, beaten or killed in the 1970s and 1980s.