Asia (except ME & Indian SC)

SEOUL, Feb 18 (NNN-YONHAP) — A South Korean presidential aircraft headed to Japan on Tuesday to evacuate four nationals and a Japanese spouse from a quarantined cruise ship docked near Tokyo, officials said, after a rapid increase in onboard infections of the new coronavirus.

The VCN-235 of the Air Force took off at Seoul Air Base in Seongnam, south of the capital, at around noon, bound for Japan’s Haneda Airport. The plane plans to return to Gimpo International Airport in western Seoul on Wednesday morning.

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea President Moon Jae-in said on Tuesday the government should make an all-out effort to cushion the economic impact from China’s coronavrius outbreak, boosting expectations of further monetary easing.

“(The government) shouldn’t quibble over whether anything is unprecedented or not, rather, we should take every possible measure we can think of on the table to deploy them,” Moon said in a cabinet meeting.

BEIJING, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- China firmly opposes unilateral sanctions and "long-arm jurisdiction" imposed by the United States citing its domestic law, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Monday.

According to the Federal Register, the United States has decided to impose sanctions on six Chinese enterprises, three Russian enterprises, one Iraqi enterprise and one Turkish enterprise in accordance with its Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act.

PHNOM PENH, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Cambodian Ministry of Health said in a statement late on Monday that 1,010 out of the 2,257 people onboard the Westerdam cruise ship had been allowed to disembark from the ship in the last three days.

The statement said the first batch of 409 people left the ship on Friday, flying from the Sihanoukville International Airport, the third largest airport of the country, to the Phnom Penh International Airport in the capital before taking flights to their home countries.

BEIJING, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- Facts have proven once again that the United States is the largest state actor of spying in cyberspace, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said Monday, urging the United States to clarify to the international community on relevant affairs.

Reports have emerged that from the Cold War into the 2000s, the U.S. intelligence used the Swiss company Crypto AG's encoding devices to spy on other countries while pocketing millions of dollars.

BEIJING (AP) — China reported 1,886 new virus cases and 98 more deaths in its update Tuesday on a disease outbreak that has caused mild illness in most people, an assessment that promoted guarded optimism from global health authorities.

The update raised the number of deaths in mainland China to 1,868 and the total confirmed cases to 72,436.

Beijing (AP) — For decades, the Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China’s far west. On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. In the winter, he bought coal for the poor.

But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer’s native Xinjiang region three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.

17 February 2020; AFP: Japan has suffered its worst quarterly GDP contraction in more than five years, with a tax hike and a deadly typhoon taking a toll on the world's third-largest economy.

The nation's gross domestic product in the three months to December shrank 1.6 percent from the previous quarter, even before the novel coronavirus outbreak in China hit Japan, according to official data published on Monday.

17 February 2020; AFP: Indonesia's military shot dead four students in the country's restive Papua region during 2014 protests and carried out "gross human rights violations", a commission investigating the uprising concluded Monday.

Komnas HAM issued its findings five years after the high-school students were gunned down in Paniai, a central area of insurgency-wracked Papua province, which shares a border with independent Papua New Guinea.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand’s army agreed on Monday to transfer management control of 160,000 hectares of commercial land to the finance ministry in a drive to reform its business practices after a soldier went on a shooting spree over a property deal gone sour.

Sergeant Major Jakrapanth Thomma killed 29 people and wounded 57 during a 19-hour rampage last week after he shot his commanding officer and relative in a business dispute. The 32-year-old soldier was then shot dead.