The US military in Okinawa will impose a curfew from midnight to 5am for a month starting Friday following the arrest of a marine on suspicion of robbing and murdering a local woman, its regional coordinator said on Tuesday. All US military personnel on Okinawa will also observe a 48-hour operational pause from noon on Wednesday, during which there will be “no off-base liberty, including a complete prohibition of alcohol consumption on or off base”, said Lieutenant General Benjamin Watson,...

Creators of China’s first Tibetan-language AI model have pledged to speed up upgrades aimed at promoting ethnic integration. Approaches to advancing the large language model, DeepZang, were discussed at a seminar on Monday that brought together representatives from research institutes, universities and enterprises, according to state-run portal Chinanews.com. It said the event held in Hohhot, in China’s northern Inner Mongolia autonomous region, addressed issues such as improving Tibetan...

Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District is betting on property development to ease its financial pressures amid a widening operating deficit, but experts have warned that land sales will only provide temporary relief and cannot replace a sustainable long-term funding model for the arts hub. The warning comes as the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority prepares to tender a prime residential site in the first half of next year, a potentially lucrative project that property experts expect to...

Jeff Kingston used to take long walks with his dogs across the hills of Gunma in central Japan. But not this year. He has good reason. Kingston said he has encountered bears in those mountains more than 100 times over the years and been charged by aggressive bears around a dozen times. In 2014, a black bear knocked him down and attacked him across the skull with its claws, leaving a gash that required nine stitches. “This year, I have actively refrained from going into the hills precisely...

US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would speak very soon with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the reported plague death of a laboratory technician, as Washington and the United Nations called for transparency from Moscow. Russian authorities denied that they were imposing anti-plague measures and played down the reports of an incident at a plague research institute in Siberia’s Irkutsk region last week. But Washington is showing growing concern, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio...

Japanese, South Korean and Thai brands have increased their share of new entrants in Hong Kong’s retail property market by 7 percentage points to more than one-third in the first nine months of 2026, while the demand for shops from mainland Chinese brands has slipped, according to Cushman & Wakefield. A slew of new brands helped lift the combined share of Japanese, South Korean and Thai brands to a three-year high, according to Cushman, which said it expected the trend to continue. This year,...

US authorities arrested ⁠a person in Washington state on Tuesday ⁠who they accuse of providing advice and offering to live-stream a deadly mass shooting carried out earlier this year in Canada. James Cody Bryant, 30, was detained on a charge of conspiracy to murder people in a foreign country in connection to the shooting at ‌Tumbler Ridge, according to the Department of Justice. The charge carries a penalty of up to life in prison. Bryant was in repeated contact with the shooter, Jesse Van...