The precise contents of the letter, which came from Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling party, were not known, the Post said.

Pompeo received it Friday and showed it to President Donald Trump. They concluded it was belligerent enough to call off the visit, the Post said late Monday, quoting two administration officials.

In pulling the plug on the visit, Trump tweeted that he had not seen sufficient progress toward Pyongyang denuclearizing.

Trump acted amid independent reports that North Korea has done little or nothing to roll back its nuclear program, despite promises made at a historic summit in June with Kim Jong Un.

Trump also blasted China for not doing enough to help push denuclearization, but left open the possibility of a Pompeo trip to Pyongyang when the US-China trading relationship is “resolved.”

Japan’s 2018 defence white paper also took aim at China’s rise as a military power, saying Beijing was sparking “strong security concerns in the region and international community, including Japan”.

Last year’s defence review was published at the height of the tensions with North Korea, amid nuclear and missile tests and with US President Donald Trump threatening to rain down “fire and fury” on Pyongyang if it kept up its threats.

But since then, a spectacular diplomatic detente has taken place, culminating in the historic summit between Trump and the North’s leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12.

Nevertheless, Tokyo insisted on Tuesday: “There is no change in our basic recognition concerning the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles.”

Pyongyang continues to post “an unprecedentedly serious and imminent threat to Japan’s security and (to) significantly damage the peace and security of the region and the international community”, according to Tokyo.

Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera acknowledged in the document that North Korea had begun dialogue with former foes the US and South Korea.

“But we cannot overlook the fact that, even to this day, it possesses and fully deploys several hundred missiles that put nearly all of Japan within range,” stressed the minister.

In response, Japan is steadily upgrading its capacity to shield the nation from the North’s arsenal, including a plan to spend some $4.2 billion over the next three decades on installing and operating US radar systems.

The defence ministry is expected later this week to request a record 5.3 trillion yen ($47.6 billion) for the budget for the fiscal year starting from April.

Despite the historic handshake in Singapore, there has been little progress in denuclearising the Korean peninsula and Washington-Pyongyang relations appear to have taken a turn for the worse, with Trump abruptly scrapping a planned visit to the North by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The white paper also reiterated Japan’s worries about China’s increasing military spending and expanding naval ambitions.

It complained that Beijing was trying to “change the status quo by coercion”, referring to such actions as building up disputed islands in the South China Sea and expanding naval activities around East China Sea islands disputed with Japan.

The white paper drew ire from Seoul by repeating Tokyo’s longstanding claim of sovereignty over islands which Japan calls Takeshima.

The islands are controlled by South Korea, which calls them Dokdo.

“The Japanese government must bear in mind that repeating such unjustifiable and groundless allegations over Dokdo will not be helpful at all in building forward-looking relations between the two countries,” the South Korean foreign ministry said in a statement.

The main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was dissolved months before the July election, giving Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodia People’s Party a clean sweep of seats in parliament, and many CNRP members and government critics were rounded up in a crackdown on dissent.

The 14 released Tuesday from Prey Sar prison in Phnom Penh were pardoned by the Cambodian king for convictions that carried between seven and 20 years behind bars.

Their pardons came after they all apologised to Hun Sen in letters.

They were arrested in 2015 and charged with insurrection after clashes that left dozens of security officers and protesters wounded.

“We could work together. We may argue when it comes to politics, but we shouldn’t kill each other,” Meach Sovannara, a former press officer who had been sentenced to 20 years, said in a Facebook Live broadcast after he was released.

Last week Cambodia’s strongman ruler said more pardons were likely, but rejected suggestions he was bending to international pressure following his one-sided election win.

Analysts have said Hun Sen could use pardons and the kingdom’s pliant courts to help deflect criticism, as he has in the past, after July’s vote was widely decried as a sham.

The US widened travel bans on the country after the vote but Cambodia’s main concern is its tariff-free access to European garment markets, where sales fuel the country’s largest industry.

Land rights activists and a former lawmaker have also been freed in recent days.

But the pardons have yet to include the CNRP’s co-founder Kem Sokha, who was arrested before the party’s dissolution last November and thrown in jail on treason charges.

The women, aged 22 and 32, were arrested in April by Islamic enforcement officers after they were found in a car in a public square in northern Terengganu state, one of the most conservative areas of the Muslim-majority country.

They were brought before an Islamic court and admitted to breaking a sharia law that forbids sexual relations between women and sentenced to six strokes of the cane each and fined 3,300 ringgit ($800).

The sentence was to be carried out Tuesday but Terengganu Sharia Court chief registrar Wan Abdul Malik Wan Sidek told AFP it had been moved to September 3 for “technical reasons”.

He did not give details but The Star newspaper quoted another court official as saying that since a few agencies would be involved in carrying out the sentence, technical issues needed to be resolved first.

Both women are out on bail.

Members of Malaysia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community have been facing rising pressure in the largely Islamic country, with public officials frequently accused of targeting them.

Transgender rights group Justice for Sisters co-founder Thilaga Sulathireh hoped the postponement would give activists time to try to stop the punishment from being carried out.

“There is a bit more time now… (to) have more conversations about this and see if these conversations can add any kind of pressure or change people’s mind about the sentence itself,” she said.

Malaysia operates a dual-track legal system and Islamic courts can handle religious and family matters, as well as cases such as adultery.

Caning is conducted out of public view.

Malaysian Muslims which make up more than 60 percent of the country’s 32 million population have traditionally practised a tolerant brand of Islam, but concerns have grown in recent years that attitudes are becoming more conservative.

China has culled more than 24,000 pigs in four provinces to stop the disease from proliferating, the FAO said in a statement. The first outbreak was reported in early August.

The FAO said the cases have been detected in areas more than 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) apart, meaning it could cross national borders.

“The deadly pig virus may spread to other Asian countries anytime,” the FAO said.

The “diverse geographical spread of the outbreaks in China have raised fears that the disease will move across borders to neighbouring countries of Southeast Asia or the Korean Peninsula where trade and consumption of pork products is also high,” it added.

China reported its first case of the disease in northeast Liaoning province earlier this month.

Last week, the eastern city of Lianyungang announced it had culled 14,500 pigs in an attempt to check the disease’s spread.

“The movement of pig products can spread diseases quickly and, as in this case of African swine fever, it’s likely that the movement of such products, rather than live pigs, has caused the spread of the virus to other parts of China,” explained Juan Lubroth, FAO’s chief veterinarian.

African swine fever is not harmful to humans but causes haemorrhagic fever in domesticated pigs and wild boar that almost always ends in death within a few days.

There is no antidote or vaccine, and the only known method to prevent the disease from spreading is a mass cull of the infected livestock.

In a report to the World Organisation for Animal Health, Beijing said an emergency plan had been launched and control measures taken to halt the spread of the disease.

The FAO warned in May of the risk of the spread of African swine fever from Russia.

Around half of the world’s pigs are raised in China, and the Chinese are the biggest consumers of pork per capita, according to the FAO.

Japan is the only country in the world still using Chinese-style imperial calendars. It might be 2018 in much of the world, but in Japan it is Heisei 30, or 30 years into Akihito’s reign.

While the Gregorian calendar is widely used in Japan, imperial dates feature on government documents, newspapers, and commercial calendars.

“It is easier to imagine what the time was like if you have eras,” said Kunio Kowaguchi, president of major calendar maker Todan.

“For instance, we remember it was early Heisei that the bubble burst,” he said, referring to the collapse of Japan’s speculation-driven economy.

The upcoming end of the Heisei period was even reportedly a factor in the government’s decision to implement death sentences this year against 13 members of the Aum cult behind a 1995 sarin attack.

Government officials apparently wanted to a draw a line under the cult’s attacks before the Heisei era ends. All 13 executions were carried out in July.

Japan has had nearly 250 eras or “gengo” since adopting the system in the 7th century.

In the past, emperors would switch era names mid-reign to make a fresh start after natural disasters or crises.

But more recently, an era has run the entire length of a monarch’s rule.

With just months to go before Crown Prince Naruhito ascends the Chrysanthemum Throne in May 2019, speculation about the new name is growing.

And calendar makers like Kowaguchi are particularly eager to hear.

A new ‘Y2K’?

His company produces 10 million calendars a year, many featuring both Western and imperial dates.

He starts printing products a year before release, so it’s already too late for his 2019 run to feature the new name, but he’s hoping for a decision in time for the 2020 batch.

The new imperial era will be the first since the IT revolution, and the tech sector is also girding for the transition.

It has inspired comparisons to the “Y2K” bug ahead of the year 2000, when experts worried about a tech apocalypse fearing that computers would not understand the new date.

“What is largely different from the time of the Y2K problem or the switch to the Heisei period is that IT is widely used and information is passed around among internet-capable devices,” said Kazunori Ishii, a spokesman at Microsoft’s Japan arm.

“We can’t predict exactly what will happen,” he said, though he added that major disruption was “unlikely”.

Software used in Japan that converts between Western and imperial dates will need to be updated with the new era, and code and fonts for the new name will also need to be created.

The 84-year-old emperor’s decision to abdicate has given experts a rare head start in choosing the new era’s name.

The task falls to the government rather than the palace and, like many matters involving the royal household, it is shrouded in secrecy.

Reports initially suggested the name would be announced in 2018 but there have been rumours of a delay.

That may indicate the scale of the challenge, with experts bound by stringent guidelines requiring the name to have two characters, be easy to read and write, and not use common names.

‘New era, new mindset’

The new name is also unlikely to start with the first letter of any of the last four eras: Heisei, Showa, Taisho and Meiji.

And because each era name is considered “sacred”, any name put forward but rejected in the past cannot be proposed again.

One of the few people familiar with the challenge is Junzo Matoba, a former bureaucrat who helped look for new names during the last years of emperor Hirohito’s Showa era, in the late 1980s.

“Some people thought it was irreverent to think about the next era” while the emperor was still alive, he told AFP.

“I had to work secretly.”

He consulted experts on Asian history and literature while trying to maintain a low profile.

“I found myself caught up in such a difficult task — I was sitting under the Sword of Damocles,” the 83-year-old told AFP.

By 1988, the search was narrowed to three contenders, and when Hirohito passed away on January 7, 1989, a panel of experts, politicians and ministers quickly approved “Heisei”, meaning “becoming peaceful both inside and outside the country”.

Japan’s government is believed to have a shortlist of names, but has been mum on potential choices or an announcement date, despite the growing interest.

“Japanese people love to ‘reset’ things,” said Matoba.

“A new era, a new mindset.”

Thousands of able-bodied employees at 27 ministries and government agencies were wrongly counted as disabled, Tokyo admitted.

“We deeply apologise for something that should not have happened to the government, which has a responsibility to secure and stabilise employment of people with disabilities,” government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told a regular news conference.

He announced the creation of a working group headed by the labour ministry to investigate how the disabled employment figures were padded and urged regional authorities to conduct similar probes.

Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said thousands of people were wrongly counted as having disabilities in the government figures. In one example, a person with diabetes was counted towards the quota.

When the figures were revised, the ratio of government employees with disabilities dropped from 2.49 percent to 1.19 percent.

Last fiscal year, Japan set a hiring quota in government ministries of at least 2.3 percent, with a quota of 2.0 percent for the private sector.

“We will make efforts to meet the legal requirement this year. But if that becomes difficult, we will draft a plan to achieve the goal next year, as the law requires us to do,” Kato told reporters.

The situation is “highly regrettable,” Kato added.

The Japan Council on Disability, which represents people with disabilities, said the scandal had caused an “immeasurable shockwave”.

“This implies that deep down the government as a whole is hoping not to hire disabled workers. This is nothing but discrimination against impaired people,” the group said in a statement.

Internal affairs minister Seiko Noda, whose son has disabilities, told reporters earlier this month that officials at her ministry had confirmed manipulating data.

“I was extremely shocked to hear that such a thing was happening, even though I don’t know the exact number,” said Noda.

“Speaking as the mother of a disabled child, not as the internal affairs minister, this is something I cannot allow,” she added.

The scandal is an embarrassment for Japan’s government two years before the country hosts the Summer Olympics and Paralympics.

The government has sought to improve access for people with disabilities and boost their integration into society ahead of the games.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican envoy to the United States, on Saturday said he had told Francis of the allegations against prominent US cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2013.

But rather than punish McCarrick, who was forced to resign last month, Vigano said Francis had lifted sanctions imposed on him by his predecessor pope Benedict XVI.

“Corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy,” Vigano said in a letter published in the National Catholic Register and several conservative US Catholic publications.

But the pope refused to address the allegation on Sunday.

“I will not say a word about that. I think that the communique speaks for itself,” Francis said on his plane as he flew back from Dublin to Rome.

The timing of the letter’s release — right in the middle of Francis’s landmark trip to Ireland — has raised speculation of a campaign against the Argentine pontiff by conservatives in the Church.

Francis told journalists to “read the communique attentively and make your own judgement,” referring to Vigano’s letter, which called on the pope to resign.

In his 11-page “testimony”, Vigano, 77, who was a papal nuncio in Washington between 2011 and 2016, said Benedict XVI imposed canonical sanctions against McCarrick in the late 2000s.

McCarrick was forced to leave his seminary and live a life of penance after former Vatican ambassadors in Washington, now dead, reported him for “gravely immoral” behaviour with seminarians and priests.

‘Homosexual networks’

Vigano claimed Francis asked him about McCarrick when he took office in June 2013, but that the pope ignored his warnings.

He said the pope “knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator,” adding that “he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end”.

The pope accepted the resignation of McCarrick, now 88, in July, making him just the second cardinal ever to lose his status.

In his letter, Vigano condemned the “culture of secrecy” in the Church but also railed against “the homosexual current” he claimed was prevalent in the highest echelons of the Vatican and contributing to a “conspiracy of silence” over abuse.

“The homosexual networks present in the Church must be eradicated,” he said. “These homosexual networks … are strangling the entire Church.”

US cardinals Monday defended themselves against Vigano’s allegations of a cover-up.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, a progressive, expressed “shock, sadness and consternation” at the wide-ranging allegations and Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington denied any knowledge that his predecessor had been either sanctioned or accused of abuse.

‘A putsch is afoot’

“Make no mistake. This is a coordinated attack on Pope Francis,” said an editorial article on the website of the progressive National Catholic Reporter weekly.

“A putsch is afoot and if the US bishops do not, as a body, stand up to defend the Holy Father in the next 24 hours, we shall be slipping towards schism,” the author Michael Sean Winters wrote.

“The enemies of Francis have declared war.”

Nicolas Seneze, the Rome correspondent for the French daily La Croix, echoed that there is “a clear desire to attack Francis,” telling AFP that “those who regard Francis as dangerous will stop at nothing.”

Among ultra-conservative Catholics, the pope is regarded as a dangerous progressive more interested in social issues than traditional Church matters.

With his more conciliatory approach to the gay community Francis had raised hopes among that he might steer the Church towards greater acceptance of homosexuality but he remains in line with traditional Church teaching on sexuality and marriage.

Abuse scandals

During his visit to Ireland on Sunday the pope “begged for God’s forgiveness” for past clerical abuse scandals, which have badly damaged the image of the Church in the Catholic stronghold.

His trip was met with enthusiastic crowds but also protests, with about 5,000 abuse victims and supporters attending a “Stand for Truth” rally in the capital Dublin.

The Catholic Church’s standing has been badly dented by the abuse scandals. Stronghold Ireland has largely shed its traditional Catholic mores, voting earlier this year to legalise abortion after approving same-sex marriage in 2015.

Multiple probes in Ireland have found Church leaders protected hundreds of predatory priests and former Irish president Mary McAleese revealed this month that the Vatican had sought to keep Church documents inaccessible to government investigators.

The abuse scandals in Ireland are part of a worldwide crisis for the Vatican.

A devastating report earlier this month accused more than 300 priests in the US state of Pennsylvania of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1950s.

Experts said the move will further reduce taxpayers’ burden and improve income distribution.

In a draft amendment submitted for first reading in June, the minimum threshold for individual income tax was to be raised from 3,500 yuan to 5,000 yuan per month, or 60,000 yuan per year, and the NPC Standing Committee decided to keep that standard on Monday.

Expenses for elderly care were added to the category of special expense deductions in the latest version of the amendment, considering “China’s rising elderly population and heavier burden for taking care of aging residents”, according to Xu Hui, deputy head of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee.

Other tax-deductible items include children’s education, continuing education, treatment for serious diseases and housing loan interest and rent, according to the draft.

Zhang Bin, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said tax policy should be analyzed in a comprehensive manner, rather than merely focusing on the minimum threshold for levying tax.

“The purpose of the tax reform is to better improve income distribution－taking a larger percentage from higher-income people and a smaller percentage from the lower-income groups,” he said.

To make sure tax benefits are put in place as soon as possible, the new threshold for collecting individual tax is expected to take effect in October, while other revisions are expected to take effect on Jan 1, once the amendment is approved by the NPC.

A draft revision usually receives three readings at the top legislature before adoption, which means a slight adjustment might be made before the law finally takes effect.

The biggest tax overhaul in over two decades, the revision to individual tax law aims to reduce the public’s tax burden and improve purchasing power, Finance Minister Liu Kun wrote in the previous draft submitted for revision.

Zhang Lianqi, a financial expert and Finance Ministry consultant, said that while the latest revision has taken into account the need to reduce residents’ tax burden, particularly among low-and middle-income individuals, different tax discount measures and flexible adjustment schemes should be adjusted in line with people’s changing expenses and consumption structure.

The moderate was deposed in a Liberal party coup last week driven by a hardline conservative faction.

After being knifed, he indicated would leave parliament rather than go to the backbench and told a party gathering on Monday evening he will officially resign on Friday, broadcaster ABC and Fairfax Media reported.

His departure will trigger a by-election for his Sydney seat, potentially on October 6, leaving new Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a precarious position with no parliamentary majority for two weeks.

Turnbull’s seat in the wealthy Sydney enclave of Wentworth is traditionally a Liberal safe haven, although a backlash against the government’s political infighting could make this less certain.

“As you know, my prime ministership has come to an end. The circumstances have appalled most Australians but again, I won’t labour the point,” he told the Monday meeting, Fairfax reported.

“I have a strong view which I’ve made very clear publicly so it comes as no surprise, that former prime ministers are best out of parliament not in it, and I think recent events best underline the value of that observation.

“And so, accordingly, on Friday, I will resign from the House of Representatives.”

Christine Forster — the sister of arch-conservative Tony Abbott, who helped orchestrate Turnbull’s demise — has already put her hand up to replace Turnbull in the plum seat.

Forster, who is gay and was a high-profile proponent of same-sex marriage in a successful campaign last year, is a well-known Liberal councillor in Sydney.

Others reportedly in the running include businessman and former ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma, while the Greens and Labor will almost certainly field candidates.