The four are now being detained in Langkawi, Malaysia.

Pol Lt-General Ronnasin Pusara, a regional police commissioner overseeing the South, said he had learned about the arrest of three Thai police officers and a deputy village headman, though he could not confirm the cause of arrest.

“The three are policemen from Satun. They had their weapons, police identity cards and badges, which have now been confiscated by Malaysia,” he said.

His deputy, Pol Maj-General Supathat Kamdee, had been given the job of holding an urgent meeting with Malaysian officials to find out the facts of the incident and why the four had been arrested, he said.

A meeting was held at Satun’s City Hall yesterday with provincial governor Pattarapon Rattanapichetchai as well as a Consul of Malaysia and several senior Malaysian government officials.

The governor said the meeting went well and a joint team of officials will visit the exact site of the arrests. “The incident may have been caused due to misunderstanding. Our bilateral ties have been excellent over the years,” he said.

Initial reports said the three police officers and the deputy village headman had gone off to investigate reports that unknown fishing vessels were in Thai waters off Satun near Kew Island. During the pursuit, the foreign vessels sailed back into Malaysian waters, and the crew alerted the Malaysian authorities, who then rushed in to arrest the four, Ronnasin said.

However the information released to the media by the Malaysian side was different.

The Star online reported that armed pirates boarded two Malaysian fishing boats near Langkawi Island.

Langkawi police Superintendent Mohammed Iqbal Ibrahim said they had received a distress call from the boat owner at around 8.35am on Sunday.

“The owner said that two of his fishing boats with 11 fishermen had been intercepted and boarded near Pulau Langgun [off eastern Langkawi]. Investigations showed two boats with 12 Thai nationals armed with guns had robbed the fishermen and detained the crew. Seven victims were rescued, while four Thai suspects were apprehended,” Mohammed Iqbal said in a statement on Sunday.

He added that police found three guns that were used during the initial boarding.

The Star reported that efforts to rescue four Malaysians, who were believed to have been taken to Thailand, were underway, as is the hunt for the remaining eight suspects.

Meanwhile, a village headman allegedly involved in the incident has resigned, while police officers, who also reportedly played a part in the incident, have been dismissed pending investigation.

The players were spotted in a notorious red light district of Jakarta in their national jerseys last week, JOC officials told a press conference, saying the quartet had been ordered to leave immediately.

News that Yuya Nagayoshi, Takuya Hashimoto, Takuma Sato, Keita Imamura had been booted out will come as a major embarrassment for Japan, who were forced to send a swimmer home from the last Asian Games in 2014 for stealing a journalist’s camera.

“I just feel a sense of shame,” Japan’s chef de mission Yasuhiro Yamashita told reporters.

“We deeply apologize and intend to give the athletes thorough guidance from now on.”

The basketball players had dinner after leaving the Games village and are believed to have been solicited by touts on the street to go to a hotel with women, Yamashita added.

“I would like to humbly apologize to the Japanese public, the JOC and everyone who supports basketball for this deplorable incident,” Japan basketball chief Yuko Mitsuya said in a statement.

“We will decide on the appropriate punishment for the four players once we have heard all the facts. We need to work harder to make sure this kind of scandal does not happen again.”

Japanese swimmer Naoya Tomita was expelled from the Asian Games in Incheon, South Korea, four years ago after being caught on video stealing a journalist’s camera.

It’s also far from being the first case of sexual misconduct at a major multisports event, which typically draw thousands of athletes, officials and fans from around the world.

At the 2014 Asian Games, an Iranian official was kicked out for the verbal sexual harassment of a female volunteer, and a Palestinian footballer was accused of groping a female worker at the athletes’ village.

In April, at the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia, a Mauritian official was accused of sexually assaulting a female athlete during a photo shoot.

Organisers say about 18,000 athletes and officials are visiting Jakarta and co-host city Palembang for the Asian Games, a regional Olympics featuring 40 sports.

The radiography device disappeared on August 10 as it was transported outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, the New Straits Times newspaper reported.

Authorities fear the device, which contains the radioactive isotope iridium-192 and, could fall into the hands of militants and be used to make a dirty bomb, the paper said.

Local police chief Mazlan Mansor told AFP an investigation had been launched without giving further details.

Deputy Home Minister Azis Jamman confirmed the incident had taken place but insisted “everything is under control”.

“There is nothing to be worried about at this moment,” he was cited as saying in The Star newspaper.

The company that owned the device — which weighed 23 kilograms (50 pounds), and consisted of a large metal tube with a handle on top — reportedly used it to detect cracks in metal as part of inspection protocols in the energy, power and transportation sectors.

It was lost as it was transported to the company’s office from the town of Seremban.

Police initially detained two technicians who had been transporting the device, and reported it missing, reports said.

However the pair were later released after investigations failed to link them to its disappearance.

Apart from Malaysian palm oil, he said the country was also interested in other agricultural goods from Malaysia.

“China and Malaysia have agreed to increase our trade volumes.

“China will import more Malaysian products that meet the demands of the Chinese,” he added at a joint press conference with Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad at the Great Hall of the People here Monday (Aug 20) morning.

Dr Mahathir said Malaysia has much to gain from China and believed that investments from this world’s second-largest economy could resolve the unemployment problem in the country.

He said that he hoped Malaysia would become a hub for new technology being developed in China.

“So there is much to be gained by strengthening the relationship between the two nations,” he added.

Eighty-nine South Koreans mostly in their 70s and older met about 180 long-separated relatives living in North Korea at Mount Kumgang, a scenic resort on the North’s east coast.

The meeting, which started at around 3 p.m., is the first session of reunions planned during their three-day stay in the North. The families are to meet on six occasions for a combined 11 hours during the reunion event that will end Wednesday.

(Yonhap)

The South Koreans left for the venue in buses early in the morning from Sokcho, a town in northeastern South Korea, where they spent the night. Some were so frail that they were in wheelchairs or supported by accompanying family members when they boarded the buses.

Many of them waited in the hotel lobby way ahead of schedule for the departure.

“I slept before 9 p.m. last night and woke up at around 3 in the morning,” said Shin Jong-ho, 70, one of the elderly persons. “I feel okay now with no health problems. I hope that things continue like this when I arrive there.”

The first session is to be followed by their meeting again at a dinner hosted by the North Korean side.

On their second day, they are scheduled to meet in the morning and have lunch together in their rooms, the first time for separated families to have such a private meeting since the reunion event started.

The South Korean participants are mostly in their 70s and 80s, with a 101-year-old man the oldest among them.

As many participants are elderly, reunions between parents and sons and daughters are rare. Most cases are meetings among cousins, nieces or nephews.

The government has dispatched around 30 medical staff to the venue to brace for any emergency cases among the participants.

In subsequent reunions planned to take place from Friday to Sunday, 83 North Koreans will also meet family members found to be alive in the South.

The family reunions are a follow-up on an agreement the leaders of South and North Korea reached in April to address humanitarian issues arising from nearly seven decades of division caused by the Korean War.

The event came amid a thaw in relations between the two Koreas after a yearslong hiatus and tensions heightened by the North’s continued pursuit of nuclear and missile programs.

Inter-Korean relations have been improving in a dramatic way since earlier this year when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un offered an olive branch to send his athletes and a delegation to the Winter Olympics that South Korea hosted in March.

The two Koreas have resumed cross-border talks ever since amid a growing sense of peace which culminated in historic summits. Their leaders are expected to meet again in Pyongyang next month.

During the April summit in particular, they agreed to work toward the “complete” denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, halt hostile acts and expand long-frozen exchanges and cooperation.

The denuclearization process, however, has been stalemated recently as the United States and North Korea appear to be at odds over how and at what speed the North should relinquish its nuclear weapons program.

Those separated families have been deemed as major victims of the longstanding division and heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

This week’s family reunions come nearly three years after such an event was last held in October 2015.

The two Koreas have organized 20 rounds of face-to-face family reunions since the first-ever inter-Korean summit in 2000. Some 57,000 South Koreans are waiting to be reunited with their families who might be living in the North.

The two Koreas technically remain at war as the Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

One father brought new meaning to this time-honored tradition when he accompanied his youngest daughter on her special day while he was ill and bed-bound.

A picture of the walk simply captioned “A Father’s Love” posted on Aug. 9 quickly went viral and currently has 22,000 likes and 15,000 shares as of this writing. The picture was captured by Law Tapalla Photography, the official wedding photographer.

The bride, Charlotte Gay Villarin, has her fingers laced around those of her father who, despite being weak, looks lovingly at his daughter from a stretcher, which is being pulled down the aisle. On the bride’s left side is her mother.

Charlotte talks to her father while in an ambulance on her wedding day.//Image: Law Tapalla Photography.

Villarin said her father was supposed to go down the aisle on a wheelchair. But because he was so weak on the wedding day, he had to be brought down from the ambulance they hired via stretcher.

Paradox Films, which documented the wedding through video, shared that Tatay Pedro or Papu called his daughter “Love.” The first part of the video pays tribute to him, proving that the wedding was as much as his as it was the couple’s.

Villarin admitted in a Facebook post last Aug. 10 that the wedding was “not as happy as it should be,” considering her father’s condition.

From a December wedding, the date had to be pushed back to August due to her father’s weakening state. She shared that aside from the stress of wedding planning within a month, “sleepless nights” were also spent taking care of her father who was “in and out of the hospital.”

Still, there was much happiness on the occasion. “As I always say, this wedding is not just for me and for Maku. This wedding is mostly for my papu. He’s been waiting for this moment, and finally we made it. His dream of walking with me to the altar became so possible by the grace of the Lord.”

Papu hugs the groom Maku.//Image: Law Tapalla Photography.

Exhausting as the experience was, the expedited preparations were well worth it. Villarin announced on Tuesday, Aug. 14, that Papu had passed away. It seems this father knew he had one last mission before breathing his last—to testify for undying love.

Langkawi OCPD Supt Mohd Iqbal Ibrahim said they were brought to Alor Setar Court for remand and all suspects left  Langkawi on Monday (Aug 20) morning.

They arrived at the Alor Setar Court at about 10.30am guarded by Marine Police personnel and detectives.

Assistant Registrar Rusmini Rashid granted the remand order for seven days which runs from Monday to Sunday (Aug 26).

“The owner said his fishing boat had been robbed near Pulau Langgun. Investigations showed that two boats had been stopped by 12 Thai nationals on two boats.

“Based on information gathered, police rushed to the scene and successfully intercepted one of the boats used by the suspects.

“In it, seven victims were saved while four Thai suspects were apprehended,” he said in a statement.

Supt Mohd Iqbal said police found three guns that were used during the initial boarding.

Four other Malaysians, who were taken in the second boat, are believed to have been transported to Thailand.

“Efforts to rescue the remaining victims are under way,” he said.

The quakes hit throughout Sunday, with the first measuring 6.3 shortly before midday which triggered landslides and sent people fleeing for cover as parts of the island suffered blackouts.

It was followed nearly 12 hours later by a quake measuring 6.9 magnitude and a string of powerful aftershocks.

The picturesque island next to holiday hotspot Bali was already reeling from two deadly quakes on July 29 and August 5 that left hundreds of thousands homeless.

Ten people were killed in the quake Sunday evening, mostly by falling debris, with four deaths in eastern Lombok and six on the neighbouring island of Sumbawa, according to the national disaster agency.

Two more Lombok residents died of heart attacks after the morning quake, it said.

Some two dozen people were injured and more than 150 homes and places of worship were damaged, the agency said.

“When the earthquake happened most people were outside their homes or at shelters so there have not been that many fatalities” compared to the August 5 tremor, said national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

“The trauma because of the earlier quake on Sunday (morning) made people prefer to stay outside,” he added.

Officials have evacuated some patients from a hospital in Sumbawa island and in Lombok’s capital Mataram for fear of worse destruction.

Blackouts have hit much of Lombok, according to Sutopo, who posted pictures of cracked roads and video footage of a large fire that broke out in a village on Sumbawa.

– ‘Too scared at home’ –

Video images from an evacuation camp in Lombok showed children and adults taking cover inside makeshift tents.

“I’m too scared to stay at my house because it’s damaged,” said Lombok resident Saruniwati, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.

“I’ve been here since the quake (earlier this month). I went home two days ago and now I’m back here again.”

Earlier, local resident Agus Salim said the powerful tremor jolted him awake Sunday evening.

“The earthquake was incredibly strong. Everything was shaking,” he told AFP.

“Everyone ran into the street screaming and crying.”

A dozen foreign guests at the hotel Lina Senggigi, which is in a popular tourist spot, were ushered out of the building as the quake struck.

There were landslides in a national park on Mount Rinjani where hundreds of hikers had been briefly trapped after the quake in late July. The park has been closed since then.

Sunday’s tremors were also felt on Bali but there were no reports of damage there.

– ‘Ring of Fire’ –

The latest tremor comes two weeks after a shallow 6.9-magnitude quake on August 5 damaged tens of thousands of homes, mosques and businesses across Lombok.

At least 481 people died and thousands were injured.

The hardest-hit region was in the north of the island, which has suffered hundreds of aftershocks.

A week before that quake, a tremor surged through the island and killed 17.

The disasters have raised fears that Lombok’s key tourism industry would take a beating, but the international airport was operating normally Monday.

“People have been arriving and leaving Lombok as usual since last night — there’s been no sudden rush of people trying to get out,” said I Gusti Ngurah Ardita, general manager of Lombok Praya International Airport.

Indonesia sits on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide and many of the world’s volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.

The Australian and Eurasian plates, which sit under the archipelago, have been colliding and putting stress on key area fault lines, according to a geologist.

“Clearly there are different parts of the fault that are moving at the moment releasing those stressors,” said Chris Elders, an expert in plate tectonics and structural geology at Curtin University in West Australia.

In 2004 a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.3 undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in western Indonesia killed 220,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.

The 93-year-old leader, who returned for a second stint as premier following a shock election win in May, has railed against a series of deals struck with Chinese state-owned companies by the administration of toppled leader Najib Razak.

His government has suspended China-backed projects worth more than $22 billion, including a major rail link, and Mahathir had pledged to raise the issue of what he views as unfair terms related to some of the deals on his five-day trip.

During a press conference with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Mahatir thanked China for agreeing to increase imports of specialty agricultural products, such as durian fruit.

But Mahatir also said he expected more from the world’s second largest economy.

“I believe that China will look sympathetically towards the problems that we have to resolve and perhaps help us in resolving some of our internal fiscal problems,” he said.

During his nine-year rule, Najib was accused of cutting quick deals with Beijing in return for help paying off debts linked to a massive financial scandal that ultimately helped bring down his long-ruling coalition.

Last week, Mahathir had said that he would look to cancel or modify the previous administration’s agreements with China, stressing that “the most important thing is for us to save money”.

Mahathir is seeking to cut Malaysia’s national debt, which has ballooned to some $250 billion.

Despite the threat to revise China-linked contracts, Mahathir is seeking to strengthen business ties with Beijing during the trip.

He met the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, in the eastern city of Hangzhou on Saturday. Mahathir also oversaw the signing of a cooperation agreement between Chinese auto firm Geely and Malaysian carmaker Proton.

China is the top trading partner of Malaysia, which is home to a substantial ethnic Chinese minority.

Bilateral ties were warm under the old regime, and Chinese investment into the country surged as Beijing signed deals for major infrastructure and construction projects.

But critics said there was often a lack of transparency and the terms, such as interest rates on loans, were unfavourable to Malaysia, fuelling suspicions about Najib’s real motives.

Najib and his cronies were accused of plundering billions of dollars from a sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, in an audacious fraud.

Since losing power, Najib has been charged over the scandal and will stand trial. He denies any wrongdoing.

As well as the rail link, which would have run from the Thai border to Kuala Lumpur, the government has suspended a China-backed project to build pipelines after alleging that almost all the money for the work was paid out but only a fraction of the project had been completed.

According to a report by the HCM City People’s Committee submitted to the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MoNRE), the city’s Military Command currently manages 64 tracts of land with a total area of 3.1 million sqm while the city’s border guards held about 113,000 sqm.

This land is primarily used for military purposes – camps and barracks, deployment of defence systems, training grounds and historical landmarks.

Monitoring land controlled by the military and other defence forces is down to the municipal department of environment, but the People’s Committee does not receive reports from the department.

“The utilisation of military-controlled land for commercial purposes was decided by the Ministry of National Defence (MoD). Joint-circulars on the management and inspection of these areas have not been established between the defence ministry, environment ministry and local governments, resulting in difficulties in stock-taking efforts,” read the report by the municipal People’s Committee.

HCM City authorities have asked the MoNRE and the MoD to direct units and agencies to review the commercialisation of military land within HCM City, and submit their findings to the Government.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc issued a directive asking for improved land management.

Local governments and concerned ministries, especially MoNRE and MoD, were told to inspect the management of military land throughout the country and submit their reports to the Government leader before November 30.

Any wrongful use of military land, illegal renting of military land, or infringement of military land due to lax oversight would be “strictly dealt with” and the leaders of those areas would be held accountable, he said.