The North’s Korea International Youth Travel Agency told a Chinese tourist agency that hotels in Pyongyang would be closed for renovations for 20 days starting Saturday, according to South Korean media reports.

Another North Korean travel agency informed their Chinese partner that an unspecified “state decision” meant they had to stop receiving Chinese tour group package travellers until September 5, the reports said.

North Korea has in the past restricted entry to foreigner tourists as the country prepares for significant events, giving a variety of reasons for the moves, Yonhap reported.

The latest measures come as the North prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the government.

In his New Year speech in January, leader Kim Jong Un said North Korean people would “greet the 70th founding anniversary of their Republic as a great, auspicious event”.

In part thanks to a recent diplomatic thaw, the number of Chinese tourists visiting the North has rapidly increased.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 tourists are currently visiting popular sites such as the North’s side of the demilitarized zone in a single day, NK News, an online news provider, said.

The surge in Chinese tourism may have been seen by North Korean authorities as straining Pyongyang’s limited hotel infrastructure ahead of the anniversary, it added.

The North has been preparing for the arrival of foreign delegations and thousands of North Korean citizens have reportedly been practicing choreographed movements in Pyongyang for the official celebration of the anniversary.

YTN TV quoted a military official as saying that soldiers and weapons were converging on Mirim military airport near Pyongyang to practice a military parade.

A satellite picture showed massive camouflage hangars have been put up, sparking speculation that the North might be hiding long-range missile transport and launch vehicles.

Similar camouflage hangars were seen in January when the North was preparing for a military parade to mark a military anniversary the following month.

The North at that time showcased what appeared to be its two newest intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15.

“The hangars look large enough to conceal ICBMs” Shin Jong-woo, a defence analyst, told YTN.

The 70th anniversary comes during a rare diplomatic detente on the Korean peninsula.

At a historic summit with President Trump in June in Singapore, Kim made a vague commitment to denuclearisation — although it was far from the longstanding US demand for the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of Pyongyang’s atomic arsenal.

Although Trump touted his summit with Kim as a historic breakthrough, the nuclear-armed North has since criticised Washington for its “gangster-like” demands of complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament.

The US has urged the international community to maintain tough sanctions on the isolated regime.

The US 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit said a member, who was not named, may have gone overboard Thursday morning.

Aircraft on board the USS Essex are searching waters off the Sulu Sea and the Surigao Strait while multiple searches are also being made inside the ship itself, the unit said.

The ship was conducting “routine operations in the Sulu Sea” at the time, the California based unit said in the statement, which was posted on its social media sites.

“We remain committed to searching for and finding our marine,” the statement quoted its commander, Colonel Chandler Nelms as saying.

“All of our sailors, marines and available assets aboard the USS Essex have been and will continue to be involved in this incredibly important search and rescue operation,” added the search commander, US Navy Captain Gerald Olin.

In Manila, Philippine authorities said on Saturday they authorised US ships and aircraft to enter Philippine territory to join in the search, while dispatching their own military search aircraft.

“A US marine fell from a US ship while traversing Philippine waters. We allowed the entry of rescue ships and aircraft,” Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters.

“As of now there has been no update on whether the marine has been recovered,” Lorenzana added.

The US Marines said an expanded search covering about 3,000 square nautical miles (10,290 square kilometres) was underway.

Sulu Sea sprawls over the central and southern sections of the Asian archipelago, a US military ally.

Surigao Strait is at least 300 kilometres (186 miles) away, off the country’s eastern seaboard.

The US statement did not explain why the two separate locations were being searched.

The shallow 6.9-magnitude quake Sunday levelled tens of thousands of homes, mosques and businesses across Lombok, just one week after another tremor surged through the island and killed 17.

“It’s predicted the death toll will continue to grow because there are still victims who are suspected of being buried by landslides and under rubble, and there are victims that have not been recorded and reported to posts,” national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said.

The number forced from their homes in the disaster has soared to 387,000, Nugroho said, with around 13,000 injured.

The hardest hit region of Lombok has been in the north, where 334 people have died and nearly 200,000 have been forced from their homes, according to latest official tolls.

Two people were also killed by the quake on the neighbouring tourist island of Bali.

Nugroho said the emergency response period has been extended another 14 days, which would allow authorities to deal with the “many problems” that still existed in the field.

Most of the displaced are sleeping under tents or tarpaulins near their ruined homes or in evacuation shelters, while makeshift medical facilities have been set up to treat the injured.

Six days after the quake hit some evacuees have still not received assistance, particularly in the mountainous north of the island.

“The main problem is the distribution of supplies to thousands of refugee points,” Nugroho said.

“Most of the roads in North Lombok were damaged by the earthquake.”

Survivors of the quake have been shaken by hundreds of aftershocks, including a shallow 5.9-magnitude quake Thursday which caused people to flee evacuation shelters crying and screaming.

Local authorities quickly ruled out terrorism as a motive for the incident, and said the F-15s “were not involved in the crash.”

An airline employee “conducted an unauthorized takeoff” of an airplane carrying no passengers at the major airport in the northwestern US state of Washington, airport officials said on Twitter.

The aircraft “crashed in south Puget Sound,” Sea-Tac Airport said, adding that normal operations at the transport hub had resumed after a pause.

“This is not a terrorist incident. Confirmed info… this is a single suicide male. We know who he is. No others involved,” the Pierce County Sheriff said.

The suspect was identified as a 29-year-old Pierce county resident who “acted alone,” the sheriff’s office added, confirming that there were “no passengers on the plane” when it crashed.

Video taken by a bystander showed the airplane making a loop, then flying low over a body of water.

Alaska Airlines on Twitter said the airplane was a turboprop Q400 airplane belonging to its sister carrier Horizon Air.

Local media described the man who stole the plane as a mechanic.

The villagers spotted the endangered animal in Lubuk Larangan, at a spot in the river where fish commonly gather, on Thursday. The local name for the animal is a fish crocodile because of its narrow, flat and long snout.

Rantau Panjang village chief Alfadol said the crocodile was 2-meters long. He said in the past, residents, who had never been threatened by the crocodiles, often saw Senyulong crocodiles in the river.

“However, after illegal gold mining became rampant in the upstream areas of the Jujuhan River, we rarely see them now,” he said on Friday.

The residents discovered the crocodile when it was accidently caught in a net they were using to catch fish. Local customs only permit villagers to catch fish from the deepest depths of the river for special occasions such as Independence Day, which falls in August. The villagers immediately released the crocodile back into the river.

“The villagers never meant to disturb the crocodile’s habitat,” Alfadol added.

Senyulong crocodiles are one of seven crocodile species endemic to Indonesia and live in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Java. The endangered species are a target of poachers. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) categorizes Senyulong crocodiles as Appendix I animals, meaning that they face imminent extinction unless the illegal trade in the animal is brought to an end.

Police and troops organised a search and rescue operation after the helicopter plunged into a forest Friday in Gunma prefecture, northwest of Tokyo.

“All the nine people were confirmed dead by noon today,” a local official told AFP.

The victims were disaster management officials and firefighters as well as the pilot and an aviation mechanic, the official said.

Aerial footage broadcast on Japanese television showed the wreckage of the crashed helicopter surrounded by trees, as the government dispatched aircraft accident investigators to the site.

The Bell 412 helicopter left its base Friday morning on a two-hour flight to observe climbing routes from the air but did not return and lost contact with air traffic control.

In February, two pilots were killed in a military helicopter crash in southern Japan. The helicopter went down seven minutes after takeoff, slamming into and setting fire to a house, which was completely destroyed in the accident.

Last year, nine people aboard a helicopter were killed after it crashed during a mountain rescue drill.

Semuel A. Pangerapan, the ministry’s director general of applications and information, said the policy would come into effect starting Friday.

The SafeSearch feature will be permanently activated in the search engine when it is accessed from Indonesia.

“The method will filter any pornographic content in the image category, including if a user inputs keywords,” Semuel told kompas.com on Thursday.

The permanent factor means that Indonesian users cannot deactivate the feature. In addition to Google, Semuel also said the government planned to collaborate with other search engines, such as Microsoft’s Bing to apply a similar filtering feature.

He said the ministry already blocked pornographic sites, but this was ineffective as the content was easily available through image searches.

“That’s what we’re trying to eradicate. Concerned mothers have reported that their children search for images by using pornographic words. We are using the SafeSearch method based on our year-long research,” he added.

SafeSearch is a feature in Google to filter out negative content, such as pornography. According to Google as quoted from its features page, “SafeSearch is not 100 percent accurate, but it can help you filter inappropriate content.”

Semuel said internet service providers should enact their own policies regarding filtering based on SafeSearch. In the last few days, there have been rumors that the filter has affected YouTube as well, with users’ status changed to “restricted” mode.

Semuel said the feature should only be applied to Google, and that providers should not broaden it to YouTube

Mơ was also in the top 18 in the Best Body Category and won the Best Costume for Tourism Promotion. She was highly regarded by both the judges and the audience throughout the competition.

The other contestants entering the top six included representatives from Chile, Hong Kong (China), Thailand, Bolivia and Mongolia. The first runner-up title went to Miss Thailand and the second and third runner-up places were awarded to beauties from Bolivia and Mongolia respectively.

The World Tourism Queen and World Miss Couture titles were awarded to representatives from Hong Kong and Chile respectively.

Mơ was born in 1990 in Tien Giang Province. She finished in the top five at Miss Vietnam World 2010.

During the question and answer session, when asked what her biggest fear in life is, Mo said that because health was the most important thing, her biggest fear was illnesses.

Before participating, she said this would be the last time she participated in an international beauty pageant and expressed a strong desire to win. Mơ said she was overwhelmed with happiness on hearing her name announced as the winner of the beauty pageant.

World Miss Tourism Ambassador was first held in 2017. This year’s beauty pageant was held over 15 days in both Vietnam and Thailand.

Hang made the remarks in response to reporters’ questions regarding China’s recent activities in the area, including celebrations marking six years of the so-called “Sansha city” and installing wave monitoring devices on Woody (Phu Lam) Island.

Meanwhile, China Central Television’s (CCTV) children’s channel recently organised a reality TV show for kids on the islands, calls Xisha by China. The Sun Yat-sen University of China has also conducted a series of scientific surveys on the islands.

Hang said Vietnam had sufficient legal foundations and historical evidence affirming its sovereignty over Parcel and Spratly (Trưong Sa) archipelagoes in line with international law.

“The aforementioned actions of China have not only seriously violated Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Hoang Sa and Trưong Sa archipelagoes but also run counter to the agreement on basic principles guiding the settlement of sea-related issues between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China; do not conform to the important common perceptions of the two countries’ senior leaders on controlling sea-related disagreements; as well as disobey the solid development trend of bilateral relations,” said the spokeswoman.

Hang added that these actions are also “contrary to the spirit and content of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) and do not benefit the negotiations between Asean and China on a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC), as well as the maintenance of an environment of peace, stability, cooperation and development in the East Sea and the region.”

“Vietnam resolutely opposes these actions and demands China immediately stop the aforementioned activities; respect Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Hoang Sa and Trưong Sa archipelagoes; seriously implement the agreement on basic principles guiding the settlement of sea-related issues between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China, along with the DOC; not continue actions that complicate the situation; and practically and actively contribute to developing the friendship and comprehensive co-operation between Vietnam and China for the sake of peace, stability, and co-operation in the East Sea and the region,” the spokeswoman said.

A representative of the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had met with a representative of the Chinese Embassy in Vietnam to talk about this issue, Hang added.