The fighter jet crashed some 250 kilometers (156 miles) east-southeast of Okinawa’s capital city Naha at around 11:45 am (0245 GMT), said Osamu Kosakai, spokesman for the ministry’s Okinawa defense bureau.

Its two crew members ejected and were rescued by a US military helicopter, he told AFP, adding the accident was “not life-threatening”.

The fighter jet crashed “due to engine trouble,” he said.

Japan’s coastguard “dispatched an aircraft to the waters to see if there is any debris or floating oil”, a coastguard spokesman told AFP.

Okinawa accounts for less than one percent of Japan’s total land area, but hosts more than half of the approximately 47,000 American military personnel stationed in Japan.

For decades, Okinawa residents have asked for some of the bases to be moved, with resentment growing after a string of accidents and crimes committed by US military personnel and base workers.

Pins and needles were found stuck into the fruit in September, leading supermarkets to pull boxes from shelves across Australia and New Zealand and forcing farmers to dump crops.

The sabotage and a rash of suspected hoaxes and copycat attacks also prompted the national government to raise criminal penalties for fruit tampering.

My Ut Trinh, 50, who worked at one of the strawberry farms where the tampered produce was grown, was arrested and charged with seven counts of contaminating goods by Queensland state police on Sunday.

She faced court on Monday and bail was denied after prosecutors said she could suffer retribution for her alleged actions, The Australian reported.

The court was told she was motivated by spite and revenge when she allegedly inserted the needles into the berries in early September, the newspaper added.

Earlier, police spoke of the challenges investigators faced as they tried to figure out the source of the contamination.

“This has probably been one of the most trying investigations that I’ve been part of,” Detective Superintendent Jon Wacker told reporters in Brisbane.

Wacker said Trinh, an Australian citizen, “was a supervisor at a farm”, with Queensland’s Courier Mail identifying her employer as the Berrylicious and Berry Obsession farm — one of the growers at the heart of the scare.

Wacker said investigators had “strong evidence” including DNA.

He said police collected 230 reports nationwide of strawberry contamination affecting 68 brands, most within his state, with the majority involving sewing needles.

Some cases were also found to be “a hoax or a false complaint”, Wacker added. Police had earlier questioned at least two minors over suspected hoaxes.

The Queensland Strawberry Growers Association welcomed the arrest, but noted the high number of unresolved cases, adding that the seven counts in Trinh’s chargesheet suggested that most of the 230 reports were either copycat actions or hoaxes.

“It was a crisis driven by social media and the only real victims were the strawberry growers, and to some extent other Australian fruit growers and exporters,” the association said in a statement.

According to Bernama,  the man identified as Teh, 26, said he was really scared and decided to stay put by sitting on his Honda Civic roof before rescuers came.

“I did not expect the trapped pool of water to be so dangerous as there was a lorry in front of me…suddenly water started seeping into my car so I quickly wound down my window and crawled out to safety.

“I was later saved by rescuers who arrived at the location,” he said when contacted by Bernama.

The incident caused severe damage to Teh’s one-year-old car after it was completely submerged in the tunnel.

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Meanwhile, Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department in a statement said the department received a distress call at 5.56pm and seven personnel from the Jalan Tun Razak station rushed to the location.

“Upon arriving at the scene, we found five vehicles trapped in the tunnel and firemen brought all victims to a safe location,” the statement said.

According to the statement, the rescue operations took about 10 minutes and the five men were unhurt.

Leaders including Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and US Vice President Mike Pence are meeting this week in the city-state against the backdrop of a months-long trade dispute between Beijing and Washington.

Some of those attending are expected to announce major progress on a massive China-backed trade deal that excludes the US, in a rebuke to President Donald Trump’s increasingly unilateralist approach to international commerce.

Trump is skipping the annual summit — which was regularly attended by his predecessor Barack Obama — in a sign of how far he has withdrawn from attempts to shape the global rules of trade and raising new questions about Washington’s commitment to Asia.

Addressing a business forum ahead of this week’s main meetings, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called for Southeast Asian companies to invest more in each others’ markets and be more open to foreign competition.

“The more integrated and open our markets are, and the more conducive our rules and business environments to foreign investment, the larger the pie will grow, and the more we will all benefit,” he said.

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) “has great potential, but fully realising it depends on whether we choose to become more integrated, and work resolutely towards this goal in a world where multilateralism is fraying under political pressures”.

The US-China trade dispute has seen Trump slap higher tariffs on roughly half of Chinese imports, and Beijing retaliate with its own levies.

The standoff is having an impact far beyond the world’s top two economies, and leaders at the four days of meetings will be keen to voice their grievances to Pence, who is participating in Trump’s place, and Li.

Many of those attending are expected to send a message in support of free trade by announcing major progress on the China-backed deal, the 16-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

With the US having pulled out of rival pact the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the RCEP is now the world’s biggest trade deal.

The pact — which is less ambitious than the TPP in areas such as employment and environmental protection — groups the 10 ASEAN members plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Firefighters took advantage of a brief calm overnight to make headway against the multiple blazes, but conditions were hellish on Sunday, with winds forecast to gust as high as 60 miles (100 kilometers) an hour, and humidity low.

In fire zones north and south, acrid smoke blanketed the sky for miles, the sun barely visible. On the ground, cars caught in the blaze were reduced to mangled metal carcasses, while power lines were gnawed by the flames.

The largest inferno — the so-called “Camp Fire” in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains — has destroyed 6,700 homes, business and other buildings in the town of Paradise, effectively wiping it off the map.

At least 25 people have lost their lives in and around the community of 27,000, according to an official count by authorities.

In Magalia, north of Paradise, workers from a local mortuary team recover a body on Sunday, which was put into a blue bag and loaded into a hearse.

And in the hills above the nearby Concow area, a recovery team discovered the body of another person near several cars on a dirt road running alongside a cannabis farm.

The blaze is now tied with the 1991 “Tunnel Fire” as the second-deadliest fire to hit the state. The deadliest was the “Griffith Park Fire” in 1933, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

At the southern end of the state, where the “Woolsey Fire” is threatening mansions and mobile homes alike in the coastal celebrity redoubt of Malibu, the death toll has been limited to two victims found in a vehicle on a private driveway.

Los Angeles County Fire chief Daryl Osby told reporters of his gratitude to firefighters “who’ve done all they could do save tens of thousands of people’s lives and thousands of people’s homes.”

‘ New abnormal ‘

Rescuers spent hours on Saturday collecting bodies around Paradise and placing them in a black hearse. Body parts were transported by bucket, while intact remains were carried in body bags.

At the Holly Hills Mobile Estate the mobile homes had been reduced to smoldering piles of debris. Yellow police tape delineated spots that were tagged “Doe C” and “Doe D,” a grim marker of the bodies that had recently been removed.

Locals fled the danger, but police told AFP some farmers returned to check on their cattle.

Fanned by strong winds, the “Camp Fire” has so far scorched 111,000 acres (45,000 hectares) and is 25 percent contained, Cal Fire said. So far, three of the more than 4,000 firefighters deployed have been injured.

They estimate they will need three weeks to fully contain the blaze.

Evacuation orders have been issued to more than 250,000 people across California, with authorities urging residents not to ignore warnings to flee.

“This is not the new normal, this is the new abnormal. And this new abnormal will continue, certainly in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years,” California Governor Jerry Brown told a news conference on Sunday.

“Unfortunately, the best science is telling us that the dryness, warmth, drought, all those things, they’re gonna intensify,” he said, referring to conditions conducive to fires.

‘Dangerously wrong’

Almost 6,000 miles away, President Donald Trump, in France for World War I commemorations, drew fierce criticism for an unsympathetic reaction to the devastation.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted, threatening to withdraw federal support.

Brian Rice, the head of the California Professional Firefighters, slammed the tweet as “ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.”

He said the president’s claim that forest policies were mismanaged “is dangerously wrong.”

The tweet also drew political criticism. Republican Senator Cory Gardner told ABC News on Sunday: “I don’t think it’s appropriate to threaten funding.

“That’s not going to happen. Funding will be available. It always is available to our people wherever they are, whatever disaster they are facing.”

Malibu mansions in flames

In southern California, the “Woolsey Fire” engulfed parts of Thousand Oaks, where the community is still shell-shocked after a Marine Corps veteran shot dead 12 people in a country music bar on Wednesday.

It has consumed around 83,000 acres, destroyed at least 177 buildings and was ten percent contained, Cal Fire said Sunday.

The blaze reached the Paramount Ranch, destroying sets used for hundreds of productions including HBO’S sci-fi western “Westworld,” network officials said.

Keegan Gibbs, 33, was crushed to find his childhood Malibu home had been consumed by flames.

“Malibu is a really small community and gets a bad rap for being this kind of elitist, snobby place, and it’s exactly the opposite,” Gibbs told The Los Angeles Times.

The renewed call comes after the announcement that Liberty Media, owners of the Formula One (F1) sport have agreed to a “multi-year” deal to stage Grand Prix races on the streets of Hanoi.

John Dalley, founder of Soi Dog, said: “By announcing a ban on selling dog meat in the city from 2021, the authorities in Hanoi have already shown that they are concerned about the effect eating dogs and cats has on the image of their city.

“We hope they will look at how the controversy over the dog meat trade in South Korea went viral during and after the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in February this year.

“For Hanoi the difference is that the Hanoi Grand Prix will be an annual event, with the spotlight being shone again and again on this dark, disgusting trade.

“We call on the Hanoi city fathers to take action now to end the eating of dogs and cats, and all the cruelty that goes with it, all across the city, so that Hanoi’s reputation will not suffer internationally when the first grand prix is staged in 2020.”

An estimated five million dogs and cats are slaughtered and eaten in Vietnam every year. Most of the animals are snatched street animals or pets kidnapped from owners’ yards or gardens.

The animals are transported across the country jammed in cages so tightly they cannot move, often without food or water, before being force-fed rice or even cement to increase their weight, then bludgeoned, knifed or burned alive in filthy illegal abattoirs.

Quite apart from the cruelty involved, the trade in dog flesh is a serious risk to health.

In 2009 an outbreak of cholera in north Vietnam was tracked back to infected dog meat.

Rabies is another concern. Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries are committed to the eradication of rabies by 2020 but, as Dalley pointed out to government officials as long ago as 2013, “Stopping the dog meat trade will not eliminate rabies. But most certainly rabies will never be eliminated as long as large numbers of unvaccinated dogs are shipped across domestic and international borders.”

Those in Vietnam who support the eating of dogs, assert that it has been part of Vietnamese culture for centuries, that it brings good luck and increases men’s libido.

Dalley counters: “The eating of dogs and cats in Hanoi is a relatively recent phenomenon, introduced by Chinese military advisers as recently as the war of independence.

“There is no place for cruelty in culture. Hanoi is growing into a 21st-century city, and practices that belong in the dark ages should be cleared away.”

“We stand ready to support the Yangon region government’s ban on wildlife sales. The next step is to officially announce this ban nationally, so that the whole of Myanmar can be free of wildlife crime,” he said in an interview. Last month, Yangon became the first city in Southeast Asia to become “illegal wildlife trade free”. In every district and township in Yangon region, anyone caught selling or carrying illegal wildlife products will now face enforcement under the new Protection of Biodiversity and Protected Areas Law enacted in May this year.

“Now, we are working with Mandalay region. Hopefully, we can do the same thing in Mandalay soon, and will spread it to other parts of the country,” he said.

“The next step is to work collectively for the enforcement of the new law, which is very strong. You will go to jail if you are found with any wildlife product in hand, according to the new law. It is very tough, and we need to cooperate to enforce it.”

He expects the rule of the new law to be approved by the Union Parliament by early next year, as the final round of discussions should be completed by November 15.

The sales of products from protected wildlife species have been illegal in Myanmar since 1994 but the law has not been enforced. The new law includes a mandatory prison sentence for poaching or trade in completely protected species or species protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). “It is really important to enforce the law and regulations at Customs checkpoints to make sure that the message is conveyed to tourists as they come in. There should be enough warning to people that they should not buy any wildlife product during their visit,” he said.

“It does not seem like a big crime but we need to raise awareness about it, especially at international airports.”

Williams stressed the importance of raising awareness at international gateways, as a lot of people are not aware that it is illegal. In November 2017, WWF Myanmar conducted an illegal wildlife product identification training at Yangon International Airport. The training courses were designed to train the airport’s management team on identifying ivory and other illegal wildlife trade products so they can monitor the shops within the terminals.

According to Williams, Asia World, a private port terminal which currently handles the highest volume of containers in Myanmar, is also committed to work with the authorities to implement illegal wildlife trade detection and enforcement measures at its facilities.

“Not enough Myanmar people clearly understand the impact of wildlife trade, including elephant poaching. Endangered species may become extinct due to activities of smugglers who are trying to meet the demand in China and the Golden Triangle,” he said.

In this regard, the WWF is working with regional authorities and related ministries to stop elephant poaching in two major regions – Bago and Ayeyarwady.

Until the last five months when the organisation started its efforts to end poaching on the ground, at least one elephant used to be killed in Myanmar every week. Elephant skin, tail hair, teeth and ivory are sold at tourist spots, markets in Yangon and Mandalay, and an illegal market in the Golden Triangle. “We are really successful because it is now over 140 days without any elephant poaching in those notorious areas,” he said.

“We are also observing the markets along the border with China and the Thai-Laos border, looking at the illegal wildlife trade that is going on and highlighting the need to shut down those markets.”

Williams, however, admitted that it would be very hard to crack down on illegal wildlife trade because some trading areas are not under the government’s control, as they are controlled by some ethnic armed groups.

“At this point, it is very difficult to fight the smugglers in such areas. It is a very complex situation. One thing that can be done is to block wildlife products on the way, before they enter the illegal markets, and another is to stop the poaching on the ground. Eventually, we will have to talk to the ethnic groups about the illegal trade and find ways together to stop it,” he said.

He considered the lack of staff at the natural conservation and wildlife protection division as a big challenge to crack down on illegal trade.