BANGKOK -- Thailand's ambitious quarantine-free tourism experiment began on Thursday morning as an Etihad Airways flight from Abu Dhabi carrying fully vaccinated passengers landed at Phuket's airport.

After clearing immigration, the visitors were taken straight to their accommodations, where they will undergo PCR testing for COVID-19. If negative results come back, those tourists will be free to roam the entire island.

A Qatar Airways flight from Doha, an El Al Israel Airlines jetliner from Tel Aviv, and a Singapore Airlines plane from

NEW YORK -- Lawyers for Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou have traded blows with prosecutors in a court in Canada this week, hoping to have troves of HSBC emails admitted as evidence in the final committal phase of her extradition case.

The U.S. has accused Meng, also the oldest daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, of fraud and wants her extradited. Her fight to prevent that is approaching a potentially decisive phase, more than two and a half years after she was detained in Vancouver. She

JAKARTA -- Indonesia will introduce tighter social restrictions in its most populous island of Java and tourism hotspot Bali, as the country aims to arrest a devastating second wave of COVID-19 infections.

The move follows pleas from the medical community for more stringent measures in a country that the Red Cross called "teeter[ing] on the edge of a COVID-19 catastrophe," as hospital beds fill up and the vaccination rollout remains slow.

The new restrictions will begin on Saturday and last until July 20

YANGON/BANGKOK -- Myanmar's military on Feb. 1 detained State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint in the country's first coup since 1988, bringing an end to a decade of civilian rule.

The Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy had won a landslide in a general election in November . But the military has claimed the election was marred by fraud.

For all our coverage, visit our Myanmar Coup page.

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TOKYO -- SoftBank Group plans to raise some $7.3 billion via the sale of foreign-currency bonds -- the biggest ever overseas debt issue by the Japanese tech investor.

SoftBank said Thursday that it will issue eight bonds, half in dollars and the rest in euros, in its first overseas bond sale since 2018. The bonds will be offered to global institutional investors outside Japan and the U.S.

The funds raised will be used to repay debt and for "general corporate purposes,

HONG KONG -- Independent news outlets in Hong Kong are rushing to take down articles and suspend donations, among other precautions, as the shutdown of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily sends a deep chill through the territory's once-freewheeling media industry.

Online publisher Stand News, one of the largest nonprofit media outlets in Hong Kong, announced this week that it would remove most opinion articles published on its site. Some were penned by activists now in jail or in exile, and discussed sensitive topics such as foreign sanctions

TOKYO -- The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Formed by 13 people in 1921, the organization has expanded exponentially and has led China to vie with the U.S. for global hegemony. The party's rule has survived numerous turbulent periods and events, such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square crackdown, supported in recent decades by the growth of the country's economy -- now the world's second-largest

BEIJING -- President Xi Jinping called on the Chinese people to build a modern socialist country, vowed to "crush" external forces who try to meddle in the country's internal affairs, and smash any push for independence on Taiwan.

Speaking at a ceremony in Tiananmen Square to mark the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi hailed the system of Marxism with Chinese characteristics for lifting the country to become the world's second largest economy.

Dressed in a gray Mao suit, Xi was joined

TOKYO -- Mitsubishi Electric's revelation of cheating on train equipment inspections is just the latest in a series of quality lapses that raise doubts about the Japanese industrial group's ability to change what critics call an arrogant corporate culture.

The company on Wednesday admitted it conducted improper checks on air compressors used in train brakes, in addition to the air conditioning equipment it had disclosed the day before. The problems may have gone on for more than three decades .

This comes less than three years after it acknowledged that a subsidiary