Asia (except ME & Indian SC)

TAIPEI, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Taiwan's defence ministry said it detected 18 Chinese air force planes operating around Taiwan and carrying out "joint combat readiness patrols" with Chinese warships on Wednesday, the first large-scale military activity after the Taiwanese election.

China, which views Taiwan as its own territory, has over the past four years regularly sent warplanes and warships into the skies and waters around the island as it seeks to assert sovereignty claims that the Taipei government rejects.

MANILA, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Philippine troops on Wednesday killed two suspected rebels in a clash in Negros Occidental province in the central Philippines, a military report said.

The report said that the fighting between the troops and around five rebels from the New People's Army (NPA) occurred in La Castellana town around 6:45 a.m. local time.

The troops recovered an AR-15 rifle, a homemade shotgun, a .45-caliber pistol, and ammunition from the encounter site.

JAKARTA, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Jakarta-Bandung High-speed Railway (HSR), the first of its kind in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, has set a target to serve 31,000 passengers per day throughout this year, said PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China (KCIC), a joint venture consortium between Indonesian and Chinese state-owned firms that constructs and runs the HSR.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Even for a nation that has perfected the provocative, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s declaration that he would abandon the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea was a shock. But a closer look shows it’s the almost inevitable culmination of years of building tension.

World powers will now be closely watching to see how one of Kim’s biggest foreign policy declarations since he took power in 2011 plays out as he works to gain leverage in a region that holds both promise and danger for his small, impoverished, nuclear-armed nation.

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 16 (NNN-BERNAMA) – Malaysian authorities said yesterday, they had seized 528 kg of drugs worth 19 million ringgit (4.06 million U.S. dollars) hidden in a forest reserve in Perlis state, near the border with Thailand.

Four suspects had been arrested in connection with the case, with four vehicles and seven motorcycles seized as well, Bukit Aman Narcotics Crime Investigation Department (NCID) director, Mohd Kamarudin Md Din said.