Top Asian News 3:09 a.m. GMT

PHNOM PEHN, Cambodia (AP) — An Australian filmmaker was awaiting deportation from Cambodia on Saturday after receiving a royal pardon for his conviction on spying charges for flying a drone over a political rally. A spokesman for immigration police said that James Ricketson will be deported on Saturday morning, a day after being released from prison. "We are now checking a flight for him," Gen. Keo Vanthan told The Associated Press. Ricketson, 69, was sentenced to six years in a trial his sympathizers described as farcical because prosecutors never specified whom he was spying for and failed to present evidence that he possessed or transmitted any secrets.

NEW DELHI (AP) — India on Friday called off a planned meeting between its foreign minister and her Pakistani counterpart on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session in New York this month, aggravating tensions between the longtime rivals. External Affairs Ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said India's decision to pull out of the meeting, which had been announced just a day earlier, follows the killing of an Indian border guard in Kashmir and Pakistan's glorification of insurgents fighting Indian rule in the Himalayan territory. The Indian government's decision to hold talks with Pakistan was strongly criticized by the Congress party and other opposition groups after rebels in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir killed the border guard and later raided over a dozen homes of police officers and abducted three.

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Anti-India rebels in disputed Kashmir raided over a dozen homes of police officers and abducted three whose bullet-riddled bodies were recovered Friday, officials said. Also Friday, Indian government forces killed five suspected militants, ending a two-day gunbattle. The police killings came days after the region's largest rebel group asked officers to quit the Kashmiri police force and stay away from counterinsurgency operations. Militants in Kashmir have increasingly targeted police working with India's forces, accusing them of being collaborators. Early Friday, nearly two dozen rebels stormed the homes in two southern Kashmir villages, took away three off-duty officers and a fourth person who had resigned from the police days earlier.

MALE, Maldives (AP) — As election officials made final preparations for nationwide elections in the Maldives, the European Union said it is not sending observers because the country has failed to meet the basic conditions for monitoring. In the capital, Male, pink and green campaign banners hung in the streets. Election commission spokesman Ahmed Akram said the country was fully prepared to hold a free and fair election on Sunday. But in neighboring Sri Lanka, exiled former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, a leader of the opposition, said Friday that the vote could be rigged. A decade after Maldivians took to the streets to welcome democracy to the series of coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, voters head to the ballot box in what has become a referendum on whether democracy will stay.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — About 500 refugees have been relocated from a Nebraska apartment complex after units were deemed unlivable. The Omaha World-Herald reports the Myanmar refugees were living at the Yale Park Apartments in north Omaha, including about 175 school-age children and dozens of toddlers and babies. City inspectors evacuated the apartments Thursday, citing of a myriad of problems ranging from unsafe electrical circuits and natural gas leaks to units infested with mice, bedbugs, lice and maggots. The refugees are now being housed at community centers where they can sleep, shower and eat. Joanie Poore is with Heartland Family Service.

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, the country's No. 2 after the ruling Communist Party's leader, died Friday after a serious illness, the government said. He was 61. Quang passed away despite "utmost efforts to treat him by Vietnamese and foreign professors and doctors and care by the party and state leaders," the statement said. It said Quang died at a military hospital in Hanoi but did not elaborate on his illness. The state-run online newspaper VnExpress quoted a former health minister and the head of a national committee in charge of leaders' health, Nguyen Quoc Trieu, as saying that Quang had contracted a rare and toxic virus since July last year and had traveled to Japan six times for treatment.

ISTANBUL (AP) — Chinese authorities are placing the children of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities into dozens of state-run orphanages across the far western Xinjiang region, as around 1 million adults in their families are sent to internment camps. The orphanages are only the latest example of Beijing's efforts to systematically distance young Muslims in Xinjiang from their families and culture. Uighurs fear such efforts are erasing their ethnic identity, one child at a time. In Istanbul, The Associated Press spoke to a dozen Uighur families during the Muslim holy festival Eid al-Adha, which comes with large family reunions. Tables in every home were resplendently laid out with traditional Xinjiang dishes like homemade noodles, freshly butchered lamb and crispy nan bread.

ISTANBUL (AP) — Every morning, Meripet wakes up to her nightmare: The Chinese government has turned four of her children into orphans, even though she and their father are alive. Meripet and her husband left the kids with their grandmother at home in China when they went to nurse Meripet's sick father in Turkey. But after Chinese authorities started locking up thousands of their fellow ethnic Uighurs for alleged subversive crimes such as travel abroad, a visit became exile. Then, her mother-in-law was also taken prisoner, and Meripet learned from a friend that her 3- to 8-year-olds had been placed in a de facto orphanage in the Xinjiang region, under the care of the state that broke up her family.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The spectacle and surprise on display at the three inter-Korean summits this year have been, at times, intense. The fourth one could be surreal — if it happens. Imagine North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rolling through South Korea's ultra-modern capital in an armored limousine flanked by crew-cut bodyguards running in crisp, military formation — the same streets where millions protested two years ago to bring down a corrupt government. Or what about Kim taking an evening stroll through affluent southern Seoul, stopping by the soaring Lotte World Tower to soak in the majestic skyline above the broad Han River — not too far from where protesters regularly burn effigies of him?

BEIJING (AP) — China said Friday it was "outraged" over U.S. economic sanctions against a Chinese military agency and its director over the purchase of Russian fighter jets and surface-to-air missile equipment, and demanded the U.S. cancel the measure. Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing has lodged stern complaints with Washington over the action, which triggers a ban on entering the U.S., forbids conducting transactions with the U.S. financial system and forces the blocking of all property and interests in property within U.S. jurisdiction. "China is strongly outraged by this unreasonable action by the U.S.," Geng told reporters at a daily news briefing.