Top Asian News 4:27 a.m. GMT

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — An estimated 11 million people in North Korea — over 43 percent of the population — are undernourished and "chronic food insecurity and malnutrition is widespread," according to a U.N. report issued Wednesday. The report by Tapan Mishra, the head of the U.N. office in North Korea, said that "widespread undernutrition threatens an entire generation of children, with one in five children stunted due to chronic undernutrition." With only limited health care and a lack of access to clean water and sanitation, "children are also at risk of dying from curable diseases," the report added. Mishra said that last year's U.N.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea's state TV has aired a documentary glorifying leader Kim Jong Un's recent visit to Vietnam that omitted the failed nuclear negotiations with President Donald Trump. The footage's release Wednesday came amid reports that North Korea is restoring some facilities at its long-range rocket launch site that it dismantled last year as part of disarmament steps. The documentary shows a smiling Kim talking with Trump while walking together inside a Hanoi hotel last week. It shows Kim's black limousine passing through a Hanoi street lined with residents waving flags. The footage also shows Kim visiting the North Korean Embassy where some skipped and wept with emotions before they took a group photo with the backdrop of a huge picture of Kim's late father and grandfather.

SHENZHEN, China (AP) — Chinese tech giant Huawei has filed a lawsuit in Plano, Texas, challenging a law that labels the company a security risk and would limit its access to the American market for telecom equipment. Huawei Technologies Ltd.'s announcement Thursday comes as the biggest global maker of network equipment for phone and internet companies fights U.S. efforts to persuade allies to exclude the company from next-generation telecom systems. Huawei said its complaint asks a federal court in Plano to throw out a portion of this year's U.S. military appropriations act that bars the government and its contractors from using Huawei equipment.

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A man who alleges he was sexually molested by George Pell as a boy in the 1970s sued the disgraced cardinal in an Australian court Thursday. The 50-year-old alleges in the filing lodged in the Victoria state Supreme Court that he was a victim of physical and sexual abuse while in the care of St. Joseph's Boys Home in Pell's hometown of Ballarat between 1974 and 1978. The suit names Pell, the trustees of the Sisters of Nazareth, the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne and Victoria state. Because the man alleges he is a victim of sexual abuse, state law prevents him from being identified in the media.

BEIJING (AP) — China's Communist Party chief in Tibet insisted Wednesday that the Tibetan people feel more affection toward the government than to the region's traditional Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled following an abortive uprising against Chinese rule nearly 60 years ago. The Dalai Lama hasn't done a "single good thing" for Tibet since he left, Tibet Party Secretary Wu Yingjie said during a meeting of China's ceremonial legislature. The people of Tibet are instead "extremely grateful for the prosperity that the Communist Party has brought them," he said. Zhaxi Jiangcun, a Tibetan grass-roots delegate whom Wu called upon to speak, said as far as he knows "there is no such thing" as adoration for the Dalai Lama among Tibetans.

Carlos Ghosn, the star auto executive credited with rescuing both Renault and Nissan, left a drab Tokyo detention center Wednesday after more than three months in custody, his identity obscured by a surgical mask, hat and construction worker's outfit. The jet-setting turnaround wizard was pursued by TV news helicopters as he traveled in a tiny Suzuki van through Tokyo streets after his release on 1 billion yen (nearly $9 million) bail — a peculiar and humbling episode in a journey that has highlighted distinct aspects of Japanese corporate life and its justice system. Brazilian-born and raised in Lebanon, Ghosn had been held since his arrest on Nov.

TOKYO (AP) — The arrest of former Nissan Motor Co. Chairman Carlos Ghosn came after a largely illustrious history at the company. Some key dates from Ghosn's two decades at Nissan and the current criminal case against him: June 1999: Ghosn becomes chief operating officer at Nissan, sent in by French alliance partner Renault SA, to save the Japanese automaker from near-bankruptcy. June 2000: Ghosn becomes president of Nissan. May 2005: Ghosn becomes chief executive at Renault. May 2016: Nissan forms alliance with Mitsubishi Motors, with Ghosn becoming chairman at Mitsubishi a few months later. April 2017: Ghosn hands over presidency and chief executive post at Nissan to Hiroto Saikawa.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The world's two largest economies are locked in negotiations that may soon produce a deal to suspend their trade war. Yet despite signals from Chinese and U.S. officials that some truce could be forthcoming, there are few signs of any truly transformed trade relationship. Beijing's longstanding policy of subsidizing its own businesses and charges that it illicitly obtains U.S. technology remain key obstacles to any meaningful U.S.-China trade deal. In the meantime, the government said Wednesday that the trade deficit in goods with China — the gap between the value of the U.S. products China buys and the higher value of what it sells to the U.S.

SUNAMGANJ, Bangladesh (AP) — The father of a British teenager who ran away to join the Islamic State group in Syria said his daughter's citizenship should not be revoked and that she should return to the U.K. and be punished if it was determined she had committed a crime. Shamima Begum fled east London with two friends to travel to Syria to marry IS fighters in 2015 at a time when the group's online recruitment program lured many impressionable young people to its self-proclaimed caliphate. Begum, now 19, resurfaced at a refugee camp in Syria and told reporters recently that she wants to come home.

PEORIA, Ariz. (AP) — Jerry Dipoto never met Ichiro Suzuki in person until the day he was reintroduced as a member of the Seattle Mariners during spring training in 2018. Suzuki's one request for the hoopla that surrounded his return to the Mariners was the news conference and ensuing activities be kept, in his words, "casual." "The entourage arrived, and it looked like the CIA arrival for the president. It was dark windows, suburbans, and Ichiro rolled out and he walked into my office in what I can only describe as something off the runways type of suit," Dipoto, the team's general manager, recalled.