Top Asian News 3:51 a.m. GMT

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Workers with paint brushes and brooms put the final touches on Pyongyang's iconic Kim Il Sung Square as North Korea prepared for what promises to be its biggest celebration in years on Sunday — the 70th anniversary of the country's official birth as a nation. The spectacle, months in the making, will center on a military parade and mass games that will likely put both advanced missiles and leader Kim Jong Un's hopes for a stronger economy front and center. Although North Korea stages military parades almost every year, and held one just before the Olympics began in South Korea in February this year, Sunday's parade comes at a particularly sensitive time.

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese tennis and non-tennis fans alike are celebrating one of their own winning a Grand Slam tournament for the first time. The results came in early Sunday morning Japan time, and television stations interrupted TV dramas and cooking programs with news flashes after Naomi Osaka defeated Serena Williams 6-2, 6-4 in the women's final at the U.S. Open in New York. "She just let her playing do the talking," said Tokyo resident Noritomo Kusumoto. "And her words after the match deserve a big warm applause under the unexpected circumstances. True champion and proud of her!" Minori Nakano, a teacher and translator from the city of Kobe in western Japan, praised 20-year-old Osaka's after-match comments in English as "so cool and yet so Japanese".

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (pahm-PAY'-oh) has received the letter that President Donald Trump has said he was expecting from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (kim jawng oon). A State Department official is confirming that Pompeo has the letter. It's not immediately clear whether it's been delivered to Trump. Pompeo returned early Friday from India. Trump was in Montana and the Dakotas on Friday before a late return to the White House. The official wasn't authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive diplomacy between the U.S. and North Korea and spoke on condition of anonymity. Trump has said Kim's recent statement that he wants to denuclearize North Korea during Trump's tenure as president was "a very positive statement."

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese authorities say 37 people have been confirmed dead from a powerful earthquake that struck the northern island of Hokkaido last week. The Hokkaido government said Sunday that two people remain missing and one other person has no vital signs. Rescue workers are using backhoes and shovels to search for the missing in a tangle of dirt and the rubble of homes left by multiple landslides in the town of Atsuma. All but four of the victims are from the community of 4,600 people. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited a hard-hit area of Sapporo, the main city in Hokkaido.

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korea is bringing back one of its most iconic art forms — mass games performed by tens of thousands of people working in precise unison — to mark its 70th anniversary this weekend. The performance, which takes months if not years of intense preparation and training, is being called "Glorious Country" this year. It is literally the embodiment of socialist ideals — North Korea's most ubiquitous slogan, seen in posters and beaming from neon signs from atop tall buildings, is "Single-minded Unity." Pyongyang sees the performances, last held in 2013, as one of its most highly effective forms of propaganda, highlighting its social and political agenda both at home, where it will be televised repeatedly for months to come, and abroad.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — During the 70 years that the Kim family has ruled, North Korea's 30-plus massive military parades have been used as much for propaganda, intimidation and internal unity as for commemorating important anniversaries. A look at how the parades have evolved ahead of another march on Sunday, the 70th anniversary of the founding of North Korea's authoritarian government: ___ KIM IL SUNG (1948-1994) Kim Il Sung, a former guerrilla who gained fame battling Japan's colonial rule, established the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on Sept. 9, 1948. The North's first military parade occurred seven months earlier, on Feb.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Engineers set to sea Saturday to deploy a trash collection device to corral plastic litter floating between California and Hawaii in an attempt to clean up the world's largest garbage patch in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. The 2,000-foot (600-meter) long floating boom was being towed from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas. The system was created by The Ocean Cleanup, an organization founded by Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands who first became passionate about cleaning the oceans when he went scuba diving at age 16 in the Mediterranean Sea and saw more plastic bags than fish.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Former Associated Press photojournalist Kim Chonkil, whose images captured South Korea's turbulent transition from dictatorship to democracy, has died. He was 89. Kim's son, Kim Kuchul, said he died in New York on Thursday after fighting kidney and respiratory problems. Kim covered South Korea for the AP for nearly 40 years until leaving the company in 1987, a period during which the country rose from the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War into an Asian industrial power and a full-fledged democracy following a bloody struggle against dictatorship. Kim will be remembered for one of the most iconic photos in South Korea's history — a May 1961 photo of Gen.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The New York Times is reporting that Jack Ma, the co-founder and executive chairman of Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group, is retiring. The Times said that in an interview, Ma said he planned to step down as executive chairman on Monday to pursue philanthropy in education. He will remain on Alibaba's board of directors. Ma started Alibaba in 1999 in his apartment in the Chinese city of Hangzhou and is now among the richest people in the world. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and has a market value of about $421 billion.

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A helicopter flying in bad weather crashed in Nepal's mountains on Saturday, killing five of the seven people on board and leaving another missing, police said. The pilot and four of the six passengers, including a 68-year-old Japanese man, were among those killed, said police official Basanta Kuwar. Another passenger was missing, while a woman survived the crash, he said. The woman's condition was not immediately clear. Rescuers were scouring the area for the missing person but thick fog and rain and the mountainous terrain were making the operation difficult, Kuwar said. Aside from the Japanese man, the six others aboard the helicopter were Nepalese.