11:30 a.m. 

Taiwan hold military drills

Taiwan has landed war planes on a normally busy highway to simulate a response to a Chinese attack on its airfields.

Tuesday’s exercise is part of annual drills designed to showcase the island’s military capabilities and resolve to repel an attack from across the Taiwan Strait amid perceptions of a rising threat.

China considers the island its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary.

President Tsai Ing-wen presided at the exercise in the southern county of Changhua.

 10:30 a.m 

Trump visits US, Japanese troops aboard ships

U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive to tour the Japanese destroyer JS Kaga, in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo on Tuesday.  

 

U.S. President Donald Trump expects that Japan's military will reinforce U.S. forces throughout Asia and elsewhere, he said on Tuesday, as the key U.S. ally upgrades the ability of its forces to operate further from its shores.

Trump's comments followed his inspection of Japan's largest warship, the Kaga, a helicopter carrier designed to carry submarine-hunting helicopters to distant waters.

The vessel, which will soon be upgraded to handle F-35B short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) jets, sailed to India on a flag-flying mission last year, going through the contested South China Sea, much of which is claimed by Beijing

 9:30 a.m. 

Two feared dead, 17 hurt after Japan mass stabbing

Police officers work at the scene where a man wielding a knife attacked commuters in Kawasaki, near Tokyo on Tuesday.   | Photo Credit: AP

A knife-wielding attacker killed a 12-year-old schoolgirl and another man before stabbing himself to death in a rampage outside Tokyo Tuesday that also injured more than a dozen including several children.

The mass stabbing in the town of Kawasaki, south of the Japanese capital, was a rare attack in a country with one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the developed world, and there was no immediate detail on the suspect's motive.

Kiyoshi Matsuda, deputy director of the Nippon Medical School Musashi Kosugi Hospital, told reporters that the 12-year-old schoolgirl and a 39-year-old man had succumbed to their injuries.

Local media reported that the suspected attacker, a man in his 50s, had also died of his wounds after turning the knife on himself. Emergency services said at least 16 others had been injured in the attack.