Top Asian News 4:29 a.m. GMT

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — A Canadian court granted bail Tuesday to a top Chinese executive arrested at the United States' request in a case that has set off a diplomatic furor among the three countries and complicated high-stakes U.S.-China trade talks. Hours before the bail hearing in Vancouver, China detained a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing in apparent retaliation for the Dec. 1 arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and daughter of the company's founder. After three days of hearings, a British Columbia justice granted bail of $10 million Canadian (US$7.5 million) to Meng, but required her to wear an ankle bracelet, surrender her passports, stay in Vancouver and its suburbs and confine herself to one of her two Vancouver homes from 11 p.m.

TORONTO (AP) — A former Canadian diplomat has been detained while visiting Beijing amid a dispute between the two counties over Canada's arrest of a Chinese executive at the request of the United States. Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale on Tuesday confirmed the detention and said Canada is very concerned. Michael Kovrig, who previously was a diplomat in China and elsewhere, was taken into custody by the Beijing Bureau of Chinese State Security on Monday night during one of his regular visits to Beijing, said the International Crisis Group, for which Kovrig works as North East Asia adviser based in Hong Kong.

INSIDE THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE (AP) — Dozens of South Korean soldiers visited former front-line North Korean guard posts on Wednesday to verify their recent removal as part of warming diplomacy by the rival Koreas while U.S.-North Korea nuclear disarmament efforts remain stalled. The two Koreas have each dismantled or disarmed 11 of their guard posts inside the Demilitarized Zone that forms their 248-kilometer (155-mile) -long, 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide border. The removals will leave South Korea with about 50 other DMZ posts and North Korea with 150, according to defense experts in South Korea. A small group of journalists was allowed to enter the zone to watch a South Korean team leave for a North Korean guard post on Wednesday morning to verify its destruction.

NEW DELHI (AP) — In a season of big Indian weddings, the marriage of two business scions on Wednesday is set to be the biggest of them all. Isha Ambani is the Ivy League-educated daughter of Mukesh Ambani, chairman and majority stakeholder in oil and gas giant Reliance Industries, whose net worth Forbes estimates at over $43 billion. Her groom, Anand Piramal, is the son of Indian industrialist Ajay Piramal, whose namesake conglomerate is estimated to be worth over $10 billion. At one of the couple's pre-wedding events on Sunday, Beyonce performed for a star-studded gathering at a 16th-century palace in the Indian city of Udaipur.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was charged Wednesday with tampering with the final audit report into a defunct state investment fund, adding to a long list of corruption allegations against him since his ouster in May elections. Najib was charged along with Arul Kanda Kandasamy, the former head of the 1MDB fund, which is being investigated in the U.S. and other countries for alleged cross-border embezzlement and money laundering. Najib pleaded not guilty to abusing power to order the modification of the report in February 2016 before it was presented to the Public Accounts Committee, in order to protect himself from disciplinary and legal action.

STRASBOURG, France (AP) — A man who had been flagged as a possible extremist sprayed gunfire near the city of Strasbourg's famous Christmas market Tuesday, killing three people, wounding up to a dozen and sparking a massive manhunt. France immediately raised its terror alert level. It was unclear if the market — a popular gathering place that was the nucleus of an al-Qaida-linked plot in 2000 — was the intended target. The assailant got inside a security zone around the venue and opened fire from there, Mayor Roland Ries said on BFM television. Authorities did not give a motive for the shooting, though prosecutors said they had opened a terrorism investigation.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — For over a century, the Bells of Balangiga have not rung in the Philippines, a silence that the president last year called "painful." Now, the revered bells will once again be heard in the country. Hundreds of Filipino villagers in 1901, armed with bolos and disguised as women, used one of Balangiga town's church bells to signal the start of a massive attack that wrought one of the bloodiest single-battle losses of American occupation forces in the Philippines. The U.S. Army brutally retaliated, reportedly killing thousands of villagers, as the Philippine-American War raged. After the violence, the Americans took three church bells as spoils of war that Filipinos would demand for decades to be handed back.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand's government on Tuesday passed a law that will make medical marijuana widely available for thousands of patients over time. The legislation will also allow terminally ill patients to begin smoking illegal pot immediately without facing the possibility of prosecution. The measures come ahead of a planned national referendum on recreational marijuana use. The government has pledged to hold the referendum some time over the next two years, but has not yet set a date or finalized the wording. The new law allows patients much broader access to medical marijuana, which was previously highly restricted.

SYDNEY (AP) — An Australian court sentenced a Sydney teenager to at least 12 years in prison on Tuesday for planning an attack inspired by the Islamic State group for which he bought knives and bayonets from a gun shop two years ago. The now 18-year-old male, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested outside a Muslim prayer hall in the western Sydney suburb of Bankstown in October 2016, and found guilty of plotting an attack by a jury in September. Handing down his sentence at the Parramatta Supreme Court in western Sydney, Judge Geoffrey Bellew rejected the man's claim that he had purchased the weapons for hunting animals.

TOKYO (AP) — The U.S. military said Tuesday that five missing crew members have been declared dead after their refueling plane collided with a fighter jet last week off Japan's southern coast, and that search and recovery operations have ended after finding only one survivor. The five were on a KC-130 Hercules refueling aircraft that collided last Thursday with an F/A-18 Hornet during regular training. The warplanes crashed into the sea south of Japan's Shikoku island. Two crew members in the F/A-18 were recovered after the accident, but one died. The U.S. Marines said the survivor was in stable condition when rescued.