Top Asian News 3:29 a.m. GMT

SHANGHAI (AP) — Shoppers in China have once again broken records after spending more than $14 billion within the first two hours of an annual online buying frenzy. Now in its 10th year, the clamor for deals and discounts known as Singles Day was heralded with characteristic fanfare by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has turned an unofficial holiday for people without romantic partners into a yearly windfall for digital retailers. A massive screen at Alibaba's gala in Shanghai showed the surging sales numbers in real time: By 1 hour and 47 minutes after midnight, 100 billion yuan ($14.3 billion) in purchases had been made.

BEIJING (AP) — Lu Yushan, a retired salesman, has advice for investors in China's slumping stock market: Sell. Lu's shares soared over the past decade. But the 65-year-old cashed out this year, driven away by plunging prices, insider trading scandals, a cooling economy and a tariff war with Washington. "Investors should get out," said Lu, watching flickering prices on a wall-mounted display at a Beijing brokerage. "I am here just for fun and not to make money." President Xi Jinping's government is struggling, with limited success, to dispel such gloom and talk stock prices back up with promises of tax cuts, more bank lending and a media campaign led by its economy czar.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The North and South Korean militaries completed withdrawing troops and firearms from 22 front-line guard posts on Saturday as they continue to implement a wide-ranging agreement reached in September to reduce tensions across the world's most fortified border, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said. South Korea says the military agreement is an important trust-building step that would help stabilize peace and advance reconciliation between the rivals. But critics say the South risks conceding some of its conventional military strength before North Korea takes any meaningful steps on denuclearization — an anxiety that's growing as the larger nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang seemingly drift into a stalemate.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka's president has dissolved Parliament and called for elections on Jan. 5 in a bid to stave off a deepening political crisis over his dismissal of the prime minister that opponents say is unconstitutional. An official notification signed by President Maithripala Sirisena announced the dissolution of Parliament effective midnight Friday. It said the names of candidates will be called before Nov. 26 and the new Parliament is to convene Jan. 17. Sri Lanka has been in a crisis since Oct. 26, when Sirisena fired his prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and replaced him with former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa.

WASHINGTON (AP) — China bluntly told the United States to stop sending ships and military aircraft close to islands claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea, during talks that set the stage for a meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping later this month. The U.S. pushed back Friday, insisting it will continue to "fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows." In late September, U.S. and Chinese vessels nearly collided near a disputed reef. Despite the frank airing of differences at the meeting in Washington of the two nations' top diplomats and military chiefs, both sides stressed the need to tamp down tensions, which have flared amid a bitter trade dispute that Trump and Xi are expected to tackle at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.

HONG KONG (AP) — The cancellation of literary and artistic events and the refusal to allow a Financial Times editor to enter Hong Kong have reignited concern about freedom of expression in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. A last-minute decision Friday to reinstate the literary event illustrates the back-and-forth over this issue. Hong Kong was promised semi-autonomy for 50 years as part of its 1997 handover from Great Britain, allowing it to retain rights to assembly and free speech that are denied on the Chinese mainland. The suspected kidnapping in 2015 by Chinese security forces of publishers of sometimes salacious works on the country's leaders and the prosecution of organizers of anti-Beijing protests have sparked concern about those rights.

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The candidates vying to become the mayor of Taiwan's capital, Taipei, faced off in a televised debate on Saturday, two weeks before a host of local elections seen as a barometer of the ruling party's popularity. The Nov. 24 mayoral election is one of hundreds being held in Taiwan for local government posts that are seen as a test of confidence in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which swept to power in 2016 with the election of President Tsai Ing-wen and a solid majority in parliament. The DPP's main opposition is the Nationalist Party, which relocated from mainland China amid civil war in 1949 and governed Taiwan for decades, first under martial law, then under full democracy beginning in the 1990s.

SYDNEY (AP) — Australia police said Saturday a man who fatally stabbed another and injured two in what they described as an Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack in central Melbourne had also planned to set off an explosion. The attacker, Hassain Khalif Shire Ali, 30, had his passport canceled in 2015 after it was learned he planned to travel to Syria, police said. The attack occurred on Friday when Shire Ali got out of a pickup vehicle, which he then set on fire, and stabbed three men, one of whom died at the scene. The attack horrified hundreds of onlookers during the afternoon rush hour in Australia's second-biggest city.

South Korea soccer international Lee Chang-min has been questioned by police after he was involved in a car crash that left one person dead and two injured. Lee, who has played seven times for the national team and is a midfielder with leading K-League club Jeju United, has admitted that his SUV crossed the center line while driving on Jeju Island on Monday and collided with another vehicle that was traveling in the opposite direction. "We have to collect more evidence and need to conduct more of the investigation on Lee," an official at Seogwipo Police Station in Jeju said on Friday.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A Philippine court found former first lady Imelda Marcos guilty of graft and ordered her arrest Friday in a rare conviction among many corruption cases that she plans to appeal to avoid jail and losing her seat in Congress. The special anti-graft Sandiganbayan court sentenced Marcos, 89, to serve 6 to 11 years in prison for each of the seven counts of violating an anti-corruption law when she illegally funneled about $200 million to Swiss foundations in the 1970s as Metropolitan Manila governor. Neither Marcos nor anyone representing her attended Friday's court hearing. Marcos said in a statement that the decision was being studied by one of her lawyers who notified the Marcos family that he intends to appeal the decision.