Top Asian News 9:38 a.m. GMT

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean President Park Geun-hye will calmly accept impeachment if the opposition-controlled parliament votes for her removal this week, but prefers to resign on her own terms, lawmakers from her party said Tuesday. Chung Jin Suk, floor leader of the conservative ruling party, said after an hour-long meeting with Park that she was willing to accept a now-withdrawn proposal by the party for her to voluntarily step down in April to set up a presidential election in June. The party's chairman, Lee Jung Hyun, who also attended the meeting, said it seemed that Park was hoping lawmakers would accept her resignation rather than push ahead with an attempt to impeach her.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The heir to the Samsung empire and other tycoons took a public drubbing by lawmakers Tuesday over deep-rooted ties between politics and business that helped drive South Korea's economic ascent but are central to its political crisis. The questioning on national TV of Samsung Electronics vice chairman Lee Jae-yong, 48-year-old only son of the company's ailing chairman, and eight other business leaders was in response to prosecution claims that President Park Geun-hye allowed a corrupt confidante to pull government strings and extort big sums from companies. Lee apologized repeatedly, without saying what he was apologizing for, and sought to distance himself from Park's friend and shadowy adviser Choi Soon-sil.

Reconciliation can be tricky. It took 70 years for an American president to visit the site of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and nearly 75 for a Japanese leader to announce he would visit Pearl Harbor, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did Monday. Abe is likely to receive a warm reception later this month at the memorial for more than 2,300 Americans who died in the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian naval base. That hasn't always been the case for other world leaders visiting similar sites, particularly when memories are fresher. ___ REAGAN IN BITBURG U.S. President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl stirred a global outcry in May 1985 when the American leader visited a German military cemetery that included the remains of 49 members of Adolf Hitler's Waffen SS troops.

COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh (AP) — The Myanmar soldiers came in the morning, the young mother says. They set fire to the concrete-and-thatch homes, forcing the villagers to cluster together. When some of her neighbors tried to escape into the fields, they were shot. After that, she says, most people stopped running away. "They drove us out of our houses, men and women in separate lines, ordering us to keep our hands folded on the back of our heads," says 20-year-old Mohsena Begum, her voice choking as she described what happened to the little village of Caira Fara, which had long been home to hundreds of members of Myanmar's minority Rohingya community.

CHENNAI, India (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people thronged the southern Indian city of Chennai on Tuesday to honor their late beloved leader, Jayaram Jayalalithaa, a former film actress and popular politician. Jayalalithaa, chief minister of Tamil Nadu state, died overnight following a heart attack a day earlier. A sea of weeping mourners surged toward the steps of a public hall where Jayalalithaa's body, draped in the Indian flag, was kept on a raised platform. Thousands of police officers formed chains to stop the heaving crowd from surging up the steps. Men and women wept, some breaking into loud wails.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — A year after losing Sri Lanka's presidency in a stunning electoral upset, strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa is making unusual political moves to regain power in the South Asian island nation — through a newly launched political party in which he has no actual stake. Not yet, anyway. Rajapaksa has yet to leave his old party, now led by the former ally who ousted him at the polls, but it's clear he is quietly in control of the new Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, which translates as the Sri Lanka People's Front. It's headed by Rajapaksa's former foreign minister, Gamini Peiris.

BEIJING (AP) — Matt Damon criticized "outrageous" stories in the era of fake news as he responded Tuesday to accusations that his role in the new China-Hollywood co-production "The Great Wall" should have gone to an Asian actor. Some critics have said Damon's casting as the lead character amounted to "whitewashing," in which Caucasians are chosen for roles that should have gone to actors from other ethnicities. In an interview with The Associated Press, the American actor said he thinks of whitewashing as applying to Caucasian actors applying makeup to appear to be of another race, as was common in the early days of film and television, when racism was overt.

NEW DELHI (AP) — The truth of New Delhi's toxic air finally hit home for Rakhi Singh when her 3-year-old son began to cough constantly early this year. She bought air purifiers for her home. When a thick, gray haze turned the view outside her home into a scene from a bad science fiction film last month, she bought pollution masks. "Having a kid made the reality of the city's pollution hit me harder," she said. The news that the Indian capital is one of the dirtiest cities in the world is three years old. But the awareness that it's toxic enough to leave its citizens chronically ill and requires long-term lifestyle changes is relatively nascent.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Whether by accident or design, President-elect Donald Trump is signaling a tougher American policy toward China, sparking warnings from both the outgoing Obama administration and Beijing. On Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said progress with the Chinese could be "undermined" by a flare-up over the sovereignty of Taiwan, the self-governing island the U.S. broke diplomatic ties with in 1979. That split was part of an agreement with China, which claims the island as its own territory, although the U.S. continues to sell Taiwan billions in military equipment and has other economic ties. Trump broke protocol last week by speaking with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and then took to Twitter to challenge China's trade and military policies.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia has strengthened its moratorium on converting peat swamps to plantations in a move a conservation research group says will help prevent annual fires and substantially cut the country's carbon emissions if properly implemented. President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's amendment to the moratorium regulation, which was issued on Monday, expands it to cover peatlands of any depth and orders companies to restore areas they've degraded. Indonesia's move was welcomed by Norway, which in 2010 pledged $1 billion to help the country stop cutting down its prized tropical forests but has released little of it. As a result of the expanded regulation, Norway said it would give $25 million to Indonesia to fund restoration of drained peatlands and another $25 million once an enforcement and monitoring plan is ready.