Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday called for an early conclusion of a regional trade pact that ensures free and rules-based commerce in the face of an increasingly protectionist United states under President Donald Trump.

Japan co-chairs the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, with Singapore, and seeks to take leadership in shaping the pact as an alternative to a Pacific Rim free-trade grouping that Trump abandoned early this year.

In his opening remarks to a meeting of 16 Asian trade ministers, Abe said a pact among the countries that together make up half the global population has an enormous growth potential.

“As we are faced with concerns of the rise of protectionism in the world, all of us in Asia must unite, and our future depends on whether we can keep hoisting our flagship principle of free and fair trade,” Abe told the meeting in Tokyo. He said RCEP is increasingly getting more attention from the rest of the world amid concerns of protectionism, so “Let us be as one and achieve a free, fair and rules-based market in this region.”

Trump, who says he prefers bilateral deals, has pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving the remaining 11 countries from Chile to New Zealand to work on a revamped version of that pact.

Trump has imposed high tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and has threatened to add automobiles to reduce America’s trade deficit. He has singled out China’s products, prompting fears of a trade war.

Japan, already hit by increased U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, has told the World Trade…

It’s a simple melody sung to the plucking of acoustic guitars by schoolchildren sitting around candles: “I beg the skies to show mercy and empathy/ My brothers are in Tham Luang Khun Nang Non/ Let them pass this danger, I beg.”

The song is dedicated to events unfolding in a flooded mountain cave in northern Thailand, where 12 boys aged 11-16 and their soccer coach disappeared a week ago. It was written and performed by students at Lek Nai Tung Kwang school across the country, in Buriram province.

The music video has played on national newscasts during round-the-clock coverage of the search and rescue operation at the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in far northern Chiang Rai province. It is part of an outpouring of hope, empathy and concern across Thailand for the boys, their families and the army of people working to bring them home.

“We’re worried. Everybody wants to hear good news,” said Keeta Wariburee, a teacher at the school that produced the video. “We want to help them, but if we went up there we’d probably just get in the way. So we’re doing what we can by sending encouragement.”

Rescuers including elite Thai navy divers, a U.S. military team, British cave experts and Australian and Chinese lifesaving responders have been frustrated by incessant rain that has flooded the cave and made locating the boys more difficult. A break in the rain over the weekend eased flooding in the system of caverns, but pumping out water hasn’t solved the problem and the attention focused on finding shafts on the mountainside that might serve as a back door to the blocked-off…

The frantic effort to locate 12 boys and their soccer coach missing in a cave in Thailand for a week picked up pace as a break in the rain eased flooding in the system of caverns and more experts from around the world joined the anxious rescue mission.

The search in the northern province of Chiang Rai has been going slowly, largely because flooding has blocked rescuers from going through chambers to get deeper into the cave. Pumping out water hasn’t solved the problem, so the attention has focused on finding shafts on the mountainside that might serve as a back door to the blocked-off areas where the missing may be sheltering.

The boys, aged 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old coach entered the sprawling Tham Luang Nang Non cave after a soccer game on June 23, but near-constant rains have thwarted the search for them. Authorities have nevertheless expressed hope that the group has found a dry place within the cave to wait.

Reflecting that hope, a medical evacuation drill was held Saturday morning to see how long it would take to get rescued people out of the cave into 13 ambulances and to the nearest hospital.

Australian police and military personnel joined other multinational teams, including U.S. military personnel and experts from a British cave exploration club. China sent a six-person team of rescue and disaster experts to the cave, the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok said. The group has experience in lifesaving operations in Myanmar and Nepal, the embassy said.

A second, private Chinese group calling itself Green Boat Emergency also arrived Saturday. “Our skills are…

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly secured agreements with 14 European Union countries to rapidly return some asylum seekers as she seeks to end a schism in her government over migration policy.

Merkel also says she also wants to establish “anchor centers” to process migrants at Germany’s borders, the dpa news agency reported Saturday.

The announcements came in a letter Merkel wrote to leaders of her Christian Democratic Union’s Bavaria-only sister party, the Christian Social Union, as well as to her junior coalition government partner, the Social Democrats, after she attended a two-day EU summit in Brussels.

Merkel is seeking to end a three-week standoff with her hard-line Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who heads the CSU.

Seehofer, whose party faces a state election in the fall, has been threatening to turn away migrants at Germany’s border who have already been rejected by the country or who have registered for asylum elsewhere in the EU.

Merkel has rejected that approach, instead insisting on a European-wide solution to migration issues to preserve EU unity. The dispute has raised the possibility of an end to Germany’s decades-old conservative alliance between the CSU and Merkel’s CDU if Seehofer goes ahead with the unilateral move, which could bring down her government.

Both the CDU and the CSU are holding separate meetings Sunday to discuss Merkel’s latest efforts on migration and plot their next steps.

Merkel on Friday came away from an EU summit with agreements from Greece and Spain to take back migrants previously registered in those…