North Korea yesterday fired three medium-range missiles that traveled about 1,000km and landed near Japan in an apparent show of force timed to coincide with the G20 summit in China, South Korean officials said.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the missiles, all believed to be Rodongs, were launched from the western North Korean town of Hwangju and flew across the country before splashing into the sea.
The missiles likely landed 200km to 250km west of Japan’s Hokkaido Island, within the nation’s 200 nautical mile (370.4km) exclusive economic zone where a nation has sovereign rights for exploring and exploiting resources, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said.
Photo: EPA
A South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff statement described the launches as an “armed protest” meant to demonstrate North Korea’s military capability on the occasion of the G20 summit and days before the North Korean government’s 68th anniversary.
Early last month, another Rodong missile fired by North Korea traveled about 1,000km, the longest-ever flight by that missile.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called the launches a “serious threat” to Japanese security and said that Tokyo protested to North Korea via the Japanese embassy in Beijing.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told US President Barack Obama that North Korea’s missile launch was “unforgivable,” a Japanese government spokesman said.
The US condemned the missile launches and a senior administration official said it will work at summits this week to “bolster international resolve” to hold North Korea accountable for its actions.
“Today’s reckless launches by North Korea pose threats to civil aviation and maritime commerce in the region,” a senior US administration official said in a statement. “Our commitment to the defense of our allies in the face of these threats remains ironclad.”
The US plans to bring up the issue during the East Asia summit in Laos this week. Obama was to head to Laos yesterday evening.
Before yesterday’s launch, South Korean President Park Geun-hye met her Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping (習近平), on the sidelines of the G20 summit and criticized North Korea for what she called repeated missile provocations that are a threat to Seoul-Beijing ties.
The missile launches were the latest in a series of launches by isolated North Korea this year in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, supported by China, that ban all ballistic missile activities by Pyongyang.
North Korea rejects the ban as infringing its sovereign right to pursue a space program and self defense.
Shortly after the missile launches, Park Geun-hye and Abe met on the sidelines of the G20 summit and agreed to cooperate on monitoring the situation, a Japanese statement said.
In 2014, North Korea fired two Rodong medium-range missiles as Park and Abe were meeting Obama at The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss responding to North Korea’s arms program.
Additional reporting by Reuters
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has