South Korea's top official in charge of relations with North Korea said yesterday that intensifying pressure on the communist state would force it to accept a US offer for multilateral talks on halting its suspected nuclear weapons programs.
North Korea has insisted on one-one-one meetings with the US, hoping to win security guarantees and massive economic aid in exchange for giving up its nuclear programs. Washington considers Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions a regional threat and says any talks on the crisis should include China, Japan, South Korea and possibly Russia.
PHOTO: AP
"Various forms of pressure on North Korea -- I wouldn't call them sanctions but rather diplomatic pressure -- would get the North to change its mind," said South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun in an interview with Seoul's CBS radio.
Jeong said talks including Japan and South Korea are "the North's only option" and that North Korea "is expected to change its attitude in one or two months."
In recent weeks, the US and its regional allies, most notably Japan and Australia, have vowed to crack down on the North Korean trade in illicit drugs, weapons and counterfeit money.
Japanese authorities have beefed up inspections of North Korean ships long suspected of smuggling missile parts and narcotics between the two countries. In the past few days, they have detained one cargo ship and blocked another from docking for safety violations.
In April, Australian authorities raided a North Korean-owned ship and charged its crew with aiding and abetting the trafficking of heroin.
Also yesterday, South Korea's mass-circulation JoongAng Ilbo newspaper, citing unnamed intelligence sources, said Iranian cargo planes traveled to North Korea six times since April, flying through airspace over China and Central Asia and carrying what appeared to be missile parts from Pyongyang.
The news comes seven months after a shipment of North Korean Scud missiles bound for Yemen was briefly stopped in the Arabian Sea as a US warning against North Korea's role in missile proliferation. JoongAng said North Korea now appears to be using aircraft instead of ships to export its missiles, believed to be a key source of hard currency for Pyongyang.
Seoul's Defense Ministry would not confirm the report.
Jeong's remarks echoed those of a senior Japanese official a day earlier. On Sunday, Japanese Deputy Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said that continued pressure could result in a "dramatic turn" in North Korea's policies.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS