Stalinist North Korea staged its first general election in more than five years yesterday to fill seats in the rubber-stamp legislature, the Supreme People's Assembly.
North Korean television showed footage of voters -- many with rows of shiny medals -- leaving ballot stations and people dancing in circles in town squares.
Citizens were "participating in the election ... to devote themselves to the sacred struggle to consolidate the people's power as firm as a rock and demonstrate the dignity and might of the DPRK through the current election," the official Korean Central News Agency said.
It said that 85.68 percent of registered voters had cast their ballots by midday.
Also yesterday, North Korea said it was still ready for six-way talks to resolve a crisis over its nuclear ambitions, but it would have no dialogue with a US arms control envoy after his sharp criticism of the country and its leader.
On Thursday Undersecretary of State John Bolton referred to life in North Korea as a "hellish nightmare," saying leader Kim Jong-il lived like royalty while keeping hundreds of thousands of his people in prison camps and millions more in poverty.
North Korea and the US said on Friday they had agreed to hold six-way talks on the nuclear standoff. China, Japan, Russia and South Korea will also attend.
The prospect of fresh talks follow months of tension after Washington's announcement last October that Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS