South Korea yesterday spurned an attempt by Japan to calm emotions in an escalating territorial dispute over a string of barely habitable islets, as Tokyo warned traveling citizens to avoid protests in South Korea, where an activist set himself on fire over the spat.
South Korea's Coast Guard said it was reinforcing patrols around the islets, called Dokdo in Korea and Takeshima in Japan, doubling the number of ships responsible for monitoring the area to six.
The long-simmering dispute erupted this week when a local Japanese assembly voted to designate a special day to commemorate Tokyo's claim to the islets between the two countries, drawing intense anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea. The move was symbolic, but the central Tokyo government has refused to repudiate the vote.
"What is important is that in the future, the Japanese government show actions, not words," Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon told senior officials from the governing Uri Party on Friday, the party said. His comment was in response to a statement late Thursday by the Japanese foreign minister that Tokyo accepts the pain it has caused in the past and has sympathy with Koreans' feelings.
Meanwhile, South Korea's Masan city council on Friday passed a resolution marking June 19 as "Daemado Day," the Korean name for Japan's Tshushima islands just off the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula.
Some South Korean historians argue those islands -- considerably larger than Dokdo and home to 40,500 people -- were once controlled by Korea.
Tsushima city official Hideo Nejime said even though the islands border South Korea that they have been under Japanese control for centuries.US occupation forces kept them as part of Japan when Korean leaders claimed territorial rights after Japan's World War II defeat, he said.
"We have had close economic ties with South Korea, but throughout history we are part of Japan and there is no question about it," Nejime said.
The row could threaten a boom in Japanese travel to South Korea spawned in part by the massive popularity of a South Korean soap opera. Some 2 million Japanese went to South Korea in the first 10 months of last year, compared to 1.8 million who went in all of 2003. The Japanese Foreign Ministry said yesterday it issued a travel notice urging citizens to stay away from protests in South Korea, which it said were not expected to end soon.
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