North Korea informed South Korea yesterday that it will delay high-level talks between the two Koreas scheduled this month because of an upcoming South Korea-US joint military exercise, the North's official news agency said.
"Our position is that hostile war exercise cannot go side by side with peaceful dialogue," the North's Cabinet counselor, Kwon Ho-ung, said in a telephone message to his South Korean counterpart carried by the Korean Central News Agency.
Kwon, who served as the North's chief negotiator in inter-Korean Cabinet-level talks, said the military exercise cannot be justified and Seoul's "wrong behavior" made it impossible to hold the 18th round of the talks this month in Pyongyang as scheduled.
"Your side should be held responsible for causing delay in the first North-South high-level talks this year," Kwon said.
South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, was not immediately available for comment.
North Korea routinely condemns the annual joint military exercises as preparations for an invasion.
The exercises, dubbed RSOI and Foal Eagle, will involve 20,000 US troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean soldiers and will run for a week starting March 25, according to the US military command in Seoul.
About 29,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically at war.
The Cabinet-level talks are the highest-level regular dialogue channel between the two Koreas since a landmark inter-Korean summit in 2000, which touched off a set of exchanges and cross-border projects.
Meanwhile, North Korea vowed to step up its peaceful nuclear activities and urged the US to change its biased nuclear policy toward the communist country, the North's news agency said yesterday.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the