North Korea has canceled an annual festival of mass games and gymnastic displays because of flood damage and planned joint military exercises by South Korea and the US, a tour operator said yesterday.
"The official reasons named by the NK [North Korean] tourism authorities are the recent torrential rains and the planned joint military drill," Leonid Petrov, executive director of L&J Development and Consultancy, said in a statement.
L&J is one of a handful of foreign companies allowed to take Western tourists into North Korea, which remains largely closed to the outside world.
The next Arirang Mass Games will be held from April 15 to early May and from mid-August to mid-October next year, Petrov said.
North Korean officials said the games early next year were timed to mark the 95th anniversary of the birth of former leader Kim Il-sung and the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People's Army.
The news was confirmed by Yoon Gil-sang, head of the Korean American National Coordinating Council -- widely seen as a propaganda vehicle for the North Korean government -- in a statement on the group's Internet news site.
"North Korea's delegation to the United Nations has informed us that the festival was cancelled due to severe flood damage. It will be resumed next spring," he said.
Dozens of Arirang performances were planned from mid-August to mid-October this year, featuring up to 100,000 North Korean performers.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency also quoted a US-based pro-North Korean group as saying the games were canceled because of storm damage.
Good Friends, an independent South Korean human rights group, said the downpours and flooding caused much more damage than North Korea's state media has claimed, with the center of Pyong-yang partly flooded for the first time in 16 years.
Hundreds of people have been killed or were missing in North Korea after heavy rain caused floods and landslides since mid-July, according to official reports last week.
Tens of thousands of houses and official buildings along with hundreds of roads, bridges and railway tracks were destroyed or damaged, the official North Korean news agency KCNA said.
The neighborhood of Pyong-yang's May Day Stadium, the venue of the gymnastics show, had been severely destroyed by floods, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
During the festival, South Korean and North Korean delegates were to hold a joint pro-unification rally in Pyongyang from Aug. 14.
The two Koreas have sponsored pro-unification rallies marking Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule each year since a landmark inter-Korean summit in 2000.
Joint US-South Korean military exercises, known as Ulji Focus Lens 2006, are planned for Aug. 21 to Sept. 1. North Korea typically condemns the annual military exercises in the South.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS