The UN Security Council neared agreement on Wednesday on North Korean firms and individuals to be added to a blacklist for involvement in Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, diplomats said.
Japanese Ambassador Yukio Takasu told reporters “we are very close” to agreement on the expanded sanctions list. Diplomats said a council committee was on target to meet a weekend deadline for completing its task and could do so as early as yesterday.
As diplomats put the finishing touches on expanding UN sanctions, US officials said they had succeeded in increasing international awareness of methods North Korea uses to disguise its trade in illicit weapons as legal business transactions.
“North Korea engages in a variety of deceptive financial practices that are intended to obscure the true nature of their transactions,” said a senior official from the administration of US President Barack Obama.
A US team is traveling to key world capitals to warn governments and banks that North Korean practices make it “virtually impossible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate business,” the official said in Washington.
Firms and governments in China, Hong Kong and other places North Korea does business were taking seriously the US warnings about Pyongyang’s practice of using front companies and unusually large cash transactions, he said.
The official said the goal was to bring scrutiny and thwart suspicious activities, not to hit all North Korean trade. Humanitarian aid would not be affected.
Arms sales are a vital source of foreign currency for destitute North Korea, with a yearly GDP of about US$17 billion and a broken economy that produces few other items it can export.
The US-based Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis estimates North Korea earns some US$1.5 billion a year from missile sales. Other studies said the figure may be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and prior sanctions have cut into exports.
Analysts said the new UN measures would make it more costly for the North to trade arms but would not likely deter customers, including Iran, who have shown little interest in joining international plans to punish Pyongyang.
North Korea’s annual legitimate trade is estimated at about US$3.8 billion, with China being its largest partner with exchanges of about US$2.8 billion a year. Previous UN sanctions have not dented trade.
Beijing has been reluctant to cut trade, a lifeline to its impoverished neighbor, fearing it could cause a collapse of the North’s government and lead to chaos on its border.
“Countries that actually do business with North Korea may find loopholes in the interpretation as to what is legitimate or not,” said Shin Sang-jin, a professor at South Korea’s Kwangoon University who specializes in North Korean-China relations.
The UN Security Council passed a resolution on June 12 that expanded UN sanctions against North Korea in response to a nuclear test it carried out on May 25, and asked the committee to add more names to the sanctions list.
The committee in April placed two North Korean firms and a bank on the list in its first action in two years. That move followed a long-range rocket launch earlier in the month by Pyongyang.
This week’s blacklisting is expected to go further by specifying individuals and goods to be subject to sanctions, as well as additional companies. The measure would prohibit companies and nations from doing business with the named firms and require them to freeze assets and impose travel bans on the individuals.
The steps described by the US official were in addition to the UN measures and targeted counterfeiting, narcotics trafficking and other North Korean activities in addition to illicit weapons proliferation, officials said.
“There’s a broad consensus, including by China, that this is the right way to go and I don’t think the Chinese would take this stuff lightly,” a second US official said.
The official said there was a growing consensus that tightening sanctions on North Korean entities is “the best chance we have to influence their calculations.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.