North Korea yesterday warned of unpredictable disaster unless the South and the US stop allowing tours inside a heavily armed border buffer that is one of the most visited spots on the peninsula.
“If the US and the South Korean authorities persist in their wrong acts to misuse the DMZ [demilitarized zone] for the inter-Korean confrontation despite our warnings, these will entail unpredictable incidents including the loss of human lives,” the North’s KCNA news agency quoted a military spokesman as saying.
The BMZ is the 4km wide buffer running along the border drawn up under a truce that ended the Korean War.
An unidentified spokesman of the North’s Korean People’s Army said South Korea was engaged in “deliberate acts to turn the DMZ into theatre of confrontation with the [North] and a site of psychological warfare” by allowing tours inside the border zone.
The warning called on the South to halt tours for journalists to areas of the buffer zone that stretches across the peninsula.
Nearly half a million people a year visit the Panmunjom truce village inside the zone as well as other sites showing aspects of the Cold War’s last frontier an official in the city of Paju that borders the North said.
The city and the United Service Organizations, affiliated with the US military in the South, said they had no plans yet to cancel tours.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS