North Korea may have hit a snag in its move to annoint leader Kim Jong-il’s youngest son as successor, being forced to delay a key party conference, a government source in Seoul was quoted as saying yesterday.
The totalitarian state has apparently put off its biggest political gathering for 30 years due to take place sometime in the first half of this month to elect the “highest leading body” of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
“There is a possibility that the issues of publicly anointing Kim Jong-un as the heir and appointing his patrons to key positions might have not yet been sorted out,” the source was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.
The source also said the South Korean government had detected signs that some party delegates who had gathered in Pyongyang for the party meeting were packing up and returning home. He noted that former US president Jimmy Carter had said that Kim Jong-il had denied in talks with China that he would name his youngest son as his heir, as believed by many analysts.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said that during a recent meeting, Kim Jong-il had dismissed the prospective promotion of the son as “a false rumor from the West,” Carter said.
“This denial might be because the North has not yet reached a consensus over the expected make-up of the new leadership and the son’s official debut,” the source in Seoul said.
The party conference will be closely watched for leadership and policy changes and above all for signs that Kim Jong-il, 68, is preparing the ground for a power transfer to Kim Jong-un, who is in his late 20s.
South Korean Minister of Unification Hyun In-taek said on Wednesday the delay may be due to floods or various other reasons.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS