There is nothing wrong with the health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a senior North Korean official said during an extremely rare visit to South Korea, after rumors of a debilitating illness or even a coup in Pyongyang.
South Korean Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae, speaking on a TV talk show yesterday, quoted Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee Secretary Kim Yang-gon as saying: “There is nothing wrong with the health of Secretary Kim.”
Kim Yang-gon, who also heads a ruling party department in charge of South Korea-related affairs, visited the South’s western port of Incheon on Saturday to attend the closing ceremony of the Asian Games, along with two other high-ranking officials.
The delegation, led by Pyongyang’s second-most powerful man, North Korean National Defense Commission Vice Chairman Hwang Pyong-so, flew back to Pyongyang late on Saturday after a series of meetings with Ryoo and other South Korean officials.
The minister said Hwang had asked him to deliver a “heartfelt greeting” from Kim Jong-un to South Korean President Park Geun-hye, but there was no specific message from the leader.
The North’s leader has not been seen in public for a month, fueling rumors about his health and even triggering reports of a coup.
A rare admission from North Korea more than a week ago that Kim Jong-un was suffering “discomfort” triggered frenzied speculation and close scrutiny of any mention of the leader in state media.
Recent state TV footage of Kim had shown him looking overweight and walking with a pronounced limp, which some analysts took to be a symptom of chronic gout.
The rumors multiplied after he failed to attend a meeting of North Korea’s parliament last week.
Kim, believed to be 30 or 31, took over the reins of power in North Korea following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema