A top North Korean official made an unexpected visit to China yesterday in an apparent attempt by Pyongyang to mend frayed ties with its powerful neighbor, Japanese media reported.
Beijing is North Korea’s largest trading partner and has been its key diplomatic protector for decades, but ties have been strained recently by Pyongyang’s internationally condemned nuclear test program, with Beijing supporting UN sanctions against its isolated neighbor.
North Korean Workers’ Party Vice Chairman Ri Su-yong arrived in Beijing to brief Chinese officials on a once-in-a-generation party congress held earlier this month, Kyodo news reported.
Photo: EPA
The lack of any official Chinese representation at the congress — which cemented North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s grip on power — was viewed as a sign of friction between the two traditional allies.
The visit came even as South Korea yesterday said the North failed in what was believed to be an attempted launch of a powerful new medium-range missile.
Xinhua news agency said Ri — a former North Korean minister of foreign affairs — would visit for three days as part of a delegation.
Ri is the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit China since last year, when Kim’s close aide Choe Ryong-hae attended a military parade in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, Kyodo reported.
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