North Korea’s doors are still open to US tourists, Pyongyang said yesterday, despite Washington banning its citizens from traveling there following the death of a US student who had been jailed in the country.
The US prohibition, which comes into effect on Sept. 1, was introduced after officials said the “serious risk” of arrest by Pyongyang authorities during tourist travel presented an “imminent danger to the physical safety” of its nationals.
The move was triggered by the death of 22-year-old Otto Warmbier, who was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in the North for trying to steal a propaganda poster during a tourist visit, but was released in a coma in June and died soon afterward.
A spokesman for the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Americans were still welcome.
“We will always leave our door wide open to any US citizen who would like to visit our country out of good will,” he said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The US Department of State has declared US passports invalid for travel to, in or through North Korea.
No details of how US visitors might travel to the country in the circumstances were provided by the spokesman.
“There isn’t any reason for the foreigners to feel threat to their safety in the DPRK, which has the most stable and strong state system,” he said, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name.
A few Americans have faced “due punishments in accordance with the laws of the DPRK” for committing crimes against the state, he said.
Tour companies say that about 5,000 Western tourists visit the North each year, with US citizens making up about 20 percent of the market.
Warmbier’s death added to already high tensions in the region over North Korea’s weapons ambitions.
In recent weeks Pyongyang has launched two successful tests of an intercontinental ballistic missile that experts say could reach US territory.
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
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
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.