South Korea yesterday began two days of war games to practice defending the disputed Dokdo Islands off its east coast — against an unlikely attack by Japan.
The drills come just days after US President Donald Trump announced the suspension of long-running US joint exercises with South Korea.
The two-day exercise — tiny compared with the suspended US-South Korea war games — would involve six warships and seven aircraft and had begun, the South Korean Ministry of Defense said.
A unit of marines would land on the largely barren rocky islets, inhabited by about 40 people, mostly police officers, which are known as Takeshima in Japan, which also claims them.
“The Dokdo defense drill is a routine training conducted to prevent an invasion from external forces,” ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo said.
Tokyo reacted angrily to the “extremely deplorable” drills.
While an attack from Japan is deemed highly unlikely, South Korea first staged the drills in 1986 and has conducted them twice a year since 2003.
In other developments, Seoul on Monday said sanctions against North Korea could be eased once it takes “substantive steps towards denuclearization,” seemingly setting the bar lower than Washington for such a move.
Last week’s Singapore summit produced only a vague statement in which North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
“Our stance is that the sanctions must remain in place until North Korea takes meaningful, substantive steps toward denuclearization,” South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said.
Seoul and Washington shared the same “big picture” view and would continue close consultations, she added.
The comments come just days after the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the UN Security Council should consider easing the economic punishment of Pyongyang.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
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