US, Japanese and South Korean officials on Thursday discussed their joint commitment to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and other regional security topics at a trilateral meeting in Hawaii, a White House statement said.
Moreover, there would be no soft response from the three countries if North Korea were to hold a nuclear weapons test, Yonhap news agency yesterday cited South Korean National Security Office Director Kim Sung-han as telling his US and Japanese counterparts.
The comment came amid signs the North has completed preparations to conduct its first nuclear test since 2017.
Photo: REUTERS
“If North Korea conducts its seventh nuclear test, the response will be clearly different from the past,” Kim told Yonhap reporters on Thursday.
“We have agreed there should never be such a complacent thinking or response that North Korea has conducted just another nuclear test in addition to the six tests it did,” Kim said.
North Korea has conducted missile tests at an unprecedented pace this year.
In the middle of last month, it fired two cruise missiles from the west coast after South Korea and the US resumed their largest field exercises in years.
Pyongyang has long denounced them as a rehearsal for war.
During Thursday’s talks, the three officials also agreed to cooperate on global supply chain issues, while Kim separately raised concerns over new US rules on subsidies for electric vehicles, South Korea’s presidential office said.
Kim said after a bilateral meeting with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan the previous day that Washington has promised to review the impact of the new rules after Seoul raised concern they could hurt South Korean automakers.
Separately yesterday, Pyongyang accused the newly appointed UN special rapporteur on North Korean human rights of being a “puppet of the US” and making “unpardonable reckless remarks” against the regime.
The accusations came as the new rapporteur, Elizabeth Salmon, visited Seoul on her first trip since being appointed to the role last month.
Salmon, a Peruvian professor of international law, has had a series of meetings with South Korean officials and civic group members to discuss the situation in the North since arriving earlier this week.
“We had already made clear our principled stand that we neither recognize nor deal with any ‘special rapporteur’ who is merely a puppet of the US,” said an unnamed spokesman for the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an English-language statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The spokesman said the rapporteur’s activities were cover for a US smear campaign against the North, accusing Salmon of daring to make “unpardonable reckless remarks encroaching upon our inviolable system and sovereign rights.”
“The UN should no longer allow its name and mission to be misused for the US hostile policy” toward North Korea, he said.
The UN established the position in 2004 as international concerns grew over allegations of human rights abuses in the North.
None of the special envoys have been granted access to the country for a fact-finding mission.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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