Foreign ministers from South Korea, China and Japan were to hold talks yesterday, a Japanese diplomat said, reportedly to discuss North Korea’s nuclear drive and the recent sinking of a South Korean warship.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan was to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) and Japanese counterpart Katsuya Okada late yesterday in Gyeongju, South Korea, the diplomat said.
The three-way talks, a fourth in their series, come amid heightened tension over the sinking of a South Korean warship near the disputed border with North Korea in the Yellow Sea. The investigation into the sinking, which killed 46 South Korean sailors, is scheduled to report this week.
Seoul has vowed to respond resolutely if the North, which has denied responsibility, is proved to have sunk the Cheonan.
“The Cheonan incident will naturally be addressed [by the foreign ministers] when they discuss regional security conditions,” an unidentified South Korean foreign ministry official was quoted as saying on Friday by Yonhap news agency.
The South Korean foreign minister was also scheduled to hold one-on-one talks with Yang yesterday and Okada today. Yang and Okada were to meet yesterday for their own bilateral talks.
Seoul says the resumption of six-party talks on disarming North Korea should wait until South Korea wraps up the probe into the sinking and decide on how to respond.
Officials have said Seoul would try to report Pyongyang to the UN Security Council for possible further sanctions.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
RSS