It is in Beijing’s interest to have a stable relationship with North Korea, a state-controlled newspaper said yesterday during a reported visit to China by the impoverished state’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, and his son.
A source with knowledge of the secretive trip told reporters at the weekend that the two Kims were on a trip to China, but there has been no official confirmation from either government.
“Maintaining and stabilizing the current relationship between China and North Korea is of maximum benefit to China,” the popular Chinese-language tabloid Global Times said in an editorial.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
China is the only major supporter for North Korea, which is largely isolated from the international community over its nuclear weapons program and which has come under further condemnation after South Korea accused it of sinking one of its warships earlier this year.
Kim Jong-il, 68, who rarely travels abroad, is reportedly in China for the second time this year. This time he is thought to have brought along his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, widely seen as the next head of the family dynasty that has led North Korea since its founding more than 60 years ago.
Yesterday, police lined the streets in Tumen, a city on China’s border with North Korea, a sign that Kim Jong-il may visit there, but there have been no definite sightings of him.
Kim may be lining up China behind succession plans involving his son, foreign analysts have said.
The Workers’ Party (WPK), which rubber-stamps big decisions in the North, is due to hold a rare meeting next month that could set in motion succession steps.
The Chinese newspaper blamed outside forces for pressuring North Korea as a way to create trouble for China, the sole major economic and diplomatic supporter of its much weaker neighbor.
The sinking of the South Korean navy ship, in which 46 sailors died, deepened tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul and strained Chinese ties with South Korea.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS