US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Japanese counterpart condemned North Korea yesterday, a day after a multinational panel blamed it for a deadly torpedo attack on a South Korean warship.
In their joint stance against the nuclear-armed communist regime, both sides stressed the importance of their half-century alliance, which has been badly strained in recent months by a dispute over an unpopular US military base.
Clinton, kicking off a week-long Asia tour, called the partnership the “cornerstone” of regional stability, as she sent a stern message to Pyongyang on the issue expected to dominate her talks later in Beijing and Seoul.
“We agreed that North Korea must stop its provocative behavior, halt its policy of threats and belligerence toward its neighbors, and take irreversible steps to fulfill its denuclearization commitments and comply with international law,” she said after meeting Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada.
“We cannot allow this attack to go unanswered by the international community,” she said, adding that on the Beijing leg of her trip from Monday she looked forward to “intensive consultations in China.”
Clinton, who was in Japan for less than four hours before leaving for Shanghai, did not specify what steps Washington would seek.
“It’s premature for me to announce options or actions without that level of consultation with regional nations that are most directly affected by North Korea’s behavior,” she said.
The rise in tensions in Northeast Asia comes at a time when Japan and the US have squabbled over the fate of a US base on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa, where residents oppose a US troop presence.
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama proposed moving the base off the island to appease local sentiment, straining ties with the administration of US President Barack Obama.
However, as the search for an alternative site in Japan has proved fruitless, Hatoyama has caved in to Washington’s demand to honor a 2006 pact struck by previous conservative governments and relocate the base on Okinawa.
Hatoyama is expected to announce next Friday that he will largely honor the base pact, news reports published on the eve of Clinton’s visit said.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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