Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi applauded Pakistan's efforts in the war against terrorism, but expressed concern to the Islamic nation's leader over nuclear proliferation, officials said.
Koizumi, who held private talks with Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf, also said Japan would resume loans to the South Asian country which were suspended after Islamabad's 1998 nuclear tests. The two governments also issued their first-ever joint declaration on bilateral cooperation after 53 years of diplomatic ties, pledging to deepen and widen relations.
Yesterday, Koizumi left Pakistan for Luxembourg for talks with EU officials. Koizumi, the first Japanese prime minister to visit Luxembourg, was expected assert that the proposed lifting of the EU arms embargo on China would affect the security balance in East Asia.
Before leaving Pakistan yesterday, Koizumi praised the country's efforts in the war on terror. But he also "expressed concern over the spillover of nuclear technology."
It was unclear if Musharraf offered Koizumi new information gleaned from the disgraced father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has confessed to supplying sensitive technology to countries including North Korea.
Koizumi said that he had told Musharraf that "Japan has been striving for elimination of nuclear weapons and for nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.
Japan -- the only country which has suffered nuclear attacks -- is a neighbor of North Korea and has been involved in six-nation talks, aimed at getting Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
The joint statement between the two nations said Japan would extend new loans to Pakistan worth ?16,400 million (US$156.5 million), mostly for fixing a canal system in eastern Punjab Province.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS