North Korea informed South Korea yesterday that it will delay high-level talks between the two Koreas scheduled this month because of an upcoming South Korea-US joint military exercise, the North's official news agency said.
"Our position is that hostile war exercise cannot go side by side with peaceful dialogue," the North's Cabinet counselor, Kwon Ho-ung, said in a telephone message to his South Korean counterpart carried by the Korean Central News Agency.
Kwon, who served as the North's chief negotiator in inter-Korean Cabinet-level talks, said the military exercise cannot be justified and Seoul's "wrong behavior" made it impossible to hold the 18th round of the talks this month in Pyongyang as scheduled.
"Your side should be held responsible for causing delay in the first North-South high-level talks this year," Kwon said.
South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, was not immediately available for comment.
North Korea routinely condemns the annual joint military exercises as preparations for an invasion.
The exercises, dubbed RSOI and Foal Eagle, will involve 20,000 US troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean soldiers and will run for a week starting March 25, according to the US military command in Seoul.
About 29,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically at war.
The Cabinet-level talks are the highest-level regular dialogue channel between the two Koreas since a landmark inter-Korean summit in 2000, which touched off a set of exchanges and cross-border projects.
Meanwhile, North Korea vowed to step up its peaceful nuclear activities and urged the US to change its biased nuclear policy toward the communist country, the North's news agency said yesterday.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS