North Korea has canceled an annual festival of mass games and gymnastic displays because of flood damage and planned joint military exercises by South Korea and the US, a tour operator said yesterday.
"The official reasons named by the NK [North Korean] tourism authorities are the recent torrential rains and the planned joint military drill," Leonid Petrov, executive director of L&J Development and Consultancy, said in a statement.
L&J is one of a handful of foreign companies allowed to take Western tourists into North Korea, which remains largely closed to the outside world.
The next Arirang Mass Games will be held from April 15 to early May and from mid-August to mid-October next year, Petrov said.
North Korean officials said the games early next year were timed to mark the 95th anniversary of the birth of former leader Kim Il-sung and the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People's Army.
The news was confirmed by Yoon Gil-sang, head of the Korean American National Coordinating Council -- widely seen as a propaganda vehicle for the North Korean government -- in a statement on the group's Internet news site.
"North Korea's delegation to the United Nations has informed us that the festival was cancelled due to severe flood damage. It will be resumed next spring," he said.
Dozens of Arirang performances were planned from mid-August to mid-October this year, featuring up to 100,000 North Korean performers.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency also quoted a US-based pro-North Korean group as saying the games were canceled because of storm damage.
Good Friends, an independent South Korean human rights group, said the downpours and flooding caused much more damage than North Korea's state media has claimed, with the center of Pyong-yang partly flooded for the first time in 16 years.
Hundreds of people have been killed or were missing in North Korea after heavy rain caused floods and landslides since mid-July, according to official reports last week.
Tens of thousands of houses and official buildings along with hundreds of roads, bridges and railway tracks were destroyed or damaged, the official North Korean news agency KCNA said.
The neighborhood of Pyong-yang's May Day Stadium, the venue of the gymnastics show, had been severely destroyed by floods, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
During the festival, South Korean and North Korean delegates were to hold a joint pro-unification rally in Pyongyang from Aug. 14.
The two Koreas have sponsored pro-unification rallies marking Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule each year since a landmark inter-Korean summit in 2000.
Joint US-South Korean military exercises, known as Ulji Focus Lens 2006, are planned for Aug. 21 to Sept. 1. North Korea typically condemns the annual military exercises in the South.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
TRUDEAU IN TROUBLE: US president-elect Donald Trump reacted to Chrystia Freeland’s departure, saying: ‘Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday quit in a surprise move after disagreeing with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over US president-elect Donald Trump’s tariff threats. The resignation of Freeland, 56, who also stepped down as finance minister, marked the first open dissent against Trudeau from within his Cabinet, and could threaten his hold on power. Liberal leader Trudeau lags 20 points in polls behind his main rival, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, who has tried three times since September to topple the government and force a snap election. “It’s not been an easy day,” Trudeau said at a fundraiser Monday evening, but
RSS