China and Germany said yesterday they were in agreement that the international force in Sudan had to be expanded in order to resolve the conflict in the African country peacefully.
German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung informed reporters of the joint position following talks in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart Liang Guanglie (梁光烈).
Washington has been pressing Beijing to use its ties with the regime in Khartoum to help end the refugee crisis in the war-torn western region of Darfur.
China responded to the pressure yesterday by saying its influence in Sudan was being overestimated.
Meanwhile, Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Koumura was in China yesterday to discuss plans to jointly develop East China Sea gas fields amid rapidly warming relations between the two Asian economic giants, an official said.
Koumura and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) also planned to discuss issues relating to North Korea, including Pyongyang’s pledge to reinvestigate the abduction of Japanese nationals as part of its spy program, Japanese foreign ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama told reporters.
“We would appreciate any efforts on the part of the Chinese government to put pressure on the DPRK [North Korea] to come forward on this issue,” he said.
Japan has long had tense relations with North Korea due to the regime’s abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies in Japanese language and culture.
Tokyo has made it clear to China and its partners in the six-party nuclear North Korea talks that it would withhold energy aid for Pyongyang until the kidnapping issue was addressed, Kodama said.
North Korea admitted in 2002 to kidnapping 13 Japanese. It returned five victims and their families, while saying the eight others were dead.
But Japan says that North Korea is hiding survivors and has abducted more people than it acknowledges.
Koumura would also attend a Japan Olympic Committee reception in Beijing, Japan’s foreign ministry said.
In other news from Beijing, Chinese police have detained at least 17 foreigners in a crackdown on illegal ticket sales outside Olympic venues, state media said yesterday.
The foreign nationals of unidentified countries were among 110 people arrested in a sweep of ticket touts near the Olympic Green and the Wukesong basketball stadium on Friday, the semi-official China News Service quoted officials as saying.
An earlier report by Xinhua news agency quoted Beijing police spokesman Shi Weiping as saying a Dutch citizen was caught trying to sell 24 tickets for more than 10 times their face value near the Water Cube aquatics’ center on Friday.
A Chinese woman was also arrested for offering two gymnastics tickets with a face value of 150 yuan for 1,000 yuan each, Shi said.
Police official Wang Wenjie told the China Daily newspaper that about 340 tickets were confiscated in Friday’s operation.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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