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.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
MISSING: Prosecutors urged the company to move workers out of poor living conditions to hotels, but residents said many workers had already left the town Brazil has stopped issuing temporary work visas for BYD, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday, in the wake of accusations that some workers at a site owned by the Chinese electric vehicle producer had been victims of human trafficking. The announcement came days after labor authorities said they found 163 Chinese workers who had been brought to Brazil irregularly in “slavery-like” conditions at the BYD factory construction site in the northeastern state of Bahia. The workers were employed by contractor Jinjiang Group, which has denied any wrongdoing. Later, the authorities also said the workers were victims of human trafficking,
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