North Korea said yesterday that leader Kim Jong-il had sent condolences on the death of former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, the latest sign of a possible defrosting of relations between the two rivals.
Kim Dae-jung died on Tuesday at the age of 85. An extraordinary figure in South Korea’s shift to democracy, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for a June 2000 summit with Kim Jong-il and efforts at reconciliation with the North.
“Though he passed away to our regret, the feats he performed to achieve national reconciliation and realize the desire for reunification will remain long with the nation,” North Korea’s KCNA news agency quoted the message as saying.
A close aide to Dae-jung, Park Ji-won, told reporters the North wanted to send a five-strong delegation to the South to pay its respects. He said it might arrive ahead of the funeral, which is expected to be held in about a week in Seoul.
Analysts said Kim Dae-jung’s death could provide an opportunity to improve ties between the Koreas, which have soured since South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took power about 18 months ago and angered the North by cutting off a steady flow of aid it had seen since the 2000 summit.
“There’s no doubt a softer atmosphere has been created but the North Koreans will put on stern faces if anyone tries to engage them in political talk at the funeral because they will say their visit is not related to the North-South political reality,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.
Analysts said the North’s rare acts of conciliation may signal that it has stopped its recent round of provocations that included a May nuclear test as it looks for aid to prop up its economy that has been hit with UN sanctions for its actions.
In related news, New Mexico Governor and former UN envoy Bill Richardson was scheduled to meet two North Korean diplomats yesterday, his office said, amid signs of a thaw in US-North Korean relations following a visit to Pyongyang by former US president Bill Clinton.
Kim Myong-gil, a North Korean delegate to the UN, requested the meeting, which will take place for “most of the day” at the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Richardson spokeswoman Alarie Ray-Garcia said.
The North Korean diplomat was to attend the talks with a deputy.
Ray-Garcia did not rule out that the talks could cover Pyongyang’s nuclear program. But she stressed that “the governor will not be negotiating with them in any way and is not representing the Obama administration.”
The meeting comes after Clinton briefed Obama on Tuesday on his talks with Kim Jong-il earlier this month during a quick visit to Pyongyang to secure the release of two detained US journalists.
Richardson, who traveled twice to North Korea in the 1990s to secure the release of US prisoners, has met with diplomats from North Korea’s UN mission before — in 2004 and 2006 — in Santa Fe, Ray-Garcia said.
Women’s accessories sold by some of the world’s most popular online shopping firms contained toxic substances sometimes hundreds of times above acceptable levels, authorities in Seoul said yesterday. Chinese giants including Shein, Temu and AliExpress have skyrocketed in popularity around the world in the past few years, offering a vast selection of trendy clothes and accessories at low prices. The explosive growth has led to increased scrutiny of their business practices and safety standards, including in the EU and South Korea, where Seoul officials have been conducting weekly inspections of items sold by online platforms. In the most recent inspection, 144 products from
The US on Monday confirmed that it would resume sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, as concerns over human rights in the kingdom’s Yemen war give way to US hopes for it to play a role in resolving the conflict in Gaza. More than three years after imposing limits on human rights grounds over Saudi Arabian strikes in Yemen, the US Department of State said that it would return to weapons sales “in regular order, with appropriate congressional notification and consultation.” “Saudi Arabia has remained a close strategic partner of the United States, and we look forward to enhancing that partnership,”
Turning heads as they cruise past office buildings and malls, driverless taxis are slowly spreading through Chinese cities, prompting both wariness and wonder. China’s tech companies and vehicle manufacturers have poured billions of dollars into self-driving technology over the past few years in an effort to catch industry leaders in the US. Now the central city of Wuhan boasts one of the world’s largest networks of self-driving cars, home to a fleet of more than 500 taxis that can be hailed on an app just like regular rides. At one intersection in an industrial area of Wuhan, AFP reporters saw at least five
STATE OF EMERGENCY: The governor of Belgorod said that the situation in the border region was ‘extremely difficult and tense’ under Ukrainian bombardment Ukraine yesterday pressed its offensive in Russian territory and bombarded the border region of Belgorod, where the governor has declared a state of emergency. Ukrainian forces entered Kursk region on Tuesday last week and have taken dozens of settlements in the biggest attack by a foreign army on Russian soil since World War II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday evening posted footage of a video call with his military chief, Oleksandr Syrsky, who said that “as of today, our troops have advanced in some areas by one to three kilometers.” Over the past day, “control over 40 square kilometers of territory has