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by Jung Ha-won Agence France Presse SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s increasingly influential sister has become one of his closest confidantes in a country where power has always been a family affair. Kim Yo Jong made history Friday as the first member of the North’s ruling dynasty to set foot in the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. The two sides technically remain at war since […]
OTTAWA, Canada (AFP) — A Canadian submarine is patrolling the western Pacific for the first time in nearly 50 years, the navy said Thursday, amid heightened tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Although HMCS Chicoutimi’s mission was scheduled a year ago, it comes after the United States and its allies agreed at crisis talks in Vancouver last month to tougher measures to halt North Korean sanctions violations, including naval security operations to prevent maritime […]
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (AFP) — More than 500 North Koreans are converging on Pyeongchang in South Korea for the 2018 Olympics, in a historic cross-border exchange between two countries still technically at war. AFP looks at what we know so far about the visitors from the isolated, nuclear-armed state. Kim’s sister The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit South Korea for Friday’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics opening ceremony and meet with South […]
by Jung Ha-won Agence France-Presse SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — North Korea staged a military parade in Pyongyang Thursday to mark the 70th anniversary of its armed forces, putting its intercontinental ballistic missiles on a show just a day before the Winter Olympics open in the South. The nuclear-armed North is on an Olympics-linked charm offensive — sending a troupe of performers, hundreds of female cheerleaders, and the sister of leader Kim Jong Un to […]
by Hiroshi Hiyama and Richard Carter © Agence France-Presse TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Washington will soon unveil its “toughest sanctions ever” on North Korea, US Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday, adding that the Pyongyang regime would not be allowed to “hijack” the upcoming Olympics. Speaking in Japan before attending the opening ceremony of the Winter Games in South Korea, Pence pledged that Washington would “intensify its maximum pressure campaign” on the North, working with Tokyo. “I’m […]
by Jennie MATTHEW Agence France-Presse NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — The Winter Olympics are being watched for many things: sporting excellence, of course, but also for headway on the US-North Korea nuclear stand-off and even tentative rapprochements between Seoul and Pyongyang. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is commemorating the Games with an exhibition of Korean art, much of it displayed for the first time in the United States, and which introduces […]
LIMA, Peru (AFP) — Vice President Mike Pence or other US officials might meet with North Koreans at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang next week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Monday. Washington has previously said it won’t seek to initiate contact with North Koreans attending the South Korean games, but it does want talks with Kim Jong-Un in an effort to get him to abandon his nuclear program. Asked during a visit to Peru […]
TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Japan said Monday it had lodged a protest with South Korea over the “unacceptable” use of a unified Korean Olympic flag that features a set of disputed islands. The two Koreas have agreed to march together under the unification flag — a pale blue silhouette of the peninsula — at the Games’ opening ceremony on February 9, and to form a combined women’s ice hockey team. The flag shows a […]
by Jung Ha-Won Agence France Presse SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — North Korea’s ceremonial head of state will visit the South this week in connection with the Winter Olympics, Seoul said late Sunday. Kim Yong-Nam will be the highest-level official from the North for years to travel to the other side of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula. His trip will be the diplomatic high point of the rapprochement between the two Koreas triggered […]
UNITED NATIONS, United States (AFP) – North Korea is flouting UN sanctions by exporting coal, iron, steel and other commodities banned under UN sanctions, earning nearly $200 million in revenue last year, a UN report said Friday. A UN panel of experts also found evidence of North Korea’s ongoing military cooperation with Syria to develop its ballistic missile and chemical weapons programs, and with Myanmar. North Korea “continued to export almost all the commodities prohibited in the […]
by Hwang Sunghee Agence France-Presse SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — North Korean skiers and skaters were due to arrive in the South Thursday to take part in the Pyeongchang Winter Games, setting the stage for a “peace Olympics” after a year of high tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. Eight days before the opening ceremony, 10 North Korean skiers and skaters were to fly in on a chartered Asiana Airlines plane, in a rare direct flight […]
SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — North Korea has denounced US President Donald Trump’s administration as a “gross violator of human rights,” its state media reported Wednesday. The official Korean Central News Agency released its English-language report on Pyongyang’s annual white paper on US human rights violations as Trump began his State of the Union speech, in which he condemned the North. North Korea’s human rights record is heavily criticized by both the United States and […]
