North Korea preps nuclear site demolition despite US summit doubts

This May 7, 2018, satellite images provided by DigitalGlobe shows the nuclear test site in Punggye-ri, North Korea. (AP)
Updated 23 May 2018
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North Korea preps nuclear site demolition despite US summit doubts

SEOUL: Invited foreign journalists gathered in North Korea Wednesday to witness the slated destruction of the reclusive regime’s nuclear test site, a high profile gesture on the road to a summit with the US that Donald Trump now says might not happen.
In a surprise announcement Pyongyang said earlier this month that it planned to “completely” destroy the Punggye-ri facility in the country’s northeast, a move welcomed by Washington and Seoul.
Punggye-ri has been the site of all six of the North’s nuclear tests, the latest and by far the most powerful in September last year, which Pyongyang said was an H-bomb.
The demolition is due to take place sometime between Wednesday and Friday, depending on the weather.
The North has portrayed the destruction on the test site as a goodwill gesture ahead of planned June 12 summit between Kim and Trump in Singapore.
But doubts have since been cast by both sides on whether that potentially historic meeting will take place.
Last week Pyongyang threatened to pull out if Washington pressed for its unilateral nuclear disarmament. Trump also said the meeting could be delayed as he met with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in in Washington on Tuesday.
“There are certain conditions we want to happen. I think we’ll get those conditions. And if we don’t, we won’t have the meeting,” he told reporters, without elaborating on what those conditions might be.

Politically, Trump has invested heavily in the success of his meeting with Kim, and so privately most US officials, as well as outside observers, believe it will go ahead.
But as the date draws near, Trump’s divergence from his top aides, the differences between the two sides and the high stakes are coming into sharp relief.
Washington has made it clear it wants to see the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the North.
Pyongyang has vowed it will never give up its nuclear deterrence until it feels safe from what is sees as US aggression.
“Everything is on thin ice,” Koo Kab-woo, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, told AFP.
“Trump wants a swift denuclearization, something that will be done within his first term in office. In that case, he has to provide North Korea with a corresponding, swift security guarantee.”
Observers will be watching the nuclear test site destruction ceremony closely for any clues to the North’s mood.
Experts are divided over whether the demolition will render the site useless. Sceptics say the site has already outlived its usefulness with six successful nuclear tests in the bag and can quickly be rebuilt if needed.
Previous similar gestures by the North have been rapidly reversed when the international mood soured.
But others say the fact that North Korea agreed to destroy the site without preconditions or asking for something in return from Washington is significant.

Go Myong-hyun, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said both sides were playing “a game of chicken” in the run up to the summit “to gain an upper hand in negotiations.”
He said the destruction of the Punggye-ri test site would win Pyongyang international sympathy even if the summit collapses.
“North Korea can say to the international community that it did its best to achieve denuclearization through negotiations but was pressured by the United States and couldn’t do it,” he said.
A handful of foreign journalists, including from South Korea, were invited to attend the demolition ceremony.
Reporters from China, the US and Russia departed on a charter flight from Beijing on Tuesday for the North Korean city of Wonsan.
From there they are expected to travel for some 20 hours up the east coast by train and bus to the remote test site — a vivid illustration of the impoverished country’s notoriously decrepit transport infrastructure.
South Korean journalists were initially left off the flight because they were not granted permission by Pyongyang.
But on Wednesday Seoul’s Unification Ministry said they had been allowed to attend at the last minute.
The ministry said it planned to arrange a rare direct flight on Wednesday between the two countries, who remain technically at war, to ferry the journalists to Wonsan.
Agence France-Presse is one of a number of major media organizations not invited to cover the demolition.


North Korean foreign minister arrives in Moscow for talks

Updated 9 sec ago
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North Korean foreign minister arrives in Moscow for talks

  • The visit comes after Pyongyang tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile this week
  • Washington says there are 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia
MOSCOW: North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui has arrived in Moscow and will hold strategic consultations with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the ministry, in a post on her official Telegram channel, published photographs of Lavrov meeting Choe at a Moscow train station.
“Today, talks between the heads of Russia and the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) will be held in Moscow. Sergei Lavrov greeted his counterpart with a bouquet of flowers,” said Zakharova.
“The meeting began at the Yaroslavsky railway station (in Moscow), where a memorial plaque was unveiled to mark the occasion of Kim Il Sung’s 1949 visit to the USSR,” she said, referring to the founder of the DPRK.
The visit, Choe’s second in six weeks, comes after Pyongyang tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile this week and as Washington says there are 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia, including as many as 8,000 deployed in Russia’s Kursk region where Ukrainian troops have dug in.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that the United States expected the North Korean troops in Kursk region to enter the fight against Ukraine in the coming days.
Moscow has neither denied nor directly confirmed the presence of North Korean troops on its soil. President Vladimir Putin has said it is for Russia to decide how to implement a treaty he signed with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June that includes a mutual defense clause.

Shootout in western France wounds five: minister

Updated 36 min 14 sec ago
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Shootout in western France wounds five: minister

  • 15-year-old boy is between life and death after the gunbattle erupted in front of a restaurant overnight
Paris: A drug trafficking-related shooting has left a teenager and four others seriously wounded in the western French city of Poitiers, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said Friday.
The 15-year-old boy is between life and death after the gunbattle erupted in front of a restaurant overnight, Retailleau told BFMTV/RMC radio.

Drone crashes on oil depot in Russia’s Stavropol region

Updated 01 November 2024
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Drone crashes on oil depot in Russia’s Stavropol region

  • There were no casualties in the incident at the Svetlograd oil depot, Vladimirov said on Telegram

MOSCOW: A drone fell on an oil depot in Russia’s southern Stavropol region, local governor Vladimir Vladimirov said on Friday.
It was the second suspected Ukrainian attack in consecutive days on Russian fuel and energy targets, following a lull of about seven weeks since a fuel facility in Tula was attacked on Sept. 10.
There were no casualties in the incident at the Svetlograd oil depot, Vladimirov said on Telegram.
Baza Telegram channel, which is close to Russia’s security services, posted a CCTV video purportedly showing the attack on the oil depot. The video showed that at least one of several fuel tanks was swiftly engulfed by a fireball.
On Thursday, several fuel and energy facilities were targeted in a Ukrainian drone attack on the central Russian region of Bashkortostan, home to Bashneft, a major oil company controlled by Russia’s leading oil producer, Rosneft .
Bashneft operates several refineries in the region, playing a significant role in Russia’s energy infrastructure.
The attacks come days after the Financial Times reported early-stage talks between Ukraine and Russia about potentially halting airstrikes on each other’s energy facilities. The Kremlin dismissed the report.
Russia has called such attacks terrorism, while Ukraine, which stepped up the drone strikes on Russian energy facilities since the start of the year, has said it is striking back in retaliation for attacks on its energy infrastructure.
Andrei Kartapolov, chairman of Russia’s lower house of parliament’s defense committee, said in comments to Life media channel earlier this week, that there were no talks on halting the attacks.
“We are not going to spare anyone,” he said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in September that Russia had knocked out the gigawatt equivalent of over half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The European Union aims to restore 2.5 GW of capacity, about 15 percent of the country’s needs, she said, referring to proposed EU-funded repairs.


Eight dead as huge fire engulfs cooking oil factory near Jakarta

Updated 01 November 2024
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Eight dead as huge fire engulfs cooking oil factory near Jakarta

  • The factory is operated by PT Primus Sanus Cooking Oil Industrial (Priscolin)

JAKARTA: Eight people died in a large fire at a cooking oil factory near the Indonesian capital Jakarta, local fire authorities said on Friday.
Around 20 firefighting trucks are at the site and have contained the blaze in most areas of the factory, authorities said.
Footage from Metro TV showed flames and billowing black smoke coming out of a building in the center of an industrial complex in Bekasi, a city on Jakarta’s eastern edge. The report said roads had been closed around the factory.
All of the bodies had been evacuated from the site, Suhartono, head of Bekasi’s fire department SAID, adding that three other people were injured.
But the number of casualties could still rise, he said.
Local authorities are investigating the cause of the fire.
The factory is operated by PT Primus Sanus Cooking Oil Industrial (Priscolin), said Suhartono.


Schoolgirls, policeman among five killed in roadside blast in Pakistan’s Balochistan

Updated 01 November 2024
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Schoolgirls, policeman among five killed in roadside blast in Pakistan’s Balochistan

QUETTA: At least five people, including three schoolgirls and a policeman, were killed in a roadside blast in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province on Friday morning, police said, in the latest incident of violence to hit the restive region.
The blast appeared to target a police van passing by a girls school in the Mastung district of the province, according to police and local administration officials.
Fateh Baloch, in-charge of the Mastung police station, said the police mobile van came under attack when it was on a routine patrol on Friday morning.
“Five people, including a police constable and three minor schoolgirls, were killed and 13 others injured in the blast,” Baloch told Arab News.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast.
“We have cordoned-off the area and are shifting the injured to the hospital,” Baz Muhammad Marri, the Mastung deputy commissioner, told Arab News.
Balochistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan and is home to major China-led projects such as a strategic port and a gold and copper mine, has been the site of a decades-long separatist insurgency by ethnic Baloch militants. The province has lately seen an increase in attacks by separatist militants.
On Tuesday, five people were killed in an attack by armed men on the construction site of a small dam in Balochistan’s Panjgur district. The outlawed Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), the most prominent of several separatist groups, claimed responsibility for the attack along with killing of two other persons in Kech and Quetta districts.
This month, 21 miners working at privately run coal mines were killed in an attack by unidentified gunmen.
The separatists accuse the central government of exploiting Balochistan’s mineral and gas resources. The Pakistani state denies the allegation and says it is working to uplift the region through development initiatives.
Besides Baloch separatists, the restive region also has a presence of religiously motivated militant groups, who frequently target police and security forces.
Islamabad says militants mainly associated with the Pakistani Taliban frequently launch attacks from Afghanistan and has even blamed Kabul’s Afghan Taliban rulers for facilitating anti-Pakistan groups. Kabul denies the allegation.

- This article originally appeared on Arab News Pakistan