WASHINGTON: A senior North Korean official was bound for New York for high-level talks with US officials on Tuesday as preparations for a historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un gathered pace.
General Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of the Workers’ Party and right hand man to Kim, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York “later this week,” the White House said.
Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a “great team” for the talks on resolving the old foes’ nuclear stand-off, which he still hopes will take place on June 12 in Singapore.
“Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!” Trump wrote.
Trump will also meet Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
“Since the President’s May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging,” she said.
“The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump’s expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore.”
A spokesman for the North Korean mission to the United Nations said he was unable to confirm that the general was on his way to New York but added that “preparation for the summit is proceeding at the highest level.”
The North Korean envoy landed at Beijing airport on Tuesday and was to meet with Chinese officials before traveling on to the United States on Wednesday, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit.
Trump briefly canceled the talks last week, citing “open hostility” from the North, but since then both sides have dialed down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track.
On Sunday, US negotiators, headed by Washington’s ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas.
“They plan to have additional meetings this week,” Sanders said.
“Separately, Joe Hagin, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and the US pre-advance team are in Singapore coordinating the logistics of the expected summit.”
Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim Yong Chol would be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then president Bill Clinton in 2000.
The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula.
He sat next to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February’s closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis.
He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he traveled to Pyongyang.
General Kim is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is blamed for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the navy corvette the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility.
From 2009 to 2016 he was also director of North Korea’s General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering.
During that period North Korea ramped up its hacking programs, including a hugely costly penetration of Sony Pictures.
His journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials.
Top North Korean general on way to US to meet Pompeo ahead of summit
Top North Korean general on way to US to meet Pompeo ahead of summit
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.
Australian judge rules senator broke race law by telling rival legislator to return to Pakistan
- Sen. Mehreen Faruqi, a 61-year-old engineer, moved to Australia with her husband in 1992 as skilled economic migrants
- Justice Angus Stewart found that Sen. Pauline Hanson had engaged in ‘seriously offensive’ and intimidating behavior
MELBOURNE: An Australian judge ruled on Friday that anti-immigration party leader Sen. Pauline Hanson breached racial discrimination laws by crudely telling Pakistan-born Sen. Mehreen Faruqi to return to her homeland.
Faruqi sued Hanson in the Federal Court over a 2022 exchange on the social media platform X, then called Twitter, under a provision of the Racial Discrimination Act that bans public actions and statements that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, color or national or ethnic origin.
Following the news that Queen Elizabeth II had died, Faruqi, deputy leader of the Australian Greens party, posted: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized peoples.”
The 70-year-old leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party replied that Faruqi had immigrated to take “advantage” of Australia, and told the Lahore-born Muslim to return to Pakistan, using an expletive.
Hanson has been known for her views on race since her first speech to Parliament in 1996 in which she warned Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” because of the nation’s non-discriminatory immigration policy. She once wore a burqa in the Senate as part of a campaign to have Islamic face coverings banned.
Faruqi, a 61-year-old qualified engineer, moved to Australia with her husband in 1992 as skilled economic migrants.
Justice Angus Stewart found that Hanson had engaged in “seriously offensive” and intimidating behavior.
The post was racist, nativist and anti-Muslim, Stewart said.
“It is a strong form of racism,” he said.
Stewart ordered Hanson to delete the offensive post and to pay Faruqi’s legal costs. Stewart expected those costs would “amount to a fairly substantial sum.”
Faruqi welcomed the ruling as a vindication for “every single person who has been told to go back to where they came from. And believe me, there are too many of us who have been subjected to this ultimate racist slur, far too many times in this country. Today’s ruling tells us that telling someone to go back to where they came from is a strong form of racism,” Faruqi told reporters.
“Today is a good day for people of color, for Muslims and all of us who have been working so hard to build an anti-racist society,” she said.
Hanson said she was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling and would appeal.
The verdict demonstrated an “inappropriately broad application”of the section of the Racial Discrimination Act that she had breached, particularly in how that section impinged upon freedom of political expression, Hanson said in a statement.
Hanson’s lawyers argued that that her post was exempt from the law because of constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.
Hanson said she considered the queen’s death a matter of public interest and that Faruqi’s views on the death were also a matter of public interest.
Stewart found that Hanson’s tweet did not respond to any point made in Faruqi’s tweet.
“Sen. Hanson’s tweet was merely an angry ad hominem attack devoid of discernible content (or comment) in response to what Sen. Faruqi had said,” Stewart wrote in his decision.
Stewart described Hanson’s testimony as “generally unreliable,” rejecting her claim that she did not know Faruqi’s religion when she posted.
Hanson told the court she had called for a ban on Muslim immigration in the past, but she described that as her personal opinion rather than her minor party’s policy.
She conceded she had once said in a media interview she would not sell her house to a Muslim, but would not say whether she had meant what she had said.
Australia is an increasingly multicultural society. Australians born overseas or have at least one overseas-born parent became a majority in the latest census in 2021.
Russia hands former US consulate employee nearly 5-year jail term
- Robert Shonov worked for more than 25 years for the US consulate until 2021, when Moscow imposed restrictions on local staff working for foreign missions
MOSCOW: A Russian former employee of the US consulate in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Vladivostok has been sentenced to four years and ten months in prison for “secret collaboration with a foreign state,” Russian agencies said Friday.
Robert Shonov worked for more than 25 years for the US consulate until 2021, when Moscow imposed restrictions on local staff working for foreign missions.
Afterward, he worked as a private contractor compiling press accounts from publicly accessible Russian media, according to the US State Department.
He was arrested this year on suspicion of passing secret information about Russia’s war in Ukraine to the United States in exchange for money.
According to the judgment published on the website of Valdivostok’s Primorye court, 400,000 roubles (€4,000) and an electronic device linked to the commission of the offense were seized.
In September 2023, Russia also expelled two US diplomats it accused of acting as liaison agents for Shonov.
According to Washington, Shonov had only been hired by the US consulate to carry out routine monitoring of freely accessible Russian media.
In recent years, several US citizens have been arrested and sentenced to long jail terms in Russia. Others are being held pending trial.
Washington, which supports Ukraine militarily and financially against Russia’s invasion, accuses Moscow of wanting to exchange them for Russians held in the United States.
The United States and Russia exchanged prisoners including The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in a landmark swap in August, but several US nationals and dual nationals remain in detention in Russia.
North Korea says record test was new Hwasong-19 intercontinental ballistic missile
- The Hwasong-19, like North Korea’s other latest ICBMs, demonstrated the range to strike nearly anywhere in the United States
- The launch drew swift condemnation from Washington and its allies in South Korea, Japan and Europe, as well as the UN chief
SEOUL: North Korea flexed its military muscle with the test of a huge new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile dubbed Hwasong-19, state media said on Friday, amid international uproar over its troops deployed to aid Russia in Ukraine.
The launch on Thursday flew higher than any previous North Korean missile, according to the North as well as militaries in South Korea and Japan that tracked its flight deep into space before it splashed down in the ocean between Japan and Russia.
State news agency KCNA lauded it as “the world’s strongest strategic missile.”
While questions remain over North Korea’s ability to guide such a missile and protect a nuclear warhead as it reenters the atmosphere, the Hwasong-19, like North Korea’s other latest ICBMs, demonstrated the range to strike nearly anywhere in the United States.
“The new-type ICBM proved before the world that the hegemonic position we have secured in the development and manufacture of nuclear delivery means of the same kind is absolutely irreversible,” North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said while overseeing the launch, KCNA reported.
The launch, days before Tuesday’s US presidential election, drew swift condemnation from Washington and its allies in South Korea, Japan and Europe, as well as the United Nations secretary-general.
“The missile continues to underwrite the growing credibility of North Korea’s strategic deterrent capabilities,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding that Kim appeared specifically interested in communicating that message to the United States.
HEAVIER PAYLOADS
The Hwasong-19 will deploy alongside the Hwasong-18, which was first launched last year and is also powered by solid fuel, KCNA said.
Solid-fuel missiles do not need to be fueled immediately ahead of launch, are often easier and safer to operate and require less logistical support than liquid-fuel weapons.
“It can be stored and moved anywhere, allowing for excellent mobility, stealth and survivability,” said Kim of the University of North Korean Studies.
Photos released by KCNA showed a large, multi-stage missile launched from a canister carried by a transporter-erector-launcher vehicle. The agency showed photos from cameras that appeared to be attached to the missile, taking images of stage separations and the earth.
“The increased length likely means a greater fuel capacity, which directly affects thrust and potentially increases range,” Kim said.
But North Korea’s existing missiles already had the range to reach anywhere in the United States, and the Hwasong-19’s expanded capacity combined with larger payload section is more likely designed to be able to carry heavier, and potentially multiple, nuclear warheads, he said.
“North Korea may continue testing to see if, during the final reentry phase, the warheads can separate and each head toward individual targets,” Kim added.
The Hwasong-19 flew of 1,001.2km for 85 minutes and 56 seconds before landing in the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula, with a maximum altitude of 7,687.5km, KCNA said.
India’s capital chokes in smog after firework ban flouted
- New Delhi’s traffic-clogged streets are home to more than 30 million people and the city regularly ranks as one of the most polluted ones
- The Indian capital is blanketed in cancer-causing acrid smog each year, primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers in neighboring regions
NEW DELHI: India’s capital New Delhi was wreathed in poisonous smog Friday, with air pollution worsening after a fireworks ban was widely flouted for raucous celebrations for the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali.
New Delhi’s traffic-clogged streets are home to more than 30 million people, and the city is regularly ranked as one of the most polluted urban areas on the planet.
The city is blanketed in cancer-causing acrid smog each year, primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers in neighboring regions to clear their fields for plowing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.
But air worsened Friday after a thunderous night of firecrackers lit as part of Diwali celebrations, despite city authorities last month banning their sale and use.
City police had seized nearly two tons of fireworks before Diwali, but the crackers remained readily available for sale in neighboring states.
Many residents celebrated at home, holding a family meal and lighting small candles in praise of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi and symbolising the victory of light over darkness.
Others launched firework rockets and booming crackers, rocking the densely packed city throughout the night.
Police are often reluctant to act against violators, given the strong religious sentiments attached to the crackers by Hindu devotees.
Critics say arguments between rival politicians heading neighboring states — as well as between central and state-level authorities — have compounded the problem.
India’s Supreme Court last month ruled that clean air was a fundamental human right, ordering both the central government and state-level authorities to take action.
“Delhi’s toxic air is killing us softly with its smog,” the Times of India wrote in an editorial last week, as the winter pollution returned.
“It is nothing new, but what doesn’t cease to amaze, year after year, is the state’s stilted response.”
Levels of fine particulate matter — dangerous microparticles known as PM2.5 pollutants that enter the bloodstream through the lungs — surged to more than 23 times the World Health Organization recommended daily maximum.
Soon after dawn, pollutant levels topped 345 micrograms per cubic meter, according to monitoring firm IQAir, which listed air in the sprawling megacity as “hazardous.”
It listed New Delhi as worst in the world, just above smoke-choked Lahore in neighboring Pakistan, 400 kilometers (250 miles) to the northeast.
The New Delhi government has previously sought to cut pollution by restricting vehicle traffic, including a scheme that only allowed cars with odd or even number license plates to travel on alternate days.
Authorities have also imposed seasonal bans on construction work and on diesel-powered vehicles from entering the city.
