by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Washington : US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will spend some time one-on-one next week at their second summit in Vietnam, White House officials said on Thursday.
The summit, scheduled for February 27-28 in Hanoi, will “be similar in format to what you saw last June 12 in Singapore,” an official said in a conference call with reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“There will be an opportunity for the two leaders to see one another one-on-one, to share a meal and engage in expanded meetings of their respective delegations,” the official said, reports Efe.
The White House has not made Trump’s agenda public yet and the source did not specify whether the private meeting — accompanied only by their respective interpreters — would occur at the beginning of the summit, as was the case in Singapore.
In Singapore, the leaders spoke privately for 38 minutes before the formal talks between the full delegations, sparking speculation about the content of Trump’s conversation with Kim.
The joint statement that emerged from the Singapore talks said that North Korea pledged to “work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” in exchange for unspecified security guarantees from the US.
One goal for next week’s encounter is reaching agreement on a “shared definition” of what denuclearisation means in concrete terms, the US official said.
Trump has also talked lately about North Korea’s economic potential and its advantageous location between Russia and China, so he is expected to expand further on that issue when he sees Kim, according to Efe.
“President Trump is looking to — after really, in some respects, breaking the ice with Kim in June — to talk in more depth about the kind of future that North Korea could enjoy if it follows through on its commitment to final and full denuclearisation,” one of the officials said.
One of the White House officials acknowledged that Pyongyang’s intention remains a mystery.
“I don’t know if North Korea has made the choice yet to denuclearise, but the reason why we’re engaged in this is because we believe there’s a possibility that North Korea can make the choice to fully denuclearize,” the official said.
“And that’s why the president has assigned such a priority to engaging with them,” the official added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Seoul : North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in will hold their three-day third summit from September 18 in Pyongyang, Seoul said on Thursday, after their envoy met the North Korean leader.
South Korea’s National Security Office Director Chung Eui-yong, who led the special delegation to Pyongyang on Wednesday, told this to the media here on Thursday.
Kim and Moon have agreed to hold the new summit to continue strengthening ties and work on the denuclearization of the peninsula, as stipulated in their joint declaration signed in the first inter-Korean summit in April.
They also discussed the complex process of dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington, Efe news reported.
During the meeting, Kim “reaffirmed his firm commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and expressed his willingness to closely cooperate with not only South Korea but also the US to that end,” Chung said.
North Korea’s state news agency KCNA, just minutes before the press conference,also published a statement by Kim guaranteeing his pledge to “realise the denuclearization”.
Chung also said that Kim has asked him to deliver a message to US President Donald Trump. However, he did not specify its content.
After Trump and Kim signed a joint declaration in Singapore in June to work towards the denuclearization, in exchange for Washington guaranteeing Pyongyang’s security, the White House has grown impatient over the absence of concrete measures from the regime.
Pyongyang, for its part, demands progress in the signing of a peace treaty to definitively end the inter-Korean conflict in exchange for concrete steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un
Pyongyang : North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, for the second time in less than a week, slammed international sanctions on his country, state media reported on Sunday.
“The hostile forces’ persistent sanctions and obstructive moves come as a serious setback to the advance of our socialism,” Kim Jong-un said during the inspection of a reconstruction project in the Samjiyon district, where his late father and former leader, Kim Jong-il, was born.
The North Korean leader, who was accompanied by his wife Ri Sol-ju and senior officials of the ruling Workers’ Party, said that despite the sanctions, the country was making history with “legendary miracles despite the most difficult conditions”, reports Efe news.
Kim’s comments comes two days after KCNA published a report where the leader had described the sanctions as “brigandish” during a visit to an under-construction site at the Wonsan-Kalma tourist area.
Since Kim’s meeting with US President Donald Trump on June 12 in Singapore, North Korea, through state and foreign media, has criticized the sanctions imposed on the country by the US and asked that they be lifted although Kim has rarely criticised the sanctions openly.
The US insists that it would retain sanctions on the regime until it takes concrete steps toward denuclearization.
On Wednesday, the US government imposed sanctions against Russian and Chinese companies with alleged links to North Korea for facilitating “illicit shipments” on behalf of Pyongyang.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Seoul : Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday invited North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for a summit to discuss urgent issues, the media reported.
Putin expressed his readiness to hold a summit with Kim at an “early date” in a message sent on the occasion of North Korea’s liberation, coinciding with the 73rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, North Korea’s state news agency KCNA reported.
“I affirm that I am ready to meet you at an early date to discuss urgent issues of bilateral relations and important matters of the region,” Putin said.
Earlier in May, the Russian President invited Kim to the Eastern Economic Forum in the Russian coastal city of Vladivostok between September 11 and 13, but Pyongyang was yet to respond.
Putin also invited his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in, Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the forum.
If Kim and other leaders decided to attend, it would be an unprecedented international gathering in which leaders from five of the six countries that have been working on nuclear disarmament meet.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : US President Donald Trump cited an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to American national security as he maintained long-standing economic restrictions on North Korea, including the freezing of any assets in Washington, a media report said.
An official declaration, contained in a notice to Congress, came on Friday despite Trump’s assertion this month that his June 12 historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ended Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons threat, reports The Washington Post.
Harsh economic restrictions will continue for one year under the declaration Trump signed Friday.
The paperwork keeps in place restrictions first imposed a decade ago by President George W. Bush.
The ban on the transfer of any American assets by North Korea’s leaders or its ruling party has been extended or expanded several times by former President Barack Obama and Trump himself in response to North Korean missile tests and other actions.
“The existence and risk of proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material on the Korean Peninsula (and_ the actions and policies of the government of North Korea… Continue to constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the US,” Trump wrote in the declaration.
Friday’s development comes in contrast to a tweet on June 13 where Trump said: “Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office… There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
The move follows as the US and South Korea cancelled two more training exercises on Friday, reports the BBC.
The Pentagon said the goal was to support diplomatic negotiations.
—IANS
