Category: Key Issues

SEOUL– President Yoon Suk Yeol visited the National Intelligence Service (NIS) headquarters Friday and called on the agency to demonstrate its capability to “neutralize” the North Korean regime’s miscalculations and provocations, his office said.

Yoon made the remark while receiving a 2023 policy briefing from NIS Director Kim Kyou-hyun and other senior agency officials.

“The reality of the security situation on the divided Korean Peninsula is grave, and the uncertainty in international affairs is growing,” he was quoted as saying. “I would like you to demonstrate the capability to neutralize the North Korean regime’s miscalculations and provocations, and boldly compete in the global information warfare.”

Yoon was briefed on the NIS’ overall work, including on overseas and North Korea intelligence, counterespionage, counterterrorism and cybersecurity operations, and urged the agency to perfectly carry out its role as the state’s top intelligence agency responsible for defending national security and the people’s freedom, his office said.

“The reason for existence of the organization called the National Intelligence Service — in other words, its fundamental duty — is to defend our freedom,” he said, adding that its employees must have a different attitude to their work than other public servants.

“Just as a large dike collapses from a small ant tunnel, we must not allow the slightest crack in defending national security,” he said.

Yoon urged the NIS to work closely with the private and public sectors and the military to strengthen their cyber capabilities, and actively apply advanced technologies to analyzing North Korea, overseas and counterespionage intelligence.

“There must be endless research, education and training to collect scientific information and effectively conduct work,” he said. “Only then will the NIS’ competitiveness be enhanced, and when it becomes a competent and strong intelligence agency will it be possible to have in-depth cooperation with our allies and partner nations.”

Yoon also quoted Gina Haspel, the first woman to be appointed director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 2018, as saying her life as an intelligence agent was not simply a “career” but a “calling.”

Source: Yonhap News Agency

Fresh from a meeting with China’s top diplomat and a U.N. Security Council session regarding Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Central and South Asia next week for international talks that will put him in the same room as his Chinese and Russian counterparts.

The State Department announced late Thursday that Blinken would travel to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan before going to India for a meeting of the Group of 20 foreign ministers from the world’s largest industrialized and developing countries, including China and Russia.

The trip comes as tensions have soared between the U.S. and Russia and between the U.S. and China over Russia’s war in Ukraine and Chinese assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific. All three countries are competing fiercely to outdo each other in global influence.

U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the prospects for Blinken having sit-down talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang or Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in New Delhi. But all three will be present in the Indian capital for the G-20 meeting. The State Department has said only that no meetings are scheduled.

The last time the group met — in Bali, Indonesia, in 2022 — Blinken held extensive talks with China’s then-foreign minister, Wang Yi, that led to a summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November.

And Wang, who has since been promoted, met with Blinken last weekend on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the first high-level talks since the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon and Blinken postponed a much-anticipated trip to Beijing.

A meeting between Blinken and Qin, who was formerly China’s ambassador to the U.S., would be their first in Qin’s current capacity.

The broader G-20 meeting is expected to focus on food and energy security, especially for developing countries, which have been hit by fallout from the Ukraine conflict. In Bali, a number of nations that have not outright condemned Russia for the war expressed deep concern about its impact on the prices and supply of food and fuel.

Before traveling to Delhi, Blinken will visit the Kazakh capital of Astana for talks with leaders there as well as a meeting of the so-called C5+1 group, made up of the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and the United States.

At that meeting, he will stress the U.S. “commitment to the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Central Asian countries,” the State Department said in a statement that mirrors the wording it has been using to support Ukraine against Russia.

Blinken will then go to Tashkent for talks with Uzbek officials.

Source: Voice of America

The ASEAN-Japan Centre (AJC) will hold the 2nd Symposium on Marine Plastic Waste Education online on Mar 1, 14:00-15:30 (JST) which will feature the student-led initiatives of selected schools from Japan and eight ASEAN countries, namely Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Thailand, who participated in the Ecoschool lectures by the AJC.

Welcome and Opening Remarks will be given by Ekkaphab Phanthavong, Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC), and Mr. Yasuyuki Hata, Director-General, Environmental Management Bureau, Ministry of Environment, Japan, respectively.

The Symposium is part of a multi-year programme of the AJC that promotes educational awareness on the issue of marine plastic waste among the young generation, from elementary to high school.

In 2021, the programme piloted in Hiroshima, Japan in cooperation with the ASEAN Hiroshima Association, and included three ASEAN countries, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

This year, the scope of participation has expanded to eight ASEAN countries and four prefectures in Japan (i.e. Hiroshima, Osaka, Saitama, and Tokyo).

Since April 2022, about 7,000 elementary and high school students have participated in the Ecoschool project. Ten AJC fellows, who were part of the 22 student fellows that drafted and launched the “Future Leaders’ Declaration on ASEAN-Japan Cooperation for International Marine Plastic Waste” in March 2021, conducted the online lectures in 10 languages (Japanese, English, Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Bisaya, Tagalog, and Thai).

This year, the Symposium will feature the lighting of candleholders made of marine plastic waste collected from Tokyo Bay to symbolize spreading the light and commitment to “nurture good habits for cleaner oceans” involving the AJC fellows and partner organizations. This act signifies a shared commitment to change behaviors and promote a conscious effort to reduce plastic waste in the region. The Symposium will also feature messages of support from global and regional like-minded partners.

The AJC cooperated with the following organizations to implement the Ecoschool project, namely Economic Research Institute for East Asia Regional Knowledge Centre for Marine Plastic Debris (ERIA-RKCMPD) in Jakarta, UN-Habitat Philippines, the Science, Technology and Environment Partnership (STEP) Centre, Ministry of Education, Brunei, Ministry of Environment, Cambodia, and Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Lao PDR.

The symposium registration is now open and free of charge.

Source: Lao News Agency

A deadly coal mining collapse in China this week is one of a growing number of industry accidents over the last year, government statistics show, coinciding with Beijing’s recent push for higher production to improve energy security.

At least six people were killed and 47 others are still missing two days after the dramatic collapse of an open pit coal mine in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia, its No. 2 coal-producing province.

The reasons for the collapse are still not known, and the mine owner could not be reached by Reuters.

The National Mine Safety Administration (NMSA) did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the accident.

But it comes after NMSA statistics released this month showed the number of accidents at coal mines almost doubled in 2022 compared to 2021, and the death toll reached a six-year high of 245, just after China called for higher coal output.

Already the world’s biggest coal producer and consumer, China increased its coal output last year by 9% to a record 4.5 billion tons, with the country urging miners to ramp up production after a nationwide power shortage in late 2021 led to a quadrupling of domestic prices.

Soaring global coal prices and energy supply disruption in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also prompted Beijing to improve its energy security.

Though its mines are known to be among the deadliest in the world, accidents and deaths had been falling steadily in the decade to 2021 after China shut down excess mining capacity, reduced coal burning and strengthened safety checks.

In 2022, however, there were 168 accidents of varying degrees of severity, data from the NMSA shows, surging from 91 the year before.

In a review of the 2021 accidents, the NMSA said some coal mines were putting more emphasis on profits than safety. “They ignored safety requirements and rushed to meet the production targets… and even violated operations regulations to run over their designed capacity,” the regulator added.

The open-pit mine that collapsed this week had been closed for three years until April 2021, state media reported. It reopened just as coal prices soared, reaching record levels later that year.

Local mine safety regulators ordered coal mines in Inner Mongolia to carry out safety checks after the accident this week.

Digging deeper

China amended its criminal law in 2021 to include punishments of managers at mines involved in accidents due to over-production.

But the NMSA also said in late 2021 that it would not engage in blind punitive production suspensions at coal mines and would instead send inspectors to help rectify problems and resume output.

With the depletion of shallow coal resources in China, coal miners are also being forced to dig deeper, posing bigger safety risks, according to experts.

“China is mining at a rate of 10 to 25 meters deeper each year, leaving miners facing more complicated scientific and technical problems,” Yuan Liang, a coal mining professor at Anhui University of Science and Technology, said in a research paper published in January.

China last year approved some 260 million tons of new mining capacity and reopened scores of mothballed mines.

Coal production is expected to further increase this year as more newly approved mines begin operations. Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, China’s top two mining hubs by production, have vowed to lift output up by at least 5% and 2% this year, respectively.

“Improving mining safety is like pushing a boulder up a hill and involves many hurdles,” the NMSA said in a statement last month. “We will have to ensure both supply and safety.”

Source: Voice of America

SEOUL– POSCO Holdings Inc., South Korea’s top steelmaker, said Friday it has signed a preliminary deal with a Chinese firm for the production of nickel in Indonesia.

Under the deal with Chinese resource trading and mining firm Ningbo Liqin, POSCO will build a plant to produce 120,000 tons of mixed nickel-cobalt hydroxide precipitate (MHP) per year on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island.

In the initial stage, the two will start building a plant to produce 60,000 tons of nickel, enough to make 1.2 million electric vehicles (EVs). Its production will start in 2025, according to POSCO Holdings.

Nickel is a core chemical used in making cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.

Last year, POSCO Holdings broke ground for a plant in South Korea that refines high-purity nickel. The facility, with an annual production of 20,000 tons of high-purity nickel, will be built this year.

In 2021, POSCO, the world’s fifth-largest steelmaker by output, purchased a 30 percent stake in the Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation in Australia.

POSCO Holdings has been accelerating its moves to expand EV development projects and ones to refine resources for EVs.

By 2030, the steel giant aims to produce 200,000 tons of nickel and 300,000 tons of lithium.

Ningbo Liqin already established its nickel-refining facility in Indonesia, which holds the world’s largest nickel reserve.

Source: Yonhap News Agency

CANBERRA– South Australian authorities, have called in extra water bombers, amid a perfect storm of bushfire conditions.

Temperatures across Australia’s state of South Australia (SA) were forecast to soar above 40 degrees Celsius for the second consecutive day today with strong winds exacerbating conditions.

Total fire bans have been put in place in eight districts, including Adelaide, the capital city of SA, and all available Country Fire Service (CFS) crews have been put on standby.

The State Emergency Service (SES) has issued severe heatwave warnings, urging people to stay indoors where possible.

Jonathan Fischer, the Bureau of Meteorology’s emergency services meteorologist, said, today’s conditions posed a significant risk with fuel moisture having reached near peak dryness and flammability.

“In terms of the prolonged duration of this heatwave, we are looking at the worst conditions since the 2019-20 season,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

“There’s also a risk of dry lightning across the state today, and that’s going to further elevate that fire risk,” said Fischer. “Despite the relatively cool and wet spring that we had, conditions have dried out over the last couple of months.”

Crews were yesterday called out to fight a fire, that broke out in an industrial warehouse, on the Yorke Peninsula, causing three million Australian dollars (2.04 million U.S. dollars) in damage.

In anticipation of today’s conditions, the fire service department has called on the support of water-bombing aircraft.

One of the areas where the danger has been rated extreme is the Lower Eyre Peninsula, where the town of Port Lincoln was hit by a fire earlier this month, that was caused by failed power infrastructure, destroying 16 properties and damaging another seven.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK