The commitment to joint action on common security threats that South Korea, the US and Japan signed at a Camp David summit Friday is a political agreement rather than a legally binding pact, US Ambassador to South Korea Philip Goldberg said Wednesday. The security pledge, the first of its kind, has sparked concern over deeper security links between Seoul and Tokyo, two American allies that have separate defense treat.
The majority of South Koreans favor a unified Korean Peninsula, but half of those prefer a model where the two Koreas remain separate, with each side able to freely cross the border, according to a survey released Friday. In a poll conducted by the National Unification Advisory Council from June 9-11, 52 percent of 1,000 South Korean respondents aged 19 and older considered keeping the two Koreas separate while allow.
The last 70 years have marked South Korea’s ascent to an economic power able to cope with threats from North Korea, its nuclear-armed neighbor that it has yet to sign a peace treaty with to resolve the 1950-53 Korean War. Seoul’s postwar efforts had relied on working with the US, the South’s biggest ally. In the early 1960s, aid from Washington accounted for 35 percent of Seoul’s budget and 73.
Japan plans to release treated radioactive wastewater from its destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean late this month, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun said Monday, citing unnamed government officials. The discharge will take place shortly after Prime Minister Fumio Kishida holds three-way talks with his South Korean and US counterparts in Washington on Aug. 18, according to the newspaper. &ldquo.
China on Friday executed a South Korean national convicted of drug trafficking, despite appeals from South Korean authorities for clemency, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry has announced. “Chinese authorities just notified us of the execution,” a Foreign Ministry official said at a briefing held the same day. Beijing had informed Seoul of when the execution would take place, according to the official..