Reviving multilateral negotiations emerge as alternative to breaking deadlock on North Korea
Posted : 2021-02-18 09:16
Updated : 2021-02-21 17:44
President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Joe Biden talked on the phone earlier this month and discussed Korean Peninsula issues. Korea Times file
By Do Je-hae
During the previous U.S. administration under Donald Trump, talks on North Korea s denuclearization revolved primarily around the U.S. and North Korea. President Moon Jae-in has also put priority on mediating U.S.-North Korea talks, but the two summits between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un did not lead to fundamental progress on denuclearization. The lack of results during the Trump administration on North Korea and the urgency from Seoul to quickly resume peace diplomacy have resulted in renewed attention to the type of multilateral negotiating framework that was seen during in the late 1990s, such as the four-party talks with representatives from the two Koreas,
Protests from right to left
Posted : 2021-02-18 18:23 By Donald Kirk
The great divide in the U.S. between far right and far left parallels debates around the world between political and ideological extremes, but there s one big difference. The main provocateur of the most violent protest in the U.S. remains at large if still under fire.
It s disturbing to think that Donald Trump has such leverage over the Republican Party that most of its members were against finding him guilty in the Senate impeachment trial that acquitted him of inciting the assault on the Capitol building in Washington on Jan. 6, as the Congress was about to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president.
Commentary: Donald Kirk - A sad milestone silently passes
Donald Kirk
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An important anniversary has slipped by. It was last January, the year 2020, while visiting Hong Kong for a few days, that I started seeing stories about a strange new virus diagnosed in the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan. The first headlines didn’t seem like a big deal. Some “experts” were saying the virus had been found in Wuhan and nowhere else.
Still, those early reports did kindle memories. No one forgot SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that erupted in China in 2002. That dread disease scared the hell out of people around the world. By the time the last case was diagnosed in 2004, more than 8,000 people had caught it, and 11 percent of them had died.
Lessons of coup By Donald Kirk.
The renaissance of undisguised military rule in Myanmar should provide inspiration for Donald Trump. The generals who jailed democracy crusader Aung San Suu Kyi and her cohorts are raising the same claims about Myanmar s parliamentary elections in November that Trump has been charging in U.S. elections held around the same time. Having won only 33 of 476 seats for their candidates against 396 for Suu Kyi s National League for Democracy, they say the voting was rigged, the count was fraudulent and they want to look at the voting rolls.
The big difference between Trump and the generals in Myanmar is that they are able to exert their authority without having to worry about a legal system rejecting their ridiculous claims. Nor do they risk impeachment by a legislative body in which their opponents are capable of mustering enough votes to embarrass them severely if not throw out their leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the army and,