South Korean President Park Geun-hye has criticised a group of opposition lawmakers who left for China yesterday to discuss the deployment of an American anti-missile system that has opened a damaging rift between Seoul and Beijing.
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“North Korea is repeatedly violating UNSC resolutions with its ballistic missile launches, but the Security Council is failing to form a united response due to an objection by some of the council members”, the ministry said in its press note.
The U.S. and Japan rejected Beijing’s proposal, causing the statement to be dropped.
For Lee, this is her first Olympics, having helped South Korea win bronze in the 2015 Asian Gymnastics Championships team competition (where North Korea was conspicuously absent).
President Xi Jinping’s administration has always been wary of Washington’s ties with South Korea.
Kim, the star of the 2014 TV series “My Love From the Star”, agreed to feature in two new ads in China even as the country allegedly moved to boycott South Korean celebrities in protest of the decision to place a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here.
Seoul’s decision to host the Thaad system has been condemned by China as a threat to its own security interests and to regional stability.
China also objected to wording in the draft of the condemnation statement that referred to the missile falling inside Japan’s EEZ.
China, Pyongyang’s closest ally, had sought to delete from the text a sentence expressing concern that the missile “impacted near Japan”.
“To propose that this council should criticise purely defensive steps that states have taken to protect their people from the DPRK’s clear and repeated ballistic missile threats. would be manifestly inappropriate and would send entirely the wrong message to the DPRK”, the U.S. mission to the United Nations told council diplomats.
The last council statement censuring North Korea was for launching two medium-range missiles in June. The isolated country has been subjected to five sets of United Nations sanctions since its first atomic test in 2006.
The latest and the toughest sanctions came in March, banning Kim Jong-un’s administration from exporting goods like coal, iron and some minerals.
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(Stand-up) “Saying the fast-advancing era requires continuous restructuring and innovation efforts, President Park asked businesses to not just focus on reforms but to also find new growth engines for the future, for example, in sectors like telemedicine”.
