Aju Press - Asia News Hub

Journalist

Park Sae-jin박세진

Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy

Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience. "Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."

Latest by Park Sae-jin

Seoul says China's stance on denuclearization unchanged SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - South Korea's foreign ministry said Thursday that China's position on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula has not changed, setting the tone for a planned visit to Seoul by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the first by a top Chinese diplomat since President Lee Jae Myung took office. Wang is expected to travel to Seoul on August 19 and 20 for talks with Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, according to diplomatic sources cited in Korean media reports, with a courtesy call on Lee also under arrangement. The trip carries an uncomfortable question. Wang visited Pyongyang in April, and Chinese President Xi Jinping followed in June, and on both occasions Beijing avoided any public mention of denuclearization, deepening concern in Seoul that China now values rebuilding ties with North Korea over resolving its nuclear program. Asked at a regular briefing whether the government sees a need for Beijing to publicly reaffirm the principle during the visit, and whether a joint document reflecting it is under discussion, foreign ministry spokesperson Park Il pointed to commitments already on the record. "Peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula are a common interest of the two countries," Park said, an understanding he said was confirmed through the leaders' reciprocal state visits, most recently Lee's state visit to Beijing in January. China has expressed its intent to play a constructive role toward that end, he added, and has said it would maintain the continuity and stability of its policy toward the peninsula. "The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is the consistent goal of the international community, confirmed through multiple Security Council resolutions, and our government will uphold that goal without wavering," Park said. "China, too, has seen no change in its position on the Korean Peninsula issue, and the US-China summit in May also confirmed that North Korea's denuclearization is a common goal." He did not address whether a joint statement or outcome document is being coordinated, saying only that the government would keep strengthening communication, including through the visit now in consultations, to draw out a constructive role from China. The summit reference has a paper trail. After US President Donald Trump met Xi in Beijing on May 14 and 15, the White House released a fact sheet stating the two presidents "confirmed their shared goal to denuclearize North Korea." Beijing never echoed the language. Asked days later to confirm the American account, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said only that China's position and policy on the Korean Peninsula maintain continuity. Seoul has leaned on both statements since. The ministry delivered essentially the same answer in June, days after Xi returned from Pyongyang, making Thursday's response the latest recitation of a fixed line rather than a reaction to the visit reports. That is the ambiguity Wang would carry into Seoul. The South Korean government is expected to press for a more active Chinese role on the North Korean nuclear issue, while Beijing is likely to use the visit to present its position on Taiwan and its trade friction with Washington, and to restore balance to a peninsula diplomacy that has tilted heavily toward Pyongyang this year. Whether Wang states the word denuclearization in public while in Seoul will be watched as the clearest signal of where China actually stands. The last time the question was put to the test, the answer was silence. Xi spent two days in Pyongyang in June, his first visit to North Korea since 2019, and left without once mentioning denuclearization. 2026-07-30 16:22:14
Why Kazakhstan puts more women to work than Korea or US SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - Kazakhstan's female workforce grew again in the first quarter of 2026, extending the reach of one of the world's higher rates of working women, a distinction the Central Asian country owes less to recent policy than to a century of history. The number of employed women reached 4.527 million in the first three months of the year, up 42,600 or 0.9 percent from a year earlier, according to Kazakhstan's National Statistics Bureau under the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms. Of them, 79.6 percent worked as employees while 20.4 percent, or 925,100 women, were self-employed. The scale of female participation sets Kazakhstan apart from far wealthier economies. World Bank data put the country's female labor force participation rate at about 66 percent in 2024, well above the world average of 51 percent, and ahead of both South Korea at 56 percent and the United States, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the rate at 57.5 percent in early 2025. The explanation begins in the Soviet era. For seven decades, state policy pushed women into employment, education, and professional training across Soviet Central Asia, backed by universal childcare and a social expectation that women worked. When Kazakhstan became independent in 1991, the norm survived the state that built it. Researchers point to that inheritance as the main reason post-Soviet countries cluster far above nations of comparable income on female employment. Education has sustained the pattern. Women make up the majority of university students in Kazakhstan, and the state has kept investing in female education since independence, including scholarships that sent thousands of women to universities abroad. Economic necessity did its own quiet work. The turbulence of the post-Soviet transition made single-income households unaffordable for most families, and two earners have remained the default ever since. Government policy came later. Kazakhstan adopted its Concept of Family and Gender Policy in 2016 and, after joining two UN Generation Equality coalitions in 2021, abolished a Soviet-era list of professions legally closed to women, opening jobs in mining, transport, and heavy industry. The first-quarter data suggests women are moving into those newly opened sectors. The fastest annual growth in female employment came in real estate, up 25.7 percent, followed by administrative and support services at 21.9 percent, transportation and warehousing at 16.2 percent, and industry at 7.6 percent. Some 388,100 women now work in industry. Most working women, however, remain concentrated where they long have been. Education is the largest employer of women with 902,200 workers, or 19.9 percent of the total, followed by wholesale and retail trade with 877,600 and healthcare and social work with 426,300. Together, the three sectors account for nearly half of all employed women in the country. That concentration feeds the number that complicates Kazakhstan's success story. Women earned an average of 344,496 tenge, about $686, in the first quarter of 2025, against 468,914 tenge, about $934, for men, a gap of roughly 26.5 percent, according to the statistics bureau. The gap had narrowed from 32.2 percent in 2013 to 21.7 percent in 2021, then widened again to 25.7 percent by 2023. By international standards, the disparity is wide. The OECD, which compares median earnings of full-time workers, put its members' average gap at 11.3 percent, with the United States around 16 percent and Japan at 21.3 percent. South Korea recorded the widest gap in the group at 29.3 percent in 2023, a position it has held for decades, leaving Kazakhstan narrower than Korea but roughly double the OECD norm. The Asian Development Bank concluded in its country gender assessment that while Kazakhstan's participation rate compares well internationally, the gaps between men and women in both participation and wages are not narrowing. Women also carry more unpaid domestic work than men on top of their jobs, the bank found. The government has answered with targets. Its updated Concept of Family and Gender Policy through 2030 commits to raising the share of women at decision-making levels in state bodies, the judiciary, and the corporate sector to 30 percent by 2030, alongside measures on the wage gap and women's asset ownership. A national action plan for 2024 to 2027 folds gender equality into budgeting and labor law, and the UN Development Programme launched a campaign in Kazakhstan in 2023 pressing companies toward pay transparency. 2026-07-30 16:14:52
S. Korea's football chiefs apologize over World Cup failure SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - The two men most blamed for South Korea's worst World Cup showing in a generation bowed their heads before lawmakers on Wednesday, as parliament opened a public reckoning over how the national team crashed out and who let it happen. South Korea exited the 2026 World Cup at the group stage despite fielding European-based stars including Son Heung-min and Lee Kang-in, a result made harder to accept by the tournament's expansion to 48 teams and a draw widely seen as favorable. The failure set off a wave of public anger that has gone beyond the team's performance to the governance of Korean football itself. That anger reached the National Assembly on Wednesday, where the Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee summoned former Korea Football Association president Chung Mong-gyu and former national team coach Hong Myung-bo as witnesses. "I did my utmost for the development of Korean football during my tenure, but I am sorry for the series of controversies and the disappointing result at the North American World Cup," Chung said in his opening statement. "I feel the weight of my responsibility as president, and I apologize for falling short of the expectations of the public and football fans." Hong followed with his own apology. "I want to first say to the public that I am sorry for failing to live up to your expectations at the World Cup," the 2002 World Cup hero said, adding: "I take seriously the responsibility for not repaying the support given to the team. Today I will speak plainly about what I know and the responsibility I must bear, without avoiding it." Hong also addressed his players. "I want to convey my regret and gratitude to the players who ran to the end in difficult circumstances," he said. "I take it seriously that I could not repay their effort with a result." For Hong, the hearing revisited a wound that predates the tournament. His appointment in July 2024 drew immediate controversy because he was the only one of three final candidates who went through no formal interview or presentation. The Korea Football Association (KFA) instead sent its technical director to Hong's home late at night to persuade him to take the job, and a government audit later found procedural violations in the process. Bae Hyun-jin, a lawmaker of the People Power Party, pressed Hong on that history. "In 2024, Lee Lim-saeng, a director who had no authority to recommend a coach, met you at 11 pm as if holding an interview in a bakery, and you were appointed without any separate interview or presentation," she said at the hearing. "Did you not feel ashamed before your juniors and football officials that one could become national team coach through a bakery interview?" Hong held his ground. "When the offer came to me, I believed it had gone through a normal process," he said. "I understand the public may see it as opaque, but I never asked for any special treatment or benefit." The distrust followed Hong through his tenure. Fans booed his name at home matches and hung banners at Seoul World Cup Stadium reading "the dark age of Korean football," while chants demanding Chung's resignation rang out at kickoff. The group-stage exit also echoed Hong's first spell in charge, when South Korea went out winless at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil amid accusations that he favored players he knew personally. Chung's 13 years atop the KFA gave the hearing a wider target. His tenure covered the appointment and costly dismissal of Jurgen Klinsmann, the team's collapse at the 2023 Asian Cup, and repeated administrative controversies, and he stepped down after the World Cup as the government launched a reform drive. A K-Football Innovation Committee, co-chaired by former national team star Park Ji-sung, is now reviewing the sport's governance, including the KFA's election system. Chung told lawmakers he would step back from football entirely. "After resigning as president, I will focus on management as a businessman and contribute to society," he said. One question remained over his international posts. Chung holds positions including vice chairman of a FIFA commercial and marketing advisory body and a seat on the executive committee of the Asian Football Confederation, and Chung Yeon-wook, a lawmaker of the People Power Party, asked whether his staying on the international stage was an asset for Korean football diplomacy or an unfinished exit. "Having resigned as association president, I have no attachment to those positions," Chung Mong-gyu said. "Once a new president is elected and a new leadership is formed, I will follow their decision." 2026-07-30 12:54:20
What Grammys lost when BTS walked away For five years, BTS wanted a Grammy, and the wanting was never hidden. The group submitted its music every cycle. Its members flew to Las Vegas and delivered performances that outclassed the ceremony hosting them, went home with nothing, and returned the next year to try again. On the red carpet in 2022, RM told American cable TV entertainment news operation E! News that the previous two years had been exhausting and devastating, and that a Grammy would make it all pay off. He said this as the leader of the best-selling act on the planet, which tells you the trophy had stopped being a prize somewhere along the way and had become something closer to a verdict he was waiting to hear. I watched that ceremony live on a Monday morning in the newsroom, the way Korea always watches American award shows, at the wrong hour and with too much riding on it. About 15 of us stood around the television, editors and reporters still in face masks in those pandemic days. When the "Butter" performance ended, nobody said anything, and nobody needed to. Whatever a world-class act was, we had just watched one. Minutes later the award went to someone else, and the gap between what we had seen and what the voters had seen was the whole story, though it would take four more years for BTS to say so themselves. They said it on July 29. Each of the seven members posted the same brief statement announcing that the group would not submit its music to the Grammys this year, adding a hope that music might be heard and loved for what it is rather than sorted by region or language. Big Hit Music asked that the statement be taken as written, and taken as written it is remarkable, because it asks for nothing. A boycott makes demands. This made none, set no conditions, named no grievance, and offered the Recording Academy no way to win them back. You negotiate with an institution whose judgment you still need. The one whose judgment you have outgrown, you simply inform. The timeline explains what the statement declined to. In February, the Grammys had their most open night in memory: Bad Bunny won Album of the Year with a record sung entirely in Spanish, the first in the award's history, while a song from an animated film about Korean pop stars became the first K-pop recording ever to take home a Grammy, its writers giving their acceptance speech in English and Korean both. For one evening, the ceremony resembled its own advertising, a room where the language of a song was no obstacle to its honor. In March, BTS came back from military service with ARIRANG, which opened with the biggest American sales week any group had posted in more than a decade. And in June, with BTS holding the number one album and number one song in the Academy's home market, the Recording Academy unveiled a new category: Best Asian Pop Music Performance, reserved for songs making meaningful use of an Asian language. Read that rule against the group's own history and it curdles. The song that earned BTS its first Grammy nomination was "Dynamite," performed entirely in English. Under the new category's terms, "Dynamite" would not qualify. So the institution that recognized these seven men only when they sang in English has now prepared a room they may enter only if they sing in Korean, and whichever language they choose, the room is never the main one. I doubt anyone at the Academy designed this on purpose. It reads like reflex, the old institutional habit of responding to a periphery grown too large to ignore by building an annex rather than widening the center. The Recording Academy has met this habit in itself before. In 2020, it renamed Best World Music Album as Best Global Music Album, conceding that the old term carried what it delicately called connotations of colonialism. "World," it turned out, had always meant everyone else, and the category had functioned as a holding pen with a friendly name. The Academy admitted as much and collected praise for the admission. Five years later, the pen has been rebuilt with Asia written on the gate. The vocabulary improved in the renaming. The habit did not. Bong Joon-ho saw all of this coming, in his own field, in the fall of 2019. Asked by Vulture why no Korean film had ever been nominated for an Oscar, a question resting on the assumption that Korea owed Hollywood an explanation for its absence, Bong refused the premise entirely and observed that the Oscars are not an international film festival but a very local one. The line traveled the world as a burn. It was actually a measurement, taken without heat, of an institution that had confused its own size with the size of the world, and it stung precisely because it was accurate and nobody in that world had been positioned to say it aloud. Four months later the Academy gave Parasite its highest prize, which was called history, though it might as easily be called an institution scrambling to agree with him. BTS has taken Bong's measurement and reached the opposite door, and the difference lies not in the judgment but in what each institution offered. Hollywood, once measured, opened its front entrance, so Bong walked in. The Recording Academy, once measured, offered a side entrance with a language test, so BTS walked out. These look like opposite choices. They are the same choice, made by Korean artists who stopped letting an American ceremony decide how large they were. The strongest case for entering anyway sat in February's ceremony itself, where Bad Bunny collected the open field's greatest prize and a specialty award in the same evening, proving a category can be a floor rather than a ceiling. But he arrived at that ceremony with something left to win. BTS would arrive with nothing to win and one thing to lose. Five nominations in open competition, five losses: that zero has hardened into a monument, and what it indicts is not the music, on which the world ruled long ago, but the room. Let BTS claim the inaugural Asian award and the monument inverts. The story of the group the Grammys failed to honor becomes the story of the group that finally won, in the category built for it, and a decade of open-field defeats gets quietly refiled as evidence the annex was needed all along. So the Academy will lose nothing visible in February. Award shows are practiced at not noticing who is missing, and the broadcast will glitter as usual. What it lost on July 29 is the thing no broadcast can generate. An award has no value of its own; it is worth exactly what the wanting of it is worth, and the wanting must be freely given. For five years the biggest band on earth gave it freely, showing up, performing, losing, returning, lending the ceremony the one asset it cannot manufacture, the sight of someone enormous still hoping. That hope was always the Grammys' property more than BTS's weakness. It has now been withdrawn, without anger, without demands, in a statement short enough to fit on a phone screen, by seven men who knocked at a door for years and were at last, generously, offered a smaller one. Submissions for the 69th Grammy Awards close on August 28. The ceremony follows on February 7 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, where last February, for one night, the room briefly resembled the world. BTS will not be there to see whether it happens again. 2026-07-30 10:05:07
US ambassador Steel to land in Seoul after 18-month vacancy SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - The new United States ambassador to South Korea lands in Seoul on Thursday afternoon, ending a vacancy of about 18 months at the top of the American mission and filling the post for the first time since President Donald Trump returned to office. Michelle Steel is expected to arrive at Incheon International Airport at about 3:20 p.m. She will deliver an arrival statement to reporters at 4 p.m. in the briefing room at the first-floor entrance to the VIP lounge in Terminal 2, according to the United States Embassy in Seoul. The job has had no confirmed occupant since Philip Goldberg left in January 2025. James Heller has run the embassy in the interim as chargé d'affaires, the senior diplomat who leads a mission when no ambassador is in place. Steel's confirmation closed a process that began in the spring. Trump sent the nomination to the Senate on April 13, and it was referred that day to the Foreign Relations Committee. The committee approved her 14 to 8 on June 4, and the full Senate confirmed her on June 17 by a vote of 55 to 39. Her statement to the committee, submitted at her May 20 hearing, set out how she reads the relationship. She described the alliance as the linchpin of peace, security and prosperity in Northeast Asia for more than seven decades, and called the combined defense posture, anchored by the 28,500 members of United States Forces Korea and reinforced by extended nuclear deterrence, the bedrock of the partnership. It "remains ironclad," she wrote. She named three security problems the two governments work on together: North Korea's unlawful weapons programs, its expanding cybercrime operations and its deepening military cooperation with Russia. She pointed to the trilateral partnership with Japan as part of the effort to defend a free and open Indo-Pacific. On the economic side, she cited the strategic trade and investment agreement reached in 2025, under which Seoul committed to invest $350 billion in American strategic industries and to reduce barriers to American exports, and said the joint fact sheet issued after Trump's state visit to Gyeongju set out an upgrade to security cooperation that included a South Korean pledge to expand defense spending. Her own account of how she reached Seoul runs through the war that created the alliance. Her parents fled North Korea during the Korean War and built a life in the South, where she was born. In her statement she noted that more than 36,000 Americans died defending that country. The family later moved to Japan, where she studied at Nippon Joshi Dai, Japan Women's University, and her father encouraged her to continue on to the United States. English, she told the committee, is her third language. Steel won a seat on the California State Board of Equalization, the only elected tax board in the country, where she represented more than nine million constituents, then served as supervisor and chairwoman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. In the House of Representatives, she served two terms representing California's 48th and 45th districts, sat on the Ways and Means Committee, and worked on the Transportation and Infrastructure and Education and Labor committees, on issues ranging from tax policy to relations with China. She holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Pepperdine University and an executive master of business administration from the University of Southern California, and the State Department describes her as fluent in Korean and Japanese. The department, in its certificate of competency submitted to the Senate in April, concluded that her record in elected office and her experience abroad make her well qualified for the post. 2026-07-30 09:39:30
Seoul office vacancy hits 5-year high on new downtown supply SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - Seoul's Grade A office vacancy rate rose to 5.8 percent in the second quarter, up 1.8 percentage points from the previous quarter and the highest level since the third quarter of 2021, according to a report released by Cushman & Wakefield Korea, the local arm of the global commercial real estate services firm. The increase was driven by new supply rather than falling demand. Two large towers, G1 Seoul in the Gongpyeong redevelopment zone and Rene Square near Euljiro 3-ga, were completed in the central business district at the same time, adding space that has yet to be absorbed. Average rents rose 1.3 percent from the previous quarter and 5.0 percent from a year earlier. Vacancy in the central business district jumped 3.3 percentage points to 9.0 percent, the steepest rise among Seoul's three major office districts. The report said initial vacancy at the new towers remained despite lease signings by large companies, while existing buildings in the area continued to fill. IQVIA signed a lease at Pine Avenue Tower A, and LG Household & Health Care and the Korea Public Finance Information Service expanded their space at Seoul City Tower. The quarter also saw companies moving between districts. MetLife Korea is relocating its headquarters from the Gangnam business district to G1 Seoul, taking 12,900 square meters, and Lotte Rental is preparing to move from Gangnam to NH NongHyup Tower downtown. Their departures pushed Gangnam's vacancy rate up 0.6 percentage point to 3.1 percent, still the lowest among the three districts. Gangnam also recorded the city's highest average asking rent at 42,444 won per square meter, against a citywide average of 39,883 won. Among new arrivals, Anthropic, the developer of the AI assistant Claude, selected the Centerfield building for its Korea office, a 3,700-square-meter lease. Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance took 4,100 square meters in the same building, and Hyosung ITX and Wyatt also signed leases in the district. The Yeouido business district saw vacancy rise 0.5 percentage point to 3.7 percent as financial firms continued to relocate and expand. Woori Investment & Securities announced plans to expand within One Sentinel, and the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation is set to relocate to Three IFC. Net absorption across the city totaled 8,251 square meters for the quarter, with the central business district recording 40,143 square meters against negative figures in Gangnam and Yeouido. On the economic front, the report noted that consumer inflation reached 3.2 percent in June, prompting the Bank of Korea to raise its base rate by 25 basis points to 2.75 percent at the start of the third quarter. The 2026 growth forecast was revised up to 2.6 percent on strong semiconductor exports, though higher rates are expected to weigh on domestic demand. Choi Yong-jun, who heads occupier services at Cushman & Wakefield Korea, said the quarter was defined by "a divergence in which a temporary rise in vacancy driven by new prime office supply and a structural realignment across districts are unfolding at the same time." Eul Tower, a 44,900-square-meter project near Euljiro 3-ga, is scheduled for completion in the fourth quarter, and the report forecast that central business district vacancy would hold near current levels through year-end. "The consolidation of the Gangnam district as an essential entry point for global big tech and AI companies will be a key indicator determining the direction of Seoul's office leasing market going forward," Choi said. 2026-07-29 15:37:49
Kazakhstan pushes factory contracts to unblock utility overhaul SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - Kazakhstan's government has set a September 1 deadline to break a logjam in the industrial side of its largest infrastructure program, a 13 trillion tenge effort to rebuild the country's aging heating, power and water systems by 2029. Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov told a cabinet meeting that work to conclude potential offtake contracts for new and expanded production facilities under the national project "Modernization of Energy and Utilities Sectors" must accelerate, Kazakhstan's state-operated Qazinform News Agency reported Tuesday. Off-take contracts commit a buyer to purchase a set volume of output in advance, which is what allows a manufacturer to borrow against future revenue and build the plant in the first place. Without them, the factories the program is meant to create do not get financed. "This issue has been repeatedly discussed but remains unresolved. The Ministry of Industry and Construction must enhance oversight and coordination," Bektenov said. He also instructed the ministry to add architectural, urban planning, and construction catalog codes to the manufacturers' register within two weeks. The pressure is pointed because domestic production is not a side benefit of the program. It is one of its four stated directions. Officials have identified 2,786 product lines worth 2.24 trillion tenge that could be supplied from inside Kazakhstan, and assembled a pool of 220 Kazakh plants and 669 qualified companies to handle design work and equipment supply. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has said more than 200 new production facilities should launch within two years. The program itself dates to December 2024, when the government approved the national project for the period through 2029. Tokayev signed the enabling law on July 17, 2025, and it took effect 12 days later. Of the 13 trillion tenge total ($27.3 billion), some 6.8 trillion tenge is directed at repairing and building 86,000 kilometers of utility networks, and roughly 6.2 trillion tenge at power generation. More than 1 trillion tenge was allocated this year alone, according to Tokayev. The targets are specific. Wear on heating networks is to fall from 53 percent to 40 percent, on electricity networks from 62 percent to 45 percent, on water supply from 39 percent to 34 percent, and on wastewater systems from 54 percent to 40 percent. Emergency breakdowns are to drop by 20 percent. The energy ministry expects generation capacity to grow by 7.3 gigawatts, lifting total national output to 32.6 gigawatts, though official statements have counted the underlying generation projects differently, sometimes as 15 new plants plus 14 modernizations, sometimes as 29 projects in total. What forced all of this was one winter. On November 27, 2022, a failure at the thermal power plant in Ekibastuz, a mining city in Pavlodar region, cut heat to much of the town while outside temperatures sat near minus 30 degrees Celsius. Authorities declared a state of emergency. Residents went days without heating, pipes and radiators froze and burst, and the regional governor was dismissed. Weeks earlier, more than 20,000 people in the northeastern town of Ridder had lost heating in a similar accident. A review by the energy ministry that December put numbers to what everyone already suspected. The average thermal power plant in Kazakhstan was 61 years old. About 76 percent of them had been running for more than half a century. Average wear on core equipment stood at 66 percent. Deputy Prime Minister Kanat Bozumbayev, who heads the project office, has said the work will concentrate on regions where network wear exceeds 65 to 70 percent. Financing comes from domestic and international financial institutions, banks, the state budget and shareholder contributions, with the government subsidizing interest rates on loans taken by utility companies to keep the repair campaign from landing directly on household tariffs. Targeted assistance for utility bills stays in place for low-income households. Bektenov also pressed the industry and energy ministries to speed up the unified digital platform Smart Turmys. Industry and Construction Minister Yersayin Nagaspayev told the same meeting the first modules would enter pilot operation in the fourth quarter, running a single subscriber registry, digital accounting of utility payments and monitoring of electricity, gas, heat and water consumption. Kazakhstan aims for full metering of utility infrastructure in cities of republican and regional significance by 2029. 17 pilot renovation projects were funded under the national project by 2025, worth 31.7 billion tenge. 2026-07-29 10:10:14
Algal blooms speed plastic breakdown into microplastics SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - The algal blooms that turn rivers and lakes green every summer do more than cloud the water. They also make discarded plastic crumble faster, accelerating the point at which a plastic bag or wrapper starts shedding microplastics, according to research from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The finding matters because the two problems have been managed as separate ones. Water authorities treat blooms as a nutrient pollution issue and plastic waste as a solid waste issue, and the research shows the first speeds up the damage caused by the second. Blooms are also becoming more frequent worldwide as warming water and fertilizer runoff push more nutrients into freshwater systems. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced the results Wednesday. The work was led by Myung Jae-wook, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with doctoral student Kim Young-ju as first author, and was carried out with three researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Plastic that ends up in a river does not sit there inertly. Within days, bacteria and algae colonize its surface and build a living film, an environment researchers call the plastisphere. Scientists already knew this film influences how pathogens spread and how microplastics travel through water. What nobody had established was what happens to that film when a serious bloom hits. To find out, the team built miniature ecosystems in the laboratory using freshwater collected from a pond on the KAIST campus in Daejeon, then added low-density polyethylene film, the flexible plastic used in shopping bags. Blooms were induced by seeding the water with Microcystis aeruginosa, a cyanobacterium commonly used as a model for harmful freshwater blooms, and by adjusting light and nutrient levels. The team then tracked the plastic surfaces for 42 days, analyzing the microbial film, the makeup of the community living in it and the genes those organisms carried. Under bloom conditions, cyanobacteria and a wide range of ordinary bacteria multiplied together and produced a thicker, more complex film than in normal water. Organisms that secrete exopolysaccharides, the sticky substances that bind microbes to each other and to surfaces, increased sharply. The film held on tighter and grew heavier. That shift changed what the plastic itself went through. Bacteria carrying genes for enzymes involved in oxidizing and breaking down plastic, including alkane hydroxylase, copper oxidase and esterase, became more abundant under bloom conditions. Infrared spectroscopy showed a rise in oxidized chemical groups on the plastic surface, and scanning electron microscopy revealed a denser pattern of fine cracks. Both are signs that the material was becoming brittle, the stage before it fragments into microplastic particles. No single plastic-eating microbe was responsible. The researchers attributed the acceleration to the whole community, photosynthetic bacteria and ordinary bacteria working as a layered network, which widens the picture of how plastic degrades in real water bodies rather than in controlled tests with one strain. The study also compared polyethylene with polylactic acid, a plant-based plastic marketed as biodegradable, and found different bacterial groups dominating on each surface. "This research is meaningful in that it looked at plastic pollution and algal blooms not as separate problems but as one environmental problem in which each affects the other," Myung said. "As climate change makes blooms more frequent, I expect this will serve as important evidence for building integrated environmental management strategies that consider water quality management and waste plastic management together." The paper appeared in the journal Water Research on May 25. (Reference Information) Journal: Water Research Title: Eutrophication drives taxonomic and functional trajectories in plastic-associated biofilms DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2026.126183 2026-07-29 09:47:16
Kookmin University leads 22.2 billion won bio materials project SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - A Seoul university better known for design and management has landed one of the year's larger national biotechnology awards, taking the lead role in a government project to mass-produce high-value biological materials that currently exist only in trace amounts in nature. Kookmin University said Tuesday that a research team headed by Park Yong-cheol, a professor in its Department of Convergence Bioengineering, was selected as a new recipient under the advanced bio materials development program, part of the first round of 2026 bio-health research and development projects overseen by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (MOTIR) and supported by the Korea Planning and Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT). The project runs through 2030 with a total budget of 22.2 billion won ($15.1 million), consisting of 15.9 billion won in government funding and 6.3 billion won from participating institutions. The award places Kookmin at the center of a 17-member consortium of companies and research bodies, an unusual position for a university whose research profile in industrial biotechnology has grown quickly over the past several years. Park was selected in April for a separate core research grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea for work on precision fermentation using the food yeast Candida utilis. He received a ministerial award for research and development in biochemistry in 2022 and founded BioCraft, a brewing yeast company, in 2020. Advanced biomaterials refer to substances made from living organisms, natural raw ingredients or bioprocess technology, with applications in medicine, chemicals, food and cosmetics. The project targets three of them: exosomes derived from microbes, high-purity vitamins and microbial lutein. All three are difficult and expensive to obtain at scale by conventional extraction, which is why the research aims to produce them inside engineered microorganisms instead. Kookmin manages the overall project while three companies run the subprojects. Bio-FD&C leads work on bio production processes and commercialization for multifunctional beauty materials based on microbe-derived exosomes. Ace Biopharm handles mass production of high-purity vitamins through microbial processes and their development into functional products. Daebong LS runs the third subproject, covering biomanufacturing processes and commercialization technology for lutein produced by industrial microbes. The research combines several approaches. The team plans to develop ultrafast microbial design methods built on synthetic biology and biofoundry platforms, fermentation and purification processes based on precision fermentation, and manufacturing process technology drawing on big data and deep learning. The goal is a production base for materials that occur naturally in only small quantities, along with a support system linking production through to finished products. "This project is a large-scale research and development task in which 17 companies and institutions participate, linking production of high-function bio materials through to commercialization," Park said. "Based on synthetic biology, biofoundry and precision fermentation technology, we will develop technology that can support mass production and industrialization of advanced bio materials." 2026-07-29 08:22:57
Samarkand hosts Uzbekistan's first sister cities forum SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - Uzbekistan has added another international gathering to Samarkand's growing calendar, hosting the country's first International Sister Cities Forum in the ancient Silk Road city on July 24 and 25, the latest step in a deliberate campaign to make Samarkand the country's face to the world. The forum opened with a scientific and practical conference titled "Brother Cities: A New Model of Sustainable Development and Public Diplomacy," which drew experts, city officials, diplomats and academics from about 20 countries, according to the Uzbek Embassy in Seoul. Participants joined in person and online, alongside representatives of foreign embassies in Uzbekistan, international organizations and local universities. The choice of venue was no accident. Since hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in September 2022, where leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin adopted more than 40 documents, Tashkent has steadily positioned Samarkand as its premier stage for international events. The city welcomed the UN World Tourism Organization General Assembly in 2023, backed by a purpose-built congress and hotel complex, Silk Road Samarkand, and an international airport terminal opened in 2022 that cut travel friction for foreign delegations. The sister cities forum extends that strategy from head-of-state summitry down to the municipal level, where Uzbekistan is betting that city-to-city ties can deliver trade, investment and tourism results that national diplomacy alone cannot. The conference was organized around a plenary session and three thematic tracks. The first covered trade, economic and investment cooperation between partnered cities and regions, with discussions on industrial cooperation, export expansion and support for small and medium-sized businesses. The second addressed science, education, technology and innovation, including partnerships between universities and research centers, joint research projects, academic exchanges and the sharing of smart city and digital governance experience. The third treated tourism as a strategic tool for the sister city network, focusing on joint tourism projects, new routes and the international promotion of Uzbekistan's historical and cultural heritage. Beyond the conference, the two-day forum program included panel discussions, roundtables and signing ceremonies for memorandums and cooperation agreements between sister cities, according to Uzbekistan's Dunyo news agency. The embassy said initiatives and proposals put forward at the conference would feed into new joint projects in economics, education, innovation, tourism and cultural cooperation between partnered cities. The conference brought together participants from about 20 countries, with the full forum running through July 25. 2026-07-29 08:00:05