Journalist
Park Sae-jin박세진
swatchsjp@ajupress.com
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
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Kazakhstan lines up social infrastructure push for 2027-2029 SEOUL, August 18 (AJP) - Hospitals, children's rehabilitation centers and sports facilities will top Kazakhstan's construction priorities for the 2027~2029 budget period, committing the state to another round of building at a time when its own auditors report that much of the last round went unfinished. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev set the priority at a meeting on the economy and budget planning at Akorda on Monday, according to the presidential press service. He was briefed on the state of the economy, the socio-economic forecast for 2027~2029 and the republican budget indicators for those years, and told officials to hold both republican and local budgets in balance and to meet this year's growth targets. The room reflected how much of the government's fiscal machinery the question touches. Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov attended, along with presidential administration head Roman Sklyar, National Bank of Kazakhstan Governor Timur Suleimenov, Supreme Audit Chamber Chairman Alikhan Smailov, Deputy Prime Minister and National Economy Minister Serik Zhumangarin, presidential economic assistant Nurlan Baibazarov and Finance Minister Madi Takiyev. What Tokayev asked for is not a new departure. Kazakhstan has spent the past three years building social facilities at exactly this scale, through a set of national projects that now offer a clear record of what the state can and cannot deliver. The largest of them, Modernization of Rural Healthcare, has just finished. The Health Ministry says all 655 planned primary care facilities are built, including first-aid posts, feldsher-midwife stations and rural outpatient clinics. Of those, 226 went to villages that had no medical building of any kind, and 419 replaced premises the ministry judged unfit for use. The ministry puts the population served at about one million rural residents. A second stage is still running. Thirty-two district hospitals are being rebuilt as multidisciplinary central hospitals, with eight completed by late last year in Temirtau, Balkhash, Zhanaarka, Urzhar, Shuskoye, Merke, Talas and Beineu. Renovation is under way at 36 regional hospitals and 17 perinatal centers, and pediatric bed capacity has risen 38 percent. The school program, Comfortable School, was built to end three-shift teaching and the shortage of pupil places, with schools put up to common standards in cities and villages alike. It opened 105 schools in 2024 and 112 in 2025, of which 45 percent were rural. Another 245 existing schools are being renovated. Sitting above both is the National Infrastructure Plan, which runs to 2029 and lists 204 priority projects in energy, transport, water and sanitation, and digital infrastructure, at an estimated 40.1 trillion tenge. Roughly 90 percent of that money is expected from outside the state budget, which makes private capital and public-private partnerships the load-bearing assumption of the entire plan. The need is not in dispute. A separate national project is spending 13 trillion tenge between 2025 and 2029 on 86,000 kilometers of utility networks, aiming to bring average wear on the country's infrastructure down to 40 percent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which reviewed the plan this year, found more than a third of Kazakhstan's power plants running at 70 to 90 percent degradation. The gap opens at delivery. Yulia Engel, a member of the Supreme Audit Chamber, told the Mazhilis on May 21 that the four national projects running in 2025 were rewritten repeatedly during the year, in deadlines, delivery mechanisms, funding volumes, lists of facilities and target indicators, until they no longer functioned as long-term commitments with fixed parameters. "They have turned into mechanisms for adaptively redistributing budget resources to match the current level of execution," Engel said. Total underfunding of the four came to 38 percent of the planned volume in 2025 alone. The chamber's wider audit of last year's budget execution found that more than 20 percent of over 600 investment projects due for completion were not finished, that 99 projects worth 75 billion tenge were dropped mid-year, and that 2.4 trillion tenge was shifted between budget lines during the year. The volume of money spent inefficiently rose by a factor of 1.7 from 2024. Healthcare showed the same pattern in miniature. From January to October last year, fixed capital investment in the sector reached 214.8 billion tenge, or 89 percent of the 241 billion tenge planned. Smailov's chamber will assess the draft 2027~2029 budget itself, and its audit program for this year covers both Comfortable School and Modernization of Rural Healthcare. The three years Tokayev was briefed on are also the years the budget is supposed to tighten. Kazakhstan has committed to cutting the republican deficit from 2.5 percent of GDP this year to 1.7 percent in 2027 and 0.9 percent in 2028, and to weaning the budget off transfers from the National Fund, the sovereign wealth fund built on oil revenue. The 2026 budget carries no targeted transfers from it. That squeeze is happening in difficult conditions. Value-added tax rose to 16 percent from 12 percent in January, annual inflation was still 10.2 percent in July, and the National Bank has held its base rate at 18 percent since October. The bank expects growth of 3.5 to 4.5 percent this year, below the 5.4 percent the government used in building the current budget. The construction categories Tokayev named on Monday are also the ones foreign contractors have been circling. Korean engineering, urban development and hospital groups spent this year pitching projects in Astana, and healthcare has featured in bilateral talks alongside energy, transport and critical minerals. Tokayev accepted President Lee Jae Myung's invitation to Seoul in April. The first Korea-Central Asia summit is set for Sept. 16 and 17. 2026-08-18 11:11:10 -
Brain tumor chip predicts which drug works for each patient SEOUL, August 18 (AJP) - Patients with the deadliest form of brain cancer usually learn whether a drug works by taking it and waiting for the next scan. A South Korean research team has built a chip that can run that test first, outside the body, using cells taken from the patient's own tumor. The waiting is not free. Glioblastoma kills most patients within 15 months of diagnosis even after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and fewer than five percent live five years. Four months spent on a drug that never reaches the tumor is a third of what a patient has left. KAIST said Tuesday that a team led by mechanical engineering professor Ahn Song-ih built a patient-specific chip that predicted how three glioblastoma patients would respond to treatment, and that those predictions closely tracked how the patients actually fared. The work was done with Sungkyunkwan University's Ahn Jung-ho, neurosurgeon Lim Jae-joon at Bundang CHA Medical Center and CHA University's Kang Youn-jung, and appeared June 27 in the journal Small. Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults and among the hardest to treat. It does not sit as a neat lump a surgeon can lift out. Its cells crawl outward into healthy brain tissue, and that ragged edge, called the tumor margin, is where the disease resists treatment most stubbornly and where it comes back. The KAIST chip models the margin rather than the center of the tumor. Getting a drug to that edge is the second problem. The brain is walled off from the bloodstream by the blood-brain barrier, a lining of tightly sealed vessel cells that keeps harmful substances out of brain tissue. It keeps most cancer drugs out as well. When a tumor takes hold, it remodels the vessels around it. The wall turns leaky in some places and stays shut in others, and how leaky it gets, and where, differs from one patient to the next. That variation has been largely invisible to the tests doctors use now. Predictions about who will respond to what rest mostly on the tumor's genes and biomarkers, which describe the cancer cells and say nothing about the road a drug has to travel to reach them. The chip closes that gap by building the road. Inside a small transparent device threaded with fluid channels, the researchers grew tumor cells taken from newly diagnosed patients alongside human brain vessel cells and astrocytes, the star-shaped support cells that make up much of normal brain tissue. The vessel cells line an upper channel and stand in for a blood vessel. The tumor cells and astrocytes sit below in a three-dimensional network and stand in for the brain the tumor is invading. A porous membrane separates the two, so a drug delivered into the vessel channel has to cross the barrier the way it would in a patient. The design leaves room to add immune cells and the cells that wrap around blood vessels. The team made three chips, one from each of three patients, and dosed them with two drugs. Temozolomide is the standard chemotherapy given after surgery and attacks the cancer cells directly. Bevacizumab goes after the supply line, blocking the growth of the new blood vessels a tumor needs to keep expanding. Gene testing had suggested the three patients would respond in much the same way. On the chips, they did not. Each barrier behaved differently, and so did the response to each drug. Set against the treatment records of the patients the chips were built from, the chip results lined up. Three patients make a signal rather than a proven test. The comparison was also made against outcomes already recorded, not in a study designed to put the chip's predictions on the line before treatment began. Nothing here has yet shown that a chip can safely steer a real treatment decision, and the researchers said the platform has to be checked against a far larger group of patients first. Ahn said Tuesday in a statement released by KAIST that growing patient tumor cells together with the barrier makes it possible to "evaluate treatment responses that differ from patient to patient in a way that is close to reality." She said the team hopes to develop the work into a preclinical platform for personalized treatment strategies and drug development. The first authors are Ryoo Min-su, a doctoral student in KAIST's mechanical engineering department, and Lee Ga-eun, a doctoral student at Sungkyunkwan University. Small selected the paper for its front cover. The second use is further from the clinic and potentially larger. Brain cancer drugs fail for two separate reasons, either because they cannot kill the cells or because they never arrive. A candidate that looks powerful against tumor cells in a dish can be worthless in a person, and that failure usually surfaces late, after years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Regulators have begun pushing toward exactly this kind of testing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's roadmap for reducing animal testing, released in April 2025, named organ-on-a-chip systems among the methods it wants to see take the place of animal studies. The agency put its reasoning in one line. More than 90 percent of drugs that clear animal safety testing go on to fail in humans. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Small Title: Human Blood-Brain Tumor Barrier on a Chip to Investigate Personalized Treatment for Glioblastoma Patients Link/DOI: 10.1002/smll.202506712 2026-08-18 09:59:40 -
Kim Min-seok takes S. Korea's ruling party helm SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - South Korea's governing party handed its leadership on Monday to the man who served as President Lee Jae Myung's first prime minister, giving the president's closest political partner control of the party machine three days after his approval rating fell to the lowest level of his term. Kim Min-seok took 54.08 percent of the vote at the Democratic Party of Korea's national convention in Daejeon, defeating the incumbent leader, Jung Chung-rae, who finished with 45.92 percent. He becomes the second party leader to serve under Lee's government. No candidate cleared a majority on the first count. Voters had ranked the three contenders in order of preference, and when the first tally came up short, the second choices of those who had placed Song Young-gil at the top were added to the totals of the other two. Song finished third. Votes cast by delegates and dues-paying members carried 70 percent of the weight in the result, with a public opinion survey accounting for the remaining 30 percent. The party applied a one-member-one-vote rule for the first time. The new leadership serves a two-year term and will control candidate nominations for the 2028 general election, which makes the post one of the most powerful in the governing camp. Kim told the convention he would rebuild the party around a plan he labeled ABC. A stands for affordability, which he described as politics organized around the cost of living. B stands for broad, meaning a party that adds rather than subtracts. C stands for competence. "Our language, our policies, our attitude and our culture will all evolve," he said. He also set out how he intends to handle the party's dealings with the presidential office, promising what he called a creative horizontal relationship of full cooperation in which the party works for the president's success rather than against it. In his final appeal to delegates before the vote, Kim had put the case for his candidacy in blunter terms, saying the campaign was driven by fear "that the Democratic Party will be shaken, that the government will be shaken, that relations between the party and the government will be shaken, that President Lee Jae Myung will be shaken." The numbers behind that anxiety had landed the previous Friday. Gallup Korea found that 44 percent of respondents approved of Lee's performance in a survey conducted from Aug. 11 to 13, against 46 percent who disapproved. It was the first time disapproval had run ahead of approval since he took office last year. Three weeks earlier, approval had stood at 51 percent. The leadership race itself grew out of the June 3 local elections. The Democratic Party of Korea won 12 metropolitan mayor and governor posts against four for the opposition People Power Party, but it lost Seoul to Oh Se-hoon, and lawmakers began blaming Jung publicly for that defeat within a day of the count. Kim, 62, opened his speech by counting 40 years back to the start of his public life, when he was elected student council president at Seoul National University at the age of 20 and joined the campaign demanding an accounting for the military crackdown in Gwangju in May 1980. He served prison time for organizing protests against the government of Chun Doo-hwan. He has represented the Yeongdeungpo-B district of Seoul across four terms in the National Assembly, split by an 18-year absence. He first won the seat in 1996 at 32, the youngest member of that assembly, and returned to parliament only in 2020 after losing the Seoul mayoral race in 2002. In 2000, he served as chief of staff to Kim Dae-jung in the late president's separate capacity as leader of the governing party, and he has since held the posts of supreme council member, policy committee chairman, and head of the Democratic Research Institute. Lee named him prime minister in July 2025. He left office at the end of June to enter the leadership race, and Han Seong-sook, the former Naver chief executive, replaced him on July 1. The council Kim will chair, however, was shaped by the camp he beat. Choi Min-hee finished first among the five elected supreme council members, taking the senior seat, followed by Park Sun-won, Suh Mi-hwa, Lee Sung-yoon and Han Min-soo. Choi, Lee and Han had campaigned under the banner of Team Jung Chung-rae. 2026-08-17 19:22:12 -
President Lee sends condolences to Indonesia after quake kills 53 SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - President Lee Jae Myung expressed condolences on Monday to victims of the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck eastern Indonesia over the weekend, killing at least 53 people. "I cannot contain my sorrow at the news that a powerful earthquake in eastern Indonesia has caused great damage," Lee wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "On behalf of the government of the Republic of Korea, I extend my deep condolences to the victims and bereaved families who have lost precious family members and their homes in this sudden disaster," he said. Lee said search operations were still under way and that he hoped more survivors would be found. "As rescue and search work continues, I earnestly hope that even one more person returns safely to the arms of their family," he wrote. He also addressed the Indonesian government directly. "Under President Prabowo Subianto's leadership, I sincerely hope recovery proceeds quickly so that residents of the affected areas soon regain their peaceful daily lives," Lee said. Lee posted the message in both Korean and Indonesian and tagged Prabowo in the text. The earthquake struck at 5:58 a.m. Saturday local time off the northern coast of Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province. The United States Geological Survey placed the epicenter 68 kilometers north-northwest of the city of Ende at a depth of 10 kilometers. Indonesia's disaster management agency said at least 53 people had been killed and more than 1,300 homes damaged, over two-thirds of them severely. About 5,000 people have been forced from their homes. Landslides triggered by the quake blocked sections of the Trans-Flores Highway and cut off remote villages, slowing rescue teams. Hundreds of aftershocks followed the initial tremor. Flores has a history of severe seismic disasters. An earthquake of similar magnitude in December 1992 triggered a tsunami that killed about 2,500 people on the island. The South Korean government has not announced humanitarian assistance for the affected areas. 2026-08-17 17:36:16 -
Third-heaviest rainfall in Korean records kills 1 in southern city SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - Record rainfall along South Korea's southern coast killed one person and injured four on Monday, and the island city of Geoje logged the heaviest single day of rain since observations began there in 1972. Geoje recorded 577.4 millimeters between midnight and 1 p.m., the Korea Meteorological Administration said. Among the 97 surface stations whose records the agency ranks, only two days have produced more, both on Aug. 31, 2002, when Typhoon Rusa dropped 870.5 millimeters on Gangneung and 712.5 millimeters on Daegwallyeong. Geoje took 124.5 millimeters in a single hour, and nearby Tongyeong took 97.4 millimeters, both hourly records. Tongyeong also set a daily record of 409.7 millimeters. The weather agency put the hourly intensity at a level expected once every 200 years in Geoje and once every 100 years in Tongyeong. The rain came from the remnant of Typhoon Dolphin, which weakened well before reaching the Korean Peninsula. At about 4:42 a.m., a landslide swept soil onto the lower floors of an apartment building in Geoje's Okpo-dong, killing one resident and injuring two others. On Gonri Island in Tongyeong, a landslide buried a house and a resident trapped from the waist down was rescued and taken to hospital. In Ulsan, a taxi passenger was hurt when the driver braked to avoid a fallen roadside tree. Damage reports reached 838 nationwide as of 10 a.m., the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters said. A total of 159 people from 116 households evacuated in Busan and South Gyeongsang Province, and 108 had not returned home. The National Fire Agency said it had taken 1,947 calls from Geoje and Tongyeong and rescued 136 people. Power was cut to 2,030 households and 25 school facilities were damaged, 12 of them flooded. More than 20 roads in Geoje were closed at one point and most city bus services stopped running. Hanwha Ocean and Samsung Heavy Industries, which operate shipyards in Geoje, told workers not to travel in because roads around the yards were impassable. The government approved 3 billion won ($2.2 million) in special disaster management grants and 40 million won ($29,000) for relief operations. "Extremely heavy rain of more than 800 millimeters has fallen on the Geoje area since the 15th," Interior and Safety Minister Yoon Ho-jung said. "The rain band is moving toward Busan, Ulsan and other neighboring areas and continues to produce rain, which makes this a very serious situation." The rain eased a drought in South Gyeongsang Province. Average storage at agricultural reservoirs across the province's 18 cities and counties rose to 43.1 percent as of 2 p.m. from 32.2 percent on Aug. 14, and Geoje's reservoirs climbed from 28.7 percent to 73.6 percent. Five counties were at the severe drought level on Aug. 14. By Monday afternoon only Miryang remained there. 2026-08-17 16:04:03 -
CJ targets 12 tln won North America sales by 2028 SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - The South Korean conglomerate behind bibigo dumplings, Olive Young beauty stores and the KCON music festival is rebuilding its American operations, betting that people who watch Korean shows will keep buying Korean food and cosmetics. CJ Group has put a number on it, aiming for 12 trillion won ($8.49 billion )in North American revenue in 2028, about a 50 percent increase from more than 8 trillion won it took in there last year. Last year's figure was already more than 10 times the roughly 800 billion won the group recorded in 2017, growth that averaged about 33 percent a year. The plan came out at a briefing on Aug. 15 (local time) at the Hilton Los Angeles North Glendale, where executives from the food, entertainment and beauty businesses described how the three will be linked so that cultural interest converts into repeat purchases. Heo Min-hoe, chief executive of CJ Corp., the group's holding company, said the pieces have been more than three decades in the making. "We will build an ecosystem that carries the popularity of the K-wave into K-lifestyle experience, and accelerate our advance into the North American market," he said. CJ invested in the American film studio DreamWorks in 1995 and staged the first U.S. edition of KCON, a festival pairing K-pop concerts with Korean food and cosmetics, in 2012. The acquisitions came later, among them the Minnesota frozen food company Schwan's in 2019 and the content studio Fifth Season in 2021, bringing cumulative investment in North America to 9.7 trillion won as of the first half of this year. Schwan's changed the arithmetic more than any other purchase, because its plants and its shelf space carried bibigo, CJ CheilJedang's Korean food brand, into roughly 80,000 American stores including Walmart, Kroger and Costco. CJ CheilJedang now runs 20 production sites across the United States and booked 4.91 trillion won in American sales last year. Kim Jin-sik, a co-chief executive of CJ America, described the sequence the group is counting on. "We will extend American consumers' interest in K-content into habitual, repeated consumption of K-food and beauty, and that will lead back into offline cultural experience, creating a virtuous cycle," he said. Food carries the largest share of the target. CJ CheilJedang plans to widen local production and distribution, and to move the advantage it built in frozen food into shelf-stable products, the category that needs no freezer space at home or in the store. Federico Arreola, president of the Asian cuisine business unit at CJ Schwan's, said the lineup will broaden well past the dumplings that opened the door. "Beyond dumplings, we will actively grow global strategic products such as Hetbahn rice, chicken, seaweed snacks, kimchi and K-sauces, and raise bibigo into a global brand enjoyed at any table in the world," he said. 2026-08-17 13:39:33 -
Korean trade minister flies to US as $200 bln deal snags SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - South Korea's industry minister arrived in Washington on Sunday and said that detailed disputes had surfaced in the final stretch of talks over a $200 billion investment package, casting doubt on a late-August announcement of the first project Minister of Trade, Industry and Resources Kim Jung-kwan told reporters at Dulles International Airport on August 16 (local time) that video conferences and working contacts had not resolved the issues and that the whole file needed sorting in one pass. The end of the month remains the goal, he said, though more has come up than expected. He made the trip three weeks after his last visit and without a chief trade negotiator. President Lee Jae Myung removed Yeo Han-koo from the post effective midnight on Aug. 15 through compulsory dismissal, a step rarely used against a political appointee, and gave no reason. No successor has been named. The $200 billion is the strategic investment portion of a $350 billion commitment made under last year's tariff agreement, which cut U.S. tariffs on Korean goods from 25 percent to 15 percent, with $150 billion allocated to shipbuilding. A joint fact sheet and a strategic investment memorandum released on Nov. 14 set the total to be pursued by January 2029 and capped outflows at $20 billion a year. Kim said he had received no warning that tariffs would rise if Seoul did not move faster. He said Trump had been calling for speed since early this year and that Seoul shared the aim, with a year already passing. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Jan. 26 that because the National Assembly had not enacted the trade deal, he was raising tariffs on Korean automobiles, lumber and pharmaceuticals and all other reciprocal tariffs from 15 percent to 25 percent. The increase was not carried out, and the National Assembly passed the special law on Korea-U.S. strategic investment on March 12. The tariff ceiling is the second front. The U.S. Trade Representative opened two Section 301 investigations in March, one into forced labor and one into structural overcapacity, and Korea was a target of both. The forced-labor measure took effect July 24 and raises most-favored-nation rates up to 12.5 percent rather than adding 12.5 points on top of them. The overcapacity finding has not been issued. Seoul's position is that the combined total must not exceed 15 percent. Kim said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had both said they would honor the spirit of the agreement, and that he would not prejudge the outcome. Washington had indicated late August for the overcapacity result, he said, but it now felt like it was running longer. He would not confirm that combined-cycle power generation remained the leading candidate for the first project, saying only to wait and see. Three weeks ago he said the first project was being discussed with energy at the center. Commercial reasonableness is the governing principle, and the law permits only investments whose principal and interest can be repaid over the investment period. Among the candidates Washington has proposed, few have been found commercially viable. Japan closed its tariff talks in July 2025 and announced its first two projects in February and March. Korea finished about three months later and has yet to name one. 2026-08-17 11:25:14 -
Trump orders cut to US-S. Korea joint military drill SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - Hours before South Korea and the United States opened their largest annual exercise, United States President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint military drills on the peninsula, pointing to his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was not happy the U.S. had agreed long ago to take part in the exercises, which he called costly and largely paid for by Washington. He said the drills send a signal that is "totally inappropriate and hostile" to a country that has been unthreatening and respectful during his presidency. "Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises," he wrote, using the title Secretary of War for the Pentagon chief. The post went up at 5:04 p.m. Sunday in Washington, 6:04 a.m. Monday in Seoul, the morning the exercise began. It was the first time in his second term that Trump had publicly faulted the combined drills and ordered them cut. Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) runs from Aug. 17 to Aug. 27. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Forces Korea said at a joint briefing on Aug. 10 that UFS 26 is a defensive annual exercise involving about 18,000 South Korean troops, a scale similar to previous years. This year's exercise also carries part of the full operational capability assessment for South Korean forces, a step toward the transfer of wartime operational control, while the field training component was cut sharply. The reduction has been read in Seoul as the Lee Jae Myung government managing military tension with Pyongyang. North Korea has spent decades describing the exercise in the language Trump echoed. North Korea's Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried by state media on Friday, called the combined training a rehearsal for an aggressive war that was driving a different level of instability in the region. The statement threatened that the North would exercise its right to self-defense and said this year's drills are more provocative than last year's. North Korea fired ballistic missiles into the East Sea on Aug. 6 and again on Aug. 12. Pyongyang has not commented on the launches, which outside analysts assess were meant either to protest the exercise or to advance weapons systems. The framing has held for years. In 2024, North Korea's Institute for American Studies, which sits under the Foreign Ministry, called the exercise preparation for aggression and described it as the most offensive and provocative in the world. In 2016, the Korean People's Army, North Korea's military, threatened a preemptive retaliatory strike against forces taking part. The exercise grew out of an attempt on a South Korean president's life. North Korean commandos raided the Blue House in January 1968, prompting a government mobilization exercise that was renamed Ulchi the following year after Eulji Mundeok, the Goguryeo commander who turned back a Sui invasion. It merged in 1976 with Focus Lens, a command post exercise the U.N. Command had run since 1954, and the combined drill was renamed Ulchi Freedom Guardian in 2008. Seoul and Washington suspended it in June 2018 after Trump's first summit with Kim in Singapore, where he called the drills expensive and provocative. The allies restored large-scale field training in 2022 under the name Ulchi Freedom Shield, after a four-year suspension imposed while the two sides tried to negotiate away the North's nuclear weapons. North Korea later said Trump had personally committed to halting the exercises and cited their resumption as evidence Washington had broken faith. Trump's reference to Kim follows a year of open signaling. He met Kim three times in his first term, in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019 and briefly at the Demilitarized Zone that same year, and since returning to office he has raised the idea of another meeting repeatedly. He told Lee on the sidelines of the Group of Seven (G7) meetings in France in June that he would restart diplomacy with North Korea, then posted a photograph of his walk with Kim at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. On Saturday he posted another picture of the two of them, writing that they get along well. Kim has said he holds fond memories of Trump while ruling out any discussion of surrendering his nuclear arsenal. Trump closed the post with a line he flagged as unrelated, writing that he had asked South Korea's president to join U.S. efforts on the denuclearization of Iran and was told, "No thanks!" He did not say what he had asked of Seoul. South Korea's presidential office and its Ministry of National Defense had not commented as of Monday morning, and no change to the exercise schedule had been announced. 2026-08-17 09:23:11 -
Sookmyung AI learns when to react, not just how SEOUL, August 14 (AJP) - A research team at Sookmyung Women's University has built an artificial intelligence model that works out when a listener should react during a conversation, treating that as a separate question from what the reaction should look like. The model, named CaReDiff, took second place in the REACT26 Grand Challenge organized by ACM Multimedia, and the work has been accepted for an oral presentation session at the conference, which opens in Rio de Janeiro in November. CaReDiff generates a video of a listener whose face responds to what a speaker is saying and to how the speaker looks while saying it. The team is led by Kim Byung-gyu, a professor in the university's Department of Artificial Intelligence Engineering. The difficulty the work addresses is timing. Earlier systems learned to react at the right moment and to use the right expression as a single task, which left them reacting at the wrong points in a live conversation. The same design meant that tuning a model to one person's habits could damage the reaction patterns it had already learned. The team split the two problems apart. One technique, which the researchers call causal lead-lag cross attention, lines up the moment of the reaction explicitly rather than leaving it to be inferred. A second works in stages, planning the overall arc of the expression first and then refining the detail. Personal style is handled by a separate lightweight module, the Personalised Residual Adapter, which sits alongside the trained model instead of altering it. It carries personality traits and a record of how the individual has reacted in the past. Less than one percent of the model's total settings are trained to produce a personal reaction style, and the rest are left as they are. The team tested the system on the MARS dataset. On FRCorr, the measure the challenge uses to score how closely a generated reaction matches the reactions real people gave, the model reached 0.7671 in the offline setting. In the real-time setting, it reached 0.6462, up from 0.5680. With the personalization module applied, the offline figure rose to 0.7868 from 0.5899 and the real-time figure to 0.6510 from 0.5475. The reaction timing the model had learned before personalization was applied stayed intact. Those figures come from tests against recorded conversation data. The team has not reported results from human viewers judging whether the generated faces read as natural, and has not shown the system running inside a working chatbot or robot. The researchers expect the technology to be used in chatbots, social robots and humanoid robots, in services where a machine has to hold an emotional exchange with a person. Choi Ji-hoon was the first author. Choi Se-in, Lee Han-seul and Qurat Ul Ain Aisha took part in the research. "What matters about this result is that we have secured the core underlying technology that lets AI understand the context of a conversation and the characteristics of an individual, and respond at the right moment," Kim said. "We will refine this human-centered empathetic AI so that it understands human emotion and intent and communicates naturally, and carry it through to real-world demonstration." 2026-08-14 21:34:53 -
Iran envoy urges South Korea to rebuild ties SEOUL, August 13 (AJP) - South Korea should draw on its historically strong relationship with Iran to seek a role in postwar reconstruction and favorable terms for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Iranian envoy in Seoul said. “We should close our eyes and look to the future,” Mohammad Esmaeil Passandideh, counselor and deputy head of mission at the Iranian embassy in Seoul, said in a recent interview with AJP. “The post-war period will be a great time for Korea to rebuild damaged relations,” he said. “It will be too late for Korea to wait for the green light from the United States.” The appeal comes after South Korea spent months reshaping its energy supply chain around disruptions in the Gulf. Before the war, roughly 70 percent of South Korea’s crude had historically passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Middle Eastern crude has since fallen to about half of total imports, from roughly two-thirds a year earlier, with American, African and Latin American barrels taking its place. The war began on Feb. 28, when joint American and Israeli strikes hit Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. His son Mojtaba Khamenei was elected to succeed him on March 8. A ceasefire brokered by Pakistan and a memorandum signed in June halted the largest exchanges, but disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, the Strait of Hormuz and sanctions remain unresolved. Passandideh said more than 3,000 Iranians had been killed and strikes had damaged energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. He did not provide an estimate of the financial cost. He described the postwar outlook as uncertain, but said one Iranian response was predictable. “Some concepts are not acceptable for Iranians — like surrender,” he said. “They will resist, not only for one month or two months.” That resistance, he said, has reshaped Tehran’s approach to Hormuz. Before Feb. 28, Iran’s goal had been to maintain peaceful and safe passage through the strait. The attacks fundamentally changed the security calculation. “The security situation around the Strait of Hormuz fundamentally changed,” Passandideh said. But he rejected the idea that Tehran wanted a permanent postwar closure. “I want to mention again: Iran is not looking to close or blockade the Strait of Hormuz after the war,” he said. Iran nevertheless no longer appears to view security in the waterway as something it should provide at its own expense. Tehran created the Persian Gulf Strait Authority in May and began imposing fees reportedly ranging from about $1 million to $2 million per voyage, depending on vessel size and cargo. Iran’s parliament is also considering legislation that would bar vessels linked to the United States, Israel and other states Tehran considers hostile while charging others for passage. U.S. President Donald Trump has separately demanded that vessels pay the equivalent of 20 percent of their cargo value in return for U.S. Navy protection of the waterway. Asked how Iran would price its own system, Passandideh answered by comparison. “I think that we will be cheaper than Trump,” he said. He said the strait could not simply return to its prewar order and argued that regional states should take more responsibility for their own security. “We believe bringing safety and security to our region is not by the United States, by foreigners,” he said. “By ourselves, by our countries.” “I believe it is time to know the United States cannot secure safety for others.” Pressed on whether high tolls could ultimately drive Asian shipping away from the Gulf and hurt Iran itself, Passandideh returned instead to what Iran had already paid during the war. “We paid a lot during this war. We paid the cost for our safety,” he said. “We expected the international community to defend us, to condemn the aggressors. Who blamed the United States and Israel? Who?” Iran, he argued, should no longer be expected to bear the cost of securing one of the world’s most important energy corridors by itself. “Maybe some countries should pay more for reaching this security,” he said. South Korea, he suggested, is among the countries from which Tehran expected more. “During this war, we provided free and secure passage for Korea,” Passandideh said, adding that Iran had expected Seoul to speak more forcefully in return. South Korea and Iran have a relationship stretching back more than six decades, including years when Korean builders were heavily involved in Iranian infrastructure projects and Iranian crude was an important part of Korea’s energy supply. But relations deteriorated as U.S. sanctions tightened and billions of dollars in Iranian oil proceeds became frozen in South Korean bank accounts. The funds were eventually released in 2023 as part of a U.S.-Iran prisoner exchange. The nuclear dispute remains another obstacle to the relationship Passandideh wants rebuilt. He argued that the issue was not weapons but Iran’s right to maintain a civilian nuclear program on the same terms as other countries. “A peaceful nuclear program is our choice, and it is our right,” he said. “Iranians cannot accept any double standard.” He said Tehran had no intention of developing nuclear weapons. “We don’t want nuclear weapons, and we don’t have any plan to make nuclear weapons,” he said. Iran and six world powers reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, restricting enrichment and expanding international monitoring before Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. For Passandideh, the postwar question is whether South Korea treats its retreat from Iran as permanent or tries to rebuild a relationship that once carried considerable economic weight. His argument was defiant on sovereignty and security, but he ended on the cost being borne inside Iran. “I hope my country and our people can overcome these challenges,” he said. “Living is so hard. The cost of living is so high.” 2026-08-13 17:47:53