AJU PRESS ASIA FIRST NEWS AGENCY

Journalist

Park Sae-jin
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
  • Kakao settles wage dispute after first strike
    Kakao settles wage dispute after first strike SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - A wage agreement that took 18 rounds of bargaining and the first strike in the company's history was ratified this week, closing a roughly three-month standoff at Kakao over how the South Korean technology company pays for performance. The deal applies a 6.3 percent increase measured against the funding base for total annual salary, excluding money set aside for stage-up raises tied to moves into higher job grades and roles. Employees also receive a special bonus of 3 million won, about $2,110. "Voting by members on the tentative agreement has been completed," the Kakao branch of the Korean Chemical, Textile and Food Workers' Union said Friday. Both sides had agreed since early this year that pay would rise. What they could not agree on was the formula underneath it. The union sought a 6.9 percent raise and a defined standard for performance pay set at 13 to 14 percent of operating profit, worth about 10 million won a person, or roughly $7,030. Kakao countered with 6.8 percent and performance pay funded at 10 percent of operating profit, on the condition that restricted stock units already promised to employees be counted inside that pool. Restricted stock units are company shares granted to staff that convert into ownership only after a set holding period. Talks went nowhere. The Gyeonggi Regional Labor Relations Commission suspended mediation on May 27, a ruling that handed the union the legal right to take industrial action and turned a bargaining impasse into a labor dispute. Members walked out for four hours on June 10, the first strike since Kakao was founded. The pressure continued through the summer. On June 29 employees took annual leave and logged out of internal work systems in a protest the union called a logout day. Picket demonstrations followed inside company offices on July 21. The two sides reached a tentative settlement on July 29. "We plan to faithfully implement the agreement reached in these negotiations and to work together on sustainable growth and a working environment where members can focus more on their work," a Kakao official said. The agreement closes once the two sides complete the remaining steps, including a signing ceremony. 2026-08-07 17:24:31
  • Homeplus reopens 67 stores after 25-day shutdown
    Homeplus reopens 67 stores after 25-day shutdown SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Shelves stood about 30 percent stocked, by the company's own count, when 67 Homeplus stores reopened across South Korea on Friday, 25 days after the country's second-largest hypermarket chain ran out of cash to keep them running. A court in Seoul will decide within four weeks whether the company survives. Homeplus called Friday's reopening a soft opening rather than a return to normal trading at the 67 big-box stores, which combine a full supermarket with floors of clothing and household goods. Checkout systems, deliveries and stock control are being tested in live conditions through Aug. 12, and the stores are scheduled to open fully on Aug. 13. The company said the rest of its goods would arrive before then. The Seoul Bankruptcy Court has set Sept. 4 as the deadline for creditors to approve a rehabilitation plan under South Korea's court-supervised restructuring process, and the law permits no further extension. A meeting of creditors to vote on the plan is expected between late this month and early September. The stores reopened on borrowed money. Meritz Financial Group, the company's largest creditor, transferred a 200 billion won loan, about $141 million at Friday's exchange rate, this week. The court had terminated the rehabilitation on July 3 after Homeplus failed to raise that amount on its own, and every store shut on July 13. The company appealed on July 20, the final day available, after its owner MBK Partners and the firm's chairman, Kim Byung-ju, guaranteed the Meritz loan in full. The court reversed itself the next day. Members of the Korean Mart Labor Union's Homeplus branch appeared at the National Assembly press briefing room on Friday alongside lawmakers from the Democratic Party of Korea, the Rebuilding Korea Party, the Progressive Party and the Social Democratic Party, and asked the public to shop at the reopened stores. "Homeplus, which was on the verge of liquidation because of the irresponsible greed of speculative capital, reopened its doors today," they said. The phrase pointed at MBK Partners, the private equity firm that has owned Homeplus since 2015. The company, now fighting for its survival, spent most of its 28 years as a fixture of South Korean life. Samsung C&T opened the first Homeplus in Daegu on Sept. 4, 1997, months before the Asian financial crisis forced Samsung to hand control to Britain's Tesco. The chain grew into one half of a duopoly with Emart, absorbing the former Carrefour stores in 2008 after both Carrefour and Walmart gave up on the market, until Tesco's accounting scandal pushed it to sell Homeplus to MBK for 7.2 trillion won, about $6.4 billion at the time and the largest buyout in South Korean history. Homeplus has said 2.7 trillion won of that price was borrowed against its own shares. The debt came due just as Coupang's overnight grocery delivery, launched nationwide in 2019 and supercharged by the pandemic, redrew how South Koreans shop. Hypermarkets' share of retail sales fell from 15.1 percent in 2021 to 9.8 percent last year, while online purchases accounted for more than 60 percent of total retail sales by March this year. Homeplus filed for rehabilitation in March last year, suspended 37 of its 104 hypermarkets in May, and sold its convenience-supermarket chain in June. The plan before creditors is to rebuild the company as a smaller entity. Homeplus intends to cut multi-story stores down to single floors of about 3,300 square meters and stock them with food, household essentials and its own private-label goods, a format the company has compared to the American chain Trader Joe's. Homeplus said traffic to its membership app reached 100,000 visitors after it announced the reopening date, above the level of a year earlier. Should creditors reject the plan, or fail to vote by Sept. 4, Homeplus enters bankruptcy proceedings regardless of how much money sits in its accounts. 2026-08-07 16:44:06
  • Uzbek President Mirziyoyev holds open business dialogue in August
    Uzbek President Mirziyoyev holds open business dialogue in August SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Uzbekistan will hold its annual open dialogue between President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and entrepreneurs in late August, the Uzbek Embassy in Seoul said on Friday, with no date yet fixed three weeks out. Nearly 6,000 inquiries have reached the organizing commission's call centers and official bots since intake opened, according to material the embassy distributed. More than 4,200 were resolved, and roughly 1,800 remain under review. Expert groups are working through 300 problems classified as systemic. Business ombudsman Abdumannop Buriev, appointed in December and facing his first dialogue in the post, said the office is trying to catch problems earlier. "We focus primary attention on building a preventive system that averts issues before they arise and protects entrepreneurs' rights early on," Buriev said in the embassy statement. The largest clusters of inquiries concern legal protection for entrepreneurs, with more than 940, and banking, with more than 910. Allocation of production space drew more than 750, and simplification of business regulation nearly 680. Kashkadarya region, Tashkent city, Samarkand region and Fergana region generated the highest volumes. Away from the call center, government bodies have held more than 750 meetings with over 8,800 entrepreneurs, producing more than 3,500 proposals and complaints. The business ombudsman's office and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry ran a further 130 meetings drawing more than 5,700 entrepreneurs, who raised close to 1,500 issues. Mirziyoyev held the first of these dialogues on August 20, 2021. Four have followed, all in August, the most recent last year in New Tashkent and the one before that in Nukus. Measures announced at the meetings have reached the statute book. The 2022 dialogue removed the Chamber of Commerce and Industry from government subordination and abolished criminal liability for violating trade rules. At the 2024 meeting in Nukus, the ceiling on microloans was tripled to 300 million soum, about $25,000, and all banks and microfinance organizations were cleared to lend to small and medium businesses. The president's office says close to a thousand proposals raised at the meetings have been written into legislation. The machinery around them was formalized by a presidential resolution in May 2024, which created a republican commission to organize the dialogue and regional working groups to handle problems locally. Under that resolution, appeals are taken around the clock from June 15 each year, sorted daily to expert groups and regional teams, and systemic problems are reviewed weekly. Ahead of last year's dialogue, the call center took more than 13,000 appeals and proposals, the president's office said at the time. That was a final count. Under the 2024 resolution, intake runs until the dialogue itself, and this year's stands at roughly 6,000. 2026-08-07 15:41:24
  • South Korea shares AI forensic know-hows with Tajikistan
    South Korea shares AI forensic know-hows with Tajikistan SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - South Korean police and forensic specialists trained about 30 Tajik law enforcement officials in Dushanbe this week in methods for investigating phone scams, deepfake fraud and crimes committed through cryptocurrency. The program targeted a category of crime that has grown alongside Tajikistan's reliance on money sent home by migrant workers. The World Bank put remittance inflows at about 49 percent of gross domestic product in 2024, up from 39 percent the previous year and the highest share of any economy in the world. Fraud built around fake overseas job placements and visa processing has spread with that dependence. "This seminar can contribute not only to the response to sharply increasing cybercrime in Tajikistan, but also to the protection of our residents and nationals there," said Jeon Sung-sik, South Korea's ambassador to Tajikistan. He described the program as the first policing cooperation between the two countries and said he expected it to solidify their public safety and law enforcement networks. The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) organized the seminar through its Dushanbe office. Its delegation drew experts from the Korean National Police Agency, the National Forensic Service and the consulting firm KOFO. Tajik participants came from the interior ministry, the police and the border guard service. Before the sessions opened, the visiting experts spent Monday at the Tajik interior ministry's digital forensics center and at border management facilities, examining the conditions local investigators work in. Lectures ran Tuesday through Thursday. Specialists from the Korean National Police Agency, the Korean National Police University and the National Forensic Service presented South Korean research on using artificial intelligence to detect voice phishing calls and deepfakes, which are video or audio recordings altered to impersonate a real person. Further sessions covered tracing crimes carried out with cryptocurrency, analyzing digital evidence drawn from Telegram and large language models, authenticating collected evidence, and pulling data from mobile phones and internet-connected devices. KOICA also held a joint workshop on Tuesday with the International Organization for Migration, where officials from both countries reviewed recent patterns in online fraud aimed at migrants and people seeking work abroad. The program closed Friday with a discussion of international coordination, joined by the British and United States embassies in Dushanbe, the European Union, the International Organization for Migration, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Electronic evidence in online fraud, digital sex crimes and virtual asset cases frequently sits on servers outside the country where the crime was reported, which makes such cases difficult to prosecute without agreements between governments. Ismonalizoda Mavluda, a senior professor in information security and digital technology at a Tajik police training institute, attended the sessions. "KOICA and the experts from these institutions shared Korea's advanced technology and capability in digital crime, a field where response has been difficult until now," she said. "I hope the cooperation continues." 2026-08-07 15:02:02
  • KAIST develops AI chip with tunable response speed
    KAIST develops AI chip with tunable response speed SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - KAIST researchers have built a semiconductor that can be set to react quickly or slowly, matching the pace of whatever information reaches it, and that keeps the setting after the power goes off. Arranged in a grid of 256, the devices predicted the course of a mathematical pattern used in the field as a difficulty test about four times more accurately than an identical grid with every device fixed at a single speed. Nature Communications published the work on July 4. Choi Shin-hyun, a chair professor in KAIST's School of Electrical Engineering and its Graduate School of Semiconductor Technology, led the team. He said the design lets a chip respond "in the way best suited to the rate at which data changes," and that he expects it to lift performance and cut power draw in self-driving cars, robots and wearable devices. Information does not arrive at one speed. A heartbeat shifts in thousandths of a second. Heat building inside a factory motor drifts over hours. Both are readings taken across time, and both land on a chip that has to make sense of them. Any chip reading that kind of stream carries two habits set at the factory. One is how fast it reacts when a new signal arrives. The other is how long it holds that signal before the trace fades. Fixed habits work when everything arrives at one rate. When fast and slow readings come in together, they do not. A chip that lets go too quickly loses the slow pattern. A chip that holds on too long smears the fast one. The KAIST device adds a control. Beneath the layer that handles the incoming signal sits a second layer holding electric charge. Adding charge there makes the device forget faster. Taking charge away makes it hold on longer. Once set, that level stays without any current to maintain it. Keeping a chip in a chosen state normally costs a steady trickle of power. The team moved the forgetting time between roughly 0.7 and 3.8 thousandths of a second, a span of about five times over. The range of signal speeds the device could follow ran from 182 to 1,912 cycles per second. It registered pulses as brief as 50 billionths of a second. The gain comes from mixing settings across many devices. On the 256-device grid, some fast and some slow, one chip follows quick and slow signals at once without software separating them out first. KAIST ran that grid on the Lorenz system, a pattern whose path is notoriously hard to forecast, and recorded the fourfold improvement. KAIST's announcement leads with a larger figure, a 40-fold cut in prediction error. That result came from a simpler test on an artificial signal, and it measures the device against itself with the control frozen. No artificial intelligence chip now on the market took part in the comparison. The university also said the grid matched software at the same task while drawing far less energy. It gave no number for the saving and named nothing to measure it against. The materials are ordinary ones. A five-nanometer layer of indium gallium zinc oxide does the processing. The control layer stacks silicon dioxide, hafnium oxide and silicon dioxide. KAIST said the combination works with the fabrication process behind most chips now in production, which matters for whether the design could ever be made in quantity. What exists so far is a laboratory component, 256 cells on a grid. The self-driving cars, the robots and the wearables are what Choi expects. None of them were tested. Kim Dae-won, a doctoral candidate at KAIST, is first author. Two researchers from Samsung Electronics' semiconductor research center are co-authors, one of them a company Fellow. KAIST did not say what Samsung contributed to the work, and did not name a funding source. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Nature Communications Title: Programmable memtransistor array with temporal dynamics modulation for efficient time-series data processing Link/DOI: https://bit.ly/4gkOvzB ---- AJP Takeaways ● Choi Shin-hyun's KAIST team built a semiconductor whose reaction speed can be set to match how fast incoming information changes, moving its forgetting time between roughly 0.7 and 3.8 thousandths of a second and holding that setting with no power. ● Samsung Electronics has two researchers on the paper, one of them a company Fellow. KAIST did not say what the company contributed or name any funding source, and neither point appears in the university's announcement. ● A grid of 256 devices forecasts the Lorenz system about four times more accurately than the same grid fixed at one speed. The 40-fold figure KAIST leads with comes from a simpler test on an artificial signal and measures the device against itself, not against any AI chip on the market. ● Nature Communications published the work on July 4. 2026-08-07 11:02:15
  • Kookmin University opens AI alliance with 10 companies
    Kookmin University opens AI alliance with 10 companies SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - A proposal to form a corporate consortium that would fund dedicated admission seats in artificial intelligence and software was raised at Kookmin University on July 24, at the launch of an industry alliance the Seoul school is building with 10 technology companies. Contract-based quotas let companies pay for places at a university under an agreement that links admission to employment with the sponsoring firms. The university's account of the meeting did not name who made the proposal, set a timeline, or say whether any company had committed to it. Kookmin University said Thursday that its College of Software Convergence has hosted the launch at the main administration building. The alliance is called the KMU AX Innovation Alliance, taking its name from AI transformation, the term used in South Korea for applying AI across an organization's existing operations. Son Jin-sik, the university's vice president for planning, and Hwang Sun-tae, dean of the software college, attended. Participants discussed joint projects, field training, internships, hiring pipelines and jointly operated courses, the university said. KT, NHN Cloud, TmaxTibero, Hancom InnoStream, Innogrid and Maum AI were among the companies represented, drawn from cloud computing, data, enterprise software, security and applied AI. The university did not say whether the firms had joined the alliance as members. Kookmin has held a government software designation since 2022, when the Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation selected its software college for funding of up to 2 billion won a year. Fifty-eight universities hold the designation. The Ministry of Science and ICT began converting those schools this year into what it calls AI-centered universities, a program paying 3 billion won a year for as long as eight years. Seven were named on May 5. They were Gachon, Korea, Sogang, Sungkyunkwan, Soonchunhyang, Soongsil and Yonsei universities. Kookmin was not among them. The ministry said then that it would select three more in June from universities outside the software program. On July 2 it announced a separate expansion of eight additional places, restricted to software-designated universities outside the capital region. Kookmin, in Seoul, was not eligible for that round. The government has said it wants 30 AI-centered universities by 2030. The national AI action plan for 2026 through 2028, issued in February by the National AI Strategy Committee and the science ministry, calls for converting the software-designated universities into AI-centered ones and for expanding contract departments and other industry-demand-based training. Kookmin marks its 80th year in 2026 and has named eight priority fields under a long-term development plan. One of them is AI+X, the pairing of AI with other disciplines, and the alliance sits under that field. The university said it would hold regular exchanges and follow-up working-level consultations with the participating companies, and would keep expanding the network to firms in cloud and AI infrastructure, generative AI and AI agents, data, enterprise software, security and field-deployed AI. Its software college funding runs to December 2027. AJP Takeaways ● Kookmin University hosted the July 24 launch of the KMU AX Innovation Alliance, where a proposal was raised to form a corporate consortium funding dedicated admission seats in AI and software. The university did not name who made the proposal, set a timeline, or say whether any company committed. ● The Ministry of Science and ICT named seven AI-centered universities on May 5 without including Kookmin, then restricted a July expansion of eight further places to schools outside the capital region, leaving the Seoul university ineligible. Neither the selection round nor Kookmin's exclusion from it appeared in the university's announcement. ● KT, NHN Cloud, TmaxTibero, Hancom InnoStream, Innogrid and Maum AI were among 10 companies represented at the launch. The university did not say whether the firms had joined the alliance as members. ● The National AI Strategy Committee's action plan for 2026 through 2028 calls for converting South Korea's 58 software-designated universities into AI-centered ones and for expanding contract departments and other industry-demand-based training. 2026-08-07 09:44:27
  • Kazakhstan Begins Construction of 800km Highway Linking Caspian Sea
    Kazakhstan Begins Construction of 800km Highway Linking Caspian Sea Kazakhstan has commenced the construction of an 800-kilometer highway that will directly connect a border checkpoint with China to a port on the Caspian Sea. This project aims to integrate a road network into the Central Asian freight route that bypasses Russia.President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced the start of construction for three segments of the highway during a virtual ceremony on August 3 in Astana. He stated that once completed, the highway will reduce the freight transport distance from China to Europe by 1,000 kilometers and shorten delivery times by up to three days.The new segments will run from Mangystau's Beineu to Sekseuil. Sekseuil is a village located at the northeastern tip of the Aral Sea, and the Kazakh government and state media still refer to it by its Soviet-era name, Saksalusk. President Tokayev described the highway as a "golden bridge" connecting China and Europe.On the same day, construction also began on the expansion and reconstruction of the Kyzylorda-Sekseuil and Ulgaiysyn-Sekseuil segments, which together span 774 kilometers. The work will be carried out by Kazakh companies, creating over 10,000 jobs, and the government anticipates that the opening of these three roads will increase freight traffic by 2.5 times, reaching 13.2 million tons annually. The completion deadline is set for 2029.The routes being connected are officially named the International Trans-Caspian Transport Route, commonly referred to as the Middle Corridor. This route runs from western China through Kazakhstan, crosses the Caspian Sea by rail ferry, and continues through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to Europe. A key feature of this route is that it does not pass through Russian territory.According to Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport, freight traffic along this route has increased more than fivefold over the past seven years, rising from 800,000 tons to 4.5 million tons. Last year, container traffic was approximately 77,000 TEUs, and the ministry aims to reach 300,000 TEUs by 2029.The World Bank evaluated this route in 2023, suggesting necessary investments and regulatory improvements to triple the freight volume and halve transport times by 2030. It also highlighted infrastructure and logistics bottlenecks in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. This is a significant reason why the route currently falls short of the volumes previously handled by Russian railways.The Beineu segment has already been included in a project supported by the European Union (EU). Aleshkha Shimkichi, the EU Ambassador to Kazakhstan, stated during a meeting on the Trans-Caspian Transport Route in Astana on June 3 that the EU's €30 million transport support project includes preparations for the modernization of Aktau Port and the comprehensive improvement of the Beineu-Sekseuil road.Funding for the project has not yet been finalized. The Kazakh Prime Minister's office reported that international financial institutions and the Kazakhstan Development Bank are currently conducting bidding processes for the Beineu, Kyzylorda, and Ulgaiysyn projects, with a requirement to use domestic materials and labor. The total project cost has not been disclosed by either the presidential office or the government.President Tokayev first proposed the Beineu road at a meeting in Aktau in 2021, followed by technical investigations, feasibility studies, and funding efforts. The state news agency Kazinform quoted Yerlan Karin, the first deputy head of the presidential office, stating that this segment will pass through areas that previously lacked road infrastructure, noting that Kazakhstan's main transport network has historically only run along a north-south axis.On the same day, President Tokayev also outlined the overall road policy. There are eight international transport corridors passing through Kazakhstan, with over 35,000 vehicles crossing daily. Road freight transport volume has doubled in the past five years, with last year's revenue in this sector reaching 1.5 trillion tenge, approximately $3.2 billion. Last year, 13,000 kilometers of new and repaired roads were completed, of which 6,000 kilometers were opened to traffic.Kazakhstan plans to modernize 37 border inspection posts by 2028, with construction already underway at 14 of them. President Tokayev remarked that this effort marks the first such initiative since the country gained independence in 1991.* This article has been translated by AI. 2026-08-06 19:00:10
  • Kazakhstan starts 800km highway to Caspian ports
    Kazakhstan starts 800km highway to Caspian ports SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - Construction began Monday on an 800-kilometer highway across western Kazakhstan that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said will connect crossings on the Chinese border directly to the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, giving trucks a direct route onto the trade corridor Europe has been funding as an alternative to shipping through Russia. Tokayev launched the project by video link from Astana along with two other road schemes. He said the new highway would shorten the freight route between China and Europe by 1,000 kilometers and cut delivery times to three days, and proposed naming it the Aral-Caspian Highway. The road runs from Beineu in Mangystau region to Sekseuil, the settlement on the northeastern edge of the Aral basin that Kazakh officials and state media still commonly call by its Soviet-era name, Saksaulsk. Tokayev told the broadcast the highway would function as a "golden bridge" between China and Europe. Work also started on capacity expansion and reconstruction of the Kyzylorda to Sekseuil and Ulgaysyn to Sekseuil highways, 774 kilometers between them. Kazakh companies will carry out the projects, creating more than 10,000 jobs, and freight traffic on the three roads is expected to rise 2.5 times to 13.2 million tons a year once they open. Tokayev set a completion deadline of 2029. The corridor the roads feed is formally the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, generally called the Middle Corridor. It links western China to Europe through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea by rail ferry, then through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye, bypassing Russian territory. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport says freight along the route has risen more than fivefold in seven years, from 800,000 tons to 4.5 million tons a year, with about 77,000 twenty-foot equivalent units moved in 2025. The ministry expects container traffic to reach 300,000 units by 2029. The World Bank assessed the corridor in 2023 and set out the investments and policy changes it said could triple freight volumes and halve travel times by 2030, alongside a diagnostic of infrastructure and logistics constraints in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Those constraints are the reason the route still moves a fraction of what the northern rail line through Russia once carried. The Beineu road has been on the European Union's list for some time. EU Ambassador to Kazakhstan Aleška Simkić told a Trans-Caspian corridor coordination workshop in Astana on June 3 that the bloc's 30 million euro transport support programme covers modernization of Aktau port facilities and preparatory work for the full modernization of the Beineu to Sekseuil road. Financing is still being arranged. The prime minister's office said international financial institutions and the Development Bank of Kazakhstan are running tender procedures for the Beineu, Kyzylorda and Ulgaysyn road projects, which are to use domestic materials and local specialists. Neither the presidential press service nor the government has published a total cost. Tokayev first proposed the Beineu road in 2021 at a meeting in Aktau, and technical studies, feasibility assessments and the identification of funding sources followed, first deputy chief of the presidential executive office Erlan Karin said, according to Kazakhstan's state news agency Qazinform. Karin said the route will be built through territory where no road previously existed, and that Kazakhstan's main transport lines have historically run north to south. Tokayev used the launch to set out the wider road program. Eight international corridors cross Kazakhstan carrying about 35,000 vehicles a day, road freight volumes have doubled in five years, and the sector earned 1.5 trillion tenge, about $3.2 billion, last year. Some 13,000 kilometers of road were built or repaired in 2025 and 6,000 kilometers opened to traffic. Kazakhstan is modernizing 37 road border checkpoints by 2028, with construction under way at 14 of them. Tokayev said the checkpoint overhaul would be the first of its kind since the country became independent in 1991. ---- AJP Takeaways ● Kassym-Jomart Tokayev launched construction of an 800-kilometer highway from Beineu to Sekseuil that he said will connect Chinese border crossings directly to the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, shortening the China to Europe freight route by 1,000 kilometers and cutting delivery times to three days. ● Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport says freight along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, known as the Middle Corridor, has risen more than fivefold in seven years to 4.5 million tons a year, and expects container traffic to reach 300,000 twenty-foot equivalent units by 2029. ● The prime minister's office said international financial institutions and the Development Bank of Kazakhstan are still running tender procedures for the three road projects, and no total cost has been published by either the government or the presidential press service. Aju Press assembled this from government tender disclosures, which were absent from the launch announcement. ● The European Union has been funding preparatory work on the same road through its 30 million euro Trans-Caspian transport support programme, EU Ambassador Aleška Simkić said in Astana on June 3. 2026-08-06 17:36:16
  • Foreign ministry says NSC coordinates North Korea policy
    Foreign ministry says NSC coordinates North Korea policy SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday that North Korea policy is set through coordination centered on the National Security Council, answering questions about whether it and the Unification Ministry are working from different positions. "The government has consistently pursued policy for the peace process on the Korean Peninsula under close coordination among relevant ministries centered on the National Security Council," spokesperson Park Doo-soon told a regular briefing. The questions followed two days of public exchange between the two ministers. After the foreign, unification, defense and veterans affairs ministries delivered their half-year reports to the president on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Cho Hyun described the Unification Ministry's plan for four-party talks toward a peace regime as idealistic and asked reporters to discount it. Chung Dong-young answered the next morning on his way into Government Complex Seoul in central Seoul: "Ideals are what change reality. I think it helps the government when we cooperate well with each other." Park was also asked about the Unification Ministry's proposal to open public debate on calling North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "As the president mentioned yesterday, we consider this a matter for careful review among the relevant ministries, taking account of such things as the formation of a national consensus," he said. Asked whether the proposal could affect relations with Washington, Park said security questions between ministries run through the same National Security Council channel. Chung put the naming proposal to President Lee Jae Myung at the presidential Blue House on Wednesday, arguing that calling the other side by its own name is the first step toward the trust that peaceful coexistence requires. Lee urged caution, saying the question was open to dispute and that he had doubts about whether it would help stability on the peninsula. Chung said the president had also encouraged the ministry to keep going. "He said that although it will be hard, like shouting without an echo, we should carry on with the peaceful coexistence policy with patience," Chung said. 2026-08-06 16:45:08
  • KAIST develops technique to recognize objects hidden behind fog
    KAIST develops technique to recognize objects hidden behind fog SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - A KAIST research team has developed an imaging method that finds a transparent object buried inside fog and works out its shape, thickness and position from a single camera exposure, the university said Thursday. Glass, clear plastic film and living cells are almost invisible to an ordinary camera because they barely change the brightness of the light passing through them. They do change something else. Light slows very slightly as it crosses them, and that shift, called phase, carries the object's outline and its optical thickness. Reading it is how scientists inspect transparent parts in semiconductors and displays, or watch living cells without staining them. The reading breaks down when something scatters the light on the way. Fog, frosted glass and cloudy tissue all send light off in random directions, and when those layers are moving, the scrambling changes moment to moment. Until now the workarounds were to take many exposures of the same target, to measure the scattering environment in advance, or to train a system on large volumes of example images. The team led by Jang Moo-seok, a professor in KAIST's Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, removed all three requirements. Their technique recovers an object sealed between two moving scattering layers, with fog in front of it and fog behind it, from one shot. Two ideas make that possible. The first is where the light goes in. Instead of lighting up the whole front layer, the researchers focus the beam onto a very small spot, the way a magnifying glass concentrates sunlight. Fewer paths through the layer means the light stays organized enough to record the object's phase in the pattern that reaches the camera. The second is where the camera sits. Placed close to the far side of the rear layer, it does not receive a purely random mess. It receives the object's pattern with a consistent smear laid over it, which the team modeled as scattering blur. A random problem became a solvable one. From there the method uses a physical model of how light travels through the object and the fog, paired with artificial intelligence. It does not work the way image AI usually does, by studying thousands of correct answers first. It runs the physics backward from the single measurement, testing what object, what blur and what distance would together produce exactly the pattern the camera saw. All three answers come out at once. The technique held up when the object moved and when the scattering changed, with no calibration and no training data, and in testing it reproduced edges and fine structure more sharply than existing single-shot phase methods. "This is the first demonstration of restoring the shape and position of a transparent object from a single measurement, even in environments where light is severely scattered, such as behind fog or a diffusive film," Jang said. He said the team plans to extend the method to more complex environments, with semiconductor inspection and biomedical imaging as targets. KAIST listed three directions for the work. In manufacturing, it could inspect transparent components sitting under scattering coatings or protective films. In medicine, it could image the retina through a cataract. Applied to reflected rather than transmitted light, it could image objects out of direct line of sight, including for military use. Kim Yoo-sun, a master's student, and Song Gook-ho, a doctoral candidate, were co-first authors, with Jang as corresponding author. The paper appeared in the optics journal Optica on July 20, and the National Research Foundation of Korea funded the work under the Ministry of Science and ICT. 2026-08-06 10:17:14