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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Moreno named temporary Korean national football team manager SEOUL, September 01 (AJP) - Former Spain head coach Robert Moreno was named temporary manager of South Korea's men's national football team Tuesday, taking over a side still dealing with the fallout from its early World Cup exit and a long-running scandal over the appointment of his predecessor. The Korea Football Association (KFA) approved Moreno's appointment during a board meeting at Korea Football Park in Cheonan, about 90 kilometers south of Seoul. Moreno, 48, will take charge of South Korea's next six international matches. The Taegeuk Warriors will host Ecuador on Sept. 24, Uruguay on Sept. 28, Venezuela on Oct. 2 and Uzbekistan on Oct. 6. The KFA is also seeking to arrange two more matches during the Nov. 9-17 FIFA international window. Moreno's contract runs through Nov. 27, but the KFA said he could be considered for the full-time job for the Asian Football Confederation Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia in January depending on the team's performance this fall. The national team has been without a permanent coach since Hong Myung-bo resigned June 28 after South Korea failed to advance from the group stage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. South Korea opened the tournament with a 2-1 win over Czechia before suffering successive 1-0 defeats to co-host Mexico and South Africa. Hong stepped down after the team failed to qualify for the round of 32 as one of the best third-place finishers, saying he took full responsibility for the result. His departure, however, revived a controversy that had followed him virtually throughout his two-year tenure. Hong was appointed in July 2024 after a five-month KFA search for a successor to Jurgen Klinsmann. The association interviewed several foreign candidates before technical director Lee Lim-saeng approached Hong, then coach of K League club Ulsan HD, during a brief meeting near Hong's home. The manner of his appointment immediately drew accusations of favoritism and a lack of transparency. Critics questioned why foreign candidates underwent formal interviews while Hong was offered the position through a markedly different process. Hong denied receiving preferential treatment. A subsequent Culture Ministry audit found the KFA had violated its own rules and procedures in appointing both Hong and Klinsmann. It concluded that Lee did not have the proper authority to make the final recommendation and that the board approval of Hong came only after his selection had effectively been decided and announced. The ministry's final audit identified 27 cases of improper or unlawful practices at the KFA and called for disciplinary action against senior officials, including then-President Chung Mong-gyu. The controversy has continued well beyond Hong's resignation. Hong and Chung, who has since stepped down as KFA president, were summoned to a National Assembly hearing on July 30 as lawmakers examined the association's management, Hong's appointment and South Korea's World Cup failure. Police then raided KFA offices in Cheonan and Seoul on Aug. 6 as part of an investigation into allegations that senior officials improperly intervened in Hong's appointment. Hong had been questioned as a suspect two days earlier. Against that backdrop, the KFA has opted against rushing into another permanent appointment, giving Moreno a six-match audition before deciding who will lead the team into the Asian Cup. Moreno has experience with precisely that kind of temporary assignment. He coached Spain for nine matches in 2019 after Luis Enrique stepped away from the national team for personal reasons. Moreno later managed AS Monaco in France, Granada in Spain and FC Sochi in Russia, where he remained through last year. Earlier in his career, he worked as a scout for FC Barcelona and served as an assistant to Enrique at AS Roma, Celta Vigo and Barcelona. AJP Takeaways Robert Moreno takes temporary charge: The former Spain coach will lead South Korea through six friendlies from September to November, with a possible full-time appointment for the Asian Cup at stake. Hong scandal still hangs over KFA: A government audit found procedural violations in Hong Myung-bo's controversial 2024 appointment, which triggered parliamentary scrutiny and an ongoing police investigation. KFA avoids another rushed permanent hire: After Hong resigned following South Korea's 2026 World Cup group-stage exit, the association is giving Moreno a six-match trial before choosing its next long-term coach. 2026-09-01 12:52:42 -
South Korea sends 44 rescuers to Nepal at Kathmandu's request SEOUL, September 01 (AJP) - An emergency South Korean relief team was set to fly to Nepal late Tuesday to search for nine workers missing since a massive flash flood engulfed a Himalayan valley last week. South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced the deployment in a statement released Tuesday. Nepal had asked Seoul to send a team to support search and rescue work in the flood zone, and a public-private council approved the mission the same day under South Korea's overseas emergency relief law. The nine missing workers, six from Doosan Enerbility and three from Korea South-East Power, were at the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower construction site in Rasuwa district when the flood hit on the morning of Aug. 26. Their offices and living quarters sat low in the valley and are believed to have been swept away. Tuesday was the seventh day without contact. Kathmandu had spent most of the past week turning down foreign search and rescue teams, telling governments its own army and police would handle the operation. The request to Seoul is the first sign of that position loosening. Lee Kyu-ho, director general of the ministry's Development Cooperation Bureau, leads the team, whose members come from the ministry, the Korea International Cooperation Agency and the National Fire Agency. They were scheduled to leave Tuesday night on a KC-330 Cygnus military transport for about 10 days of work with Nepali authorities. South Korea assembles the Korea Disaster Relief Team for large disasters abroad. Past Korea Disaster Relief Team (KDRT) missions include Türkiye after the 2023 earthquake, Laos after the 2018 dam collapse and Nepal after the 2015 earthquake. Seoul had already pledged $1 million on Aug. 27. Nepal was accepting money and supplies through the Prime Minister's Relief Fund. Foreign personnel were another matter. That caution dates to 2015. After the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people, 4,050 rescue workers from 34 countries arrived in a country whose airport, roads and bureaucracy could not absorb them, and within about 10 days Information Minister Minendra Rijal was asking them to go home. A senior Nepali foreign ministry official told the Kathmandu Post last week that the influx and the competition among countries had caused significant coordination problems, and that the government weighed that experience this time. Foreign ministry spokesperson Lok Bahadur Chhetri said on Aug. 28 that offers from India, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were understandable but unnecessary. "Our security agencies are doing the search and rescue operation. For now we do not require such help," he told Reuters. The policy left the South Korean effort stuck. A joint rapid response team of about 20 officials has been in Nepal since the middle of last week, and its six chartered helicopters sat grounded while Nepali authorities withheld clearance over fears of further flooding. On Aug. 29, South Korea was the only country granted a flight permit. The next day, nobody was. On Monday the team stopped waiting. Nine National Fire Agency personnel left the embassy in Kathmandu at 7:20 a.m. and drove north through Nuwakot, reaching Dhunche about 11 hours later. Dhunche sits roughly 30 kilometers from the site. The Nepali army agreed to cooperate on the overland search. Ten other Doosan Enerbility workers cut off elsewhere were pulled out earlier. Nine landed in South Korea on Monday afternoon. The site manager stayed behind. Monsoon rain did not cause this flood. An avalanche of ice and rock came off a glacier near the Nepal-Tibet border, dammed the Lhende Khola River and then gave way. Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, calculated that the surge covered its first 22 kilometers at an average of 193 kilometers per hour. Downstream, the Trishuli River rose nine meters in half an hour. Nepali disaster authorities counted at least 903 dead and 4,247 missing as of Monday. Nationals of more than 30 countries are among them, partly because the flood tore through a Hindu pilgrimage route and a trekking corridor. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun asked his Nepali counterpart, Sisir Khanal, for particular help in finding the nine during a call Monday afternoon, their second since the disaster. At Upper Trishuli-1, 576 people are out of contact and about 300 of them are thought to be trapped inside the headrace tunnel, according to Mohan Kumar Dangi, who chairs Nepal's Independent Power Producers' Association. A Chinese tunnel rescue team pushed roughly 300 meters into that tunnel on Monday and recovered one body. The nationality has not been confirmed, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was checking through its embassy in Kathmandu. AJP Takeaways ● Nepal's government asked Seoul to send a search and rescue team, reversing a week of refusing foreign personnel, and the 44-member Korea Disaster Relief Team was set to leave Tuesday night on a military transport. ● Nepali foreign ministry spokesperson Lok Bahadur Chhetri had told Reuters on Aug. 28 that offers from eight countries were unnecessary, a stance traced to 2015, when 4,050 rescue workers from 34 countries overwhelmed the country and Information Minister Minendra Rijal asked them to go home. ● Mohan Kumar Dangi of Nepal's Independent Power Producers' Association put 576 people out of contact at the Upper Trishuli-1 site, with about 300 believed trapped in the headrace tunnel where a Chinese rescue team recovered one unidentified body on Monday. ● Jeffrey Kargel of the Planetary Science Institute measured the surge at an average 193 kilometers per hour over its first 22 kilometers, and the U.S. Geological Survey revised its initial earthquake reading to conclude the seismic signal came from the landslide itself. 2026-09-01 10:58:06 -
New Kazakh parliament opens with 109 first-time deputies SEOUL, August 31 (AJP) - Of the 145 members of Kazakhstan's new single-chamber legislature, 109 have never held a seat in the national parliament. Within four days of taking their seats, they had elected a speaker, confirmed a vice president and returned a prime minister to office. The Kurultai opened on Aug. 28, replacing the Mazhilis and the Senate under the constitution that took effect July 1. Its members were elected on Aug. 23 in the first national vote held under that constitution. Adilet took 110 of the 145 seats on 71.17 percent of the vote. The party was registered on June 1 and absorbed Amanat, which had governed the outgoing lower house. Four other parties cleared the 5 percent threshold, according to Kazakhstan's Central Election Commission. Auyl took 10 seats on 6.26 percent, Respublica nine on 5.56 percent, Ak Zhol eight on 5.21 percent and the Nationwide Social Democratic Party eight on 5.11 percent. The People's Party of Kazakhstan, which won 6.8 percent in 2023, dropped to 3.11 percent and lost every seat. Baitaq took 1.07 percent. The against all option drew 2.51 percent, more than either party. Turnout was 74.08 percent of an electorate of 12,623,289, against 54.21 percent at the last parliamentary election in 2023. Women hold 49 seats, or 33.8 percent, compared with 18 of 98 in the old Mazhilis. Eighteen deputies fall into the youth category and members range in age from 27 to 65, according to figures released by the Kazakh government. "This stage is not a time for empty promises, false speeches and populist slogans," President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the deputies at the opening session. "Our society is reaching maturity." The international observation mission for the election was made up of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights together with the OSCE and Council of Europe parliamentary assemblies. It found the election technically well prepared but held in an environment lacking political pluralism. Political choice was narrowed because all seven contesting parties supported the president's policies, the mission said, and Adilet had an undue advantage. The same statement described the campaign as orderly and said the parties were given equal campaign conditions. Tokayev nominated Aibek Dadebay as speaker and deputies approved him. Dadebay founded Adilet in May, days after stepping down as head of the presidential executive office. On Monday the chamber confirmed Erlan Karin as vice president, a post created by the new constitution, with 141 of 145 deputies voting in favor. Karin has advised Tokayev since 2019 and served as state counselor. Deputies also approved the reappointment of Olzhas Bektenov as prime minister. Adilet holds more than two thirds of the seats, enough to amend the constitution on its own. "The party that secured the support of the largest number of voters won the election and formed a constitutional majority in the Kurultai," Tokayev said. "High responsibility therefore rests on this party, and we associate particular hopes with it." The legislative program he set out for the first session covers bringing sectoral law into line with the new constitution, a government bill barring children under 16 from registering on social media, and a Golden Visa aimed at attracting foreign specialists and capital. Deputies are also to overhaul migration policy, pass measures on energy resilience and alternative energy, and draft a law on comprehensive support for children with disabilities. He asked them to use artificial intelligence in drafting legislation and to adopt an E-Parliament system, while warning that technology cannot replace legal expertise. "States, especially large countries, have essentially stopped trusting one another, which has had a damaging effect on the work of the UN and its institutions," he said. "The UN Security Council has ceased to carry out the mission entrusted to it of ensuring global and regional peace, stability and security." He said regional organizations and what are commonly called middle powers had become more prominent, and placed Kazakhstan in that category. He also noted a forecast that artificial intelligence tools would replace nuclear weapons within the foreseeable future. The pace and scale of the reforms had reached the point of irreversibility, he said, adding, "Simply put, there is no reverse gear." "Our history and literature are not a chronicle of endless victims, suffering and tragedies," he said near the end of the address. "The suffering our people endured cannot be the foundation of our national identity." Tokayev said the Kazakhstan Halyk Kenesi, or People's Council, will be formed in the second half of September as the country's first supreme consultative body, with the right to initiate legislation. 2026-08-31 16:37:03 -
Sookmyung maps titanium nanomaterials for cancer treatment SEOUL, August 28 (AJP) - Porous crystals built around titanium can carry a cancer drug through the bloodstream, hold it shut until they reach a tumor, and then be switched on from outside the body to attack the cells around them. That range of jobs, long divided among separate materials, is converging on a single compound, according to a review article led by Sookmyung Women's University professor Lee Jung-bok. The paper appeared this month in Coordination Chemistry Reviews. Sookmyung said the journal carries an impact factor of 25.6 and ranks first in chemistry in the Journal Citation Reports, the citation database used to rank academic publications. The materials at the center of the review are metal-organic frameworks, crystalline solids assembled from metal ions and organic molecules that link them together. The result is a rigid scaffold shot through with pores, and those pores can be packed with drug molecules. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are already being tested as drug carriers and as probes for medical imaging. Titanium versions draw attention for a plain reason. The bond between titanium and oxygen is unusually strong, which makes the structure hold its shape in the body, keeps toxicity low and lets tissue tolerate it. Researchers also count titanium MOFs as environmentally benign to produce. Lee and his co-authors compared the methods used to build these materials, then sorted the medical research into three groups. The first is targeted drug delivery. Tumors sit in a chemical environment unlike healthy tissue, more acidic and loaded with reactive oxygen species, unstable oxygen molecules that damage cells from within. Carriers tuned to those conditions stay closed as they travel and open once they arrive, which concentrates a chemotherapy dose where it is needed and spares the rest of the body. The second is repair. Bone graft materials and wound dressings made with titanium MOFs release antibiotics and nitric oxide slowly over time, holding infection down while new tissue grows into the site. Nitric oxide is a gas the body produces itself to prompt blood vessels to form, which is why a dressing that supplies it can speed healing rather than merely protect a wound. The third is a family of treatments that turn the material into a weapon. In photodynamic, sonodynamic and microwave dynamic therapy, the framework works as a sensitizer, a substance that sits inert until light, ultrasound or microwaves reach it, at which point it floods the surrounding area with reactive oxygen and kills the cells there. Because the trigger arrives from outside the patient, clinicians can confine the damage to wherever the beam is aimed. Recent work surveyed in the review pushes that effect further by doping the crystals, meaning small amounts of silver or manganese are worked into the structure. The additions improve charge separation, the step in which energy from the trigger splits into the electrical charges that generate reactive oxygen. Cleaner separation produces a stronger kill. Taken together, the authors argue, the field is widening from delivery alone toward theranostics, platforms that diagnose and treat in the same operation. None of it has reached a patient. The review sets out three obstacles standing between the laboratory and the clinic. No one has developed a manufacturing process that is both clean enough to be called green and reliable enough at industrial scale to guarantee the material is safe in the body. The mechanisms by which titanium MOFs break down and leave the body remain unmapped. And regulators have no framework written for nanoscale medicines, which leaves approval pathways undefined. The authors expect artificial intelligence to shape what comes next, with data analysis used to design titanium MOF formulations matched to individual patients rather than to a general population. Lee served as co-corresponding author alongside Hanyang University's Kim Ki-su and Pusan National University's Han Dong-wook. Three Pusan National University researchers, Elif Beyza Demiray, Kang Moon-sung and Jang Hee-jeong, shared first authorship. The work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea. Journal/Source: Coordination Chemistry Reviews (IF:12.5, JCR top 4.5%) Title: Ti-based metal-organic frameworks as versatile platforms primed for nanomedicine, a mini-review Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccr.2026.218397 2026-08-28 10:42:12 -
Sookmyung team tunes coating strength by adjusting CO2 pressure SEOUL, August 27 (AJP) - A coating material built from discarded plastic bottles and carbon dioxide can be made soft and rubbery or firm and glassy by changing one setting in the reactor, researchers at Sookmyung Women's University found. The team traced how the molecular structure of the starting material shapes the behavior of the finished film, turning a single laboratory result into something closer to a recipe with dials. The range they measured is wide. Glass transition temperature, the point at which a plastic shifts from stiff and glassy to soft and rubbery, moved from minus 36.4 degrees Celsius to 17.5 degrees Celsius depending on how the material was made. Tensile strength, a measure of how hard a film can be pulled before it tears, reached 13.6 megapascals, roughly the range of the flexible plastic films used in packaging. Because that temperature span crosses ordinary room temperature, the same feedstock can yield a film that behaves like rubber on a desk or one that behaves like a hard shell. The material belongs to a family called UV-curable coatings, which harden in seconds under an ultraviolet lamp rather than being baked or left to dry with solvents. They appear on phone screens, wood flooring, furniture, printing inks and optical film. Most of them start from polyols, a class of liquid building blocks that the chemical industry draws almost entirely from petroleum. The Sookmyung work replaces part of that petroleum input with two things normally treated as waste. Polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic used in beverage bottles and better known as PET, supplies one half. Carbon dioxide supplies the other. The team broke down waste PET chemically to recover an intermediate compound called BHET, reacted that compound with carbon dioxide to build a polyol, then converted the polyol into a polyurethane acrylate, the UV-curable material tested in the study. Control came from two variables. By changing the pressure at which carbon dioxide was fed into the reaction and by changing the proportions of the starting materials, the researchers adjusted how much carbonate structure derived from CO2 and how much aromatic structure derived from PET ended up in the polyol. Those two features then shaped the crosslinked network that forms when the material cures, and the network determined the thermal and mechanical properties of the film. The aromatic rings inherited from the bottle plastic did most of the stiffening. They restricted the movement of the polymer chains, raising the rigidity and the mechanical performance of the material. The university said the significance lies in connecting the molecular structure of the raw material to the network formed during curing and then to the properties of the finished product, a relationship it calls structure, network and property. The team expects the material to find use in coatings, films and adhesives. The paper extends work the same group published earlier, in which PET-derived feedstock and carbon dioxide were combined into polyols and used to make flexible polyurethane foam. The new study carries that chemistry into UV-cured materials, which cure differently and go into different products. The findings appeared in Chemical Engineering Journal, volume 547. Chae Ji-young was the first author, Kim Ye-in, Lee Da-young, and Kim Ha-rin were co-authors, and Sookmyung's Baik Joon-hyun was the corresponding author. "We plan to expand the research toward developing high-value materials that use waste plastic and carbon dioxide," Baik said. Journal/Source: Chemical Engineering Journal (IF: 12.5, JCR top 4.5%) Title: Integrated upcycling of waste PET and CO2 into UV-curable polyurethane acrylates via CO2-based polyols Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2026.180657 2026-08-27 12:56:52 -
Seoul races to find 9 Koreans in Nepal flood SEOUL, August 27 (AJP) -South Korea is sending an emergency response team to Nepal after nine Korean workers at a hydropower construction site went missing in a catastrophic Himalayan flash flood that killed at least 160 people across Nepal and Tibet, with scientists pointing to a massive glacier collapse as the likely trigger. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun convened an emergency task force meeting at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday after contact was lost with the nine employees of Korea South-East Power Co. (KOEN) and Doosan Enerbility working in Nepal's northern Rasuwa district. The Foreign Ministry said officials from the Korean Embassy in Kathmandu, the National Police Agency, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and other agencies joined the meeting. Cho ordered officials to mobilize all available resources for the search and rescue effort following an emergency directive from President Lee Jae Myung that the lives and safety of Korean citizens be given top priority. "The ministry headquarters and our embassy should make every effort for the swift and safe search and rescue of our citizens while maintaining close communication with related agencies," Cho said, according to the ministry. A joint rapid-response team made up of Foreign Ministry, police and fire officials is scheduled to leave Incheon International Airport at 1:40 p.m. Thursday and arrive in Kathmandu at 9:45 p.m. after transiting through Hong Kong. The team will be led by Lim Sang-woo, the government's representative for overseas nationals' protection and consular affairs. Cho also plans to speak with Nepal's foreign minister Thursday to request cooperation in the search. He instructed embassy officials to maintain close contact with the families of the missing workers and keep them informed of developments. The Koreans were working on the Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project, a 216-megawatt run-of-river power plant under construction in Rasuwa, roughly 70 kilometers north of Kathmandu. KOEN is a major sponsor of the project and Doosan Enerbility is its engineering, procurement and construction contractor. The plant, being developed by Nepal Water and Energy Development Company, is designed to generate electricity for Nepal's domestic grid. South Korea's embassy in Nepal described the project in May as a flagship example of energy cooperation involving Korean companies and international financial institutions. Commercial operation had been expected to begin next year. The disaster struck around 9 a.m. Wednesday as a huge surge of water, mud, rocks and other debris swept through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems near Nepal's border with China's Tibet region. Nepalese police reported at least 157 deaths by Thursday, while Chinese authorities said at least three people had died and 265 were missing in Tibet's neighboring Gyirong County. Hundreds of tourists, workers and residents were also unaccounted for in Nepal. The flood destroyed villages, roads, bridges and power infrastructure across steep Himalayan valleys that serve as important trade, tourism and pilgrimage routes between Nepal and Tibet. At least 19 bridges and nearly 40 kilometers of roads were swept away, complicating rescue operations in already difficult mountain terrain. Hundreds of foreigners were among those reported missing, including visitors from India, the United States, Australia, Britain and Canada. Many were traveling toward Mount Kailash in Tibet, a major Hindu pilgrimage destination, or trekking around Nepal's Gosaikunda Lake area. Scientists are increasingly focusing on the high mountains above the Lhende Khola, a tributary of the Bhote Koshi, for an explanation of how such a large flood developed so rapidly. The Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) said preliminary evidence points to a large ice-rock avalanche from a high-altitude glacier. A mass of ice and rock appears to have plunged into the Lhende Khola valley, possibly temporarily blocking the river before water and debris burst downstream. Hydrological measurements illustrate the extraordinary force of the resulting flood wave. The Trishuli River at Galchhi rose by as much as nine meters in about 30 minutes, according to ICIMOD, while the water level at Malekhu climbed around seven meters over a similar period. The precise reason for the collapse remains under investigation. High temperatures and long-term ice loss are receiving particular scrutiny because Himalayan glaciers have been retreating rapidly as temperatures rise. Nepal has lost nearly one-third of its glacier ice over the past three decades, with the rate of melting accelerating sharply during the past decade, and recent high temperatures may also have increased snow and ice melt before Wednesday's collapse. Scientists caution, however, against attributing the individual disaster directly to climate change before the investigation is complete. ICIMOD said warming is already altering glaciers, snow cover, permafrost and mountain slopes throughout the Hindu Kush Himalaya, increasing concern over so-called cryosphere hazards. But researchers said it remains too early to determine precisely how much climate change contributed to Wednesday's event. A flash flood struck the same Nepal-China border region in July 2025 after a glacial lake in Tibet overflowed amid unusually high temperatures, killing nine people and damaging critical infrastructure, including the bridge linking the two countries. Wednesday's disaster was far larger and again exposed the vulnerability of hydropower plants, roads and settlements built along narrow Himalayan river valleys. AJP Takeaways Nine South Korean workers are missing in Nepal's Rasuwa district after a massive Aug. 26 flash flood struck the construction area of the 216-MW Upper Trishuli-1 hydropower project involving KOEN and Doosan Enerbility. Seoul is dispatching a joint emergency team to Nepal, while Foreign Minister Cho Hyun plans to seek direct cooperation from Nepal's government in the search and rescue operation. At least 160 people have been reported dead across Nepal and Tibet, with hundreds more missing as floods destroyed roads, bridges, villages and power infrastructure near the China-Nepal border. 2026-08-27 07:29:16 -
Five Central Asian states join Korea in new industry ministers' forum SEOUL, August 26 (AJP) - A standing consultative body of industry ministers will anchor the economic agenda when South Korea hosts the leaders of five Central Asian countries in Seoul next month, giving a relationship built largely on separate bilateral deals its first permanent multilateral working channel. The first Korea-Central Asia Summit, set for Sept. 16 and 17, puts industrial modernization, infrastructure, critical minerals and energy, workforce training and private-sector participation at the center of the agenda. The C5+Korea Industry Ministers' Meeting is designed to keep sectoral talks running between leaders' meetings, identify joint initiatives and maintain a list of priority projects that links each area to specific partners and sources of financing. In materials setting out Tashkent's approach to the summit, the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Seoul said Uzbekistan enters the new regional format with elements of the industrial agenda already operating inside its bilateral relationship with South Korea. The two countries have held what both governments describe as a special strategic partnership since 2019, a designation that places South Korea in Uzbekistan's highest tier of diplomatic relationships. Cumulative South Korean direct investment in the Uzbek economy has passed $8 billion, according to the embassy. Bilateral trade approached $1 billion in the first half of 2026, up 11.5 percent from the same period a year earlier. Behind those figures sits a network of joint institutions rather than a trade balance. Uzbekistan hosts Korean-linked centers in textiles, rare metals and alloys, agricultural machinery and e-government, and cooperation has extended into chemical technologies and construction. Their function is to move engineering methods, technical knowledge and production experience across, not finished goods. Critical minerals are where the summit agenda and Uzbekistan's own industrial plans overlap most directly. The metals and rare earth elements that go into batteries, semiconductors and defense equipment, and the processing steps that turn raw ore into usable input are the part most countries cannot do alone. Uzbekistan already runs the Uzbek-Korean Scientific and Technological Center for Rare Metals and Alloys, which works on materials science, processing technologies, research and specialist training with the aim of moving those results into industrial production. More sophisticated industry raises the demands placed on everything around it. Within the summit agenda, infrastructure covers energy, industrial complexes, transport and logistics, and urban systems, and it extends across the full life of a project, from planning and construction through modernization and operation. For an investor, that means an industrial site can be assessed together with the power, engineering and logistics needed to run it. Financing for projects on that scale already exists in part. The cooperation program between Uzbekistan and the Economic Development Cooperation Fund, South Korea's concessional lending arm for developing countries, has been set at $2 billion for 2024 through 2027. A new portfolio of initiatives is under preparation, and the two sides are examining financing without state guarantees and through public-private partnerships, arrangements that shift more of the risk onto commercial participants and open the door to private capital. Where the agenda ultimately settles is at the level of individual companies, which turn sectoral priorities into investment decisions and products. That places private firms, financial institutions and research organizations at the center of the industrial cooperation the ministers' forum is meant to steer. The workforce is the constraint that grows alongside the rest. The Korea International Cooperation Agency has helped establish four vocational education centers in Uzbekistan, in Tashkent, Fergana, Shakhrisabz and Samarkand. A fifth is under construction in Urgench. 2026-08-26 15:45:59 -
S. Korea's denuclearization goal remains unchanged: MOFA SEOUL, August 25 (AJP) - The stated goal of peace on the Korean Peninsula means the denuclearization of North Korea, South Korea's foreign ministry said Tuesday. The ministry was restating a position left out of its own account of a phone call between the two allies' top diplomats the night before. That account said Foreign Minister Cho Hyun and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio agreed to keep up close communication on peace on the peninsula and a resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue, while maintaining a firm combined defense posture. The word denuclearization did not appear. The State Department released two sentences under spokesperson Tommy Pigott, saying only that Rubio had discussed a range of issues related to the alliance. Denuclearization was discussed, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Park Doo-soon said Tuesday. Both governments continue to hold to the two goals set out in the joint fact sheet issued Nov. 14 after President Lee Jae-myung and President Donald Trump met in Gyeongju, it said. That document commits the two sides to the complete denuclearization of North Korea and to peace and stability on the peninsula, and pledges cooperation on implementing the 2018 Singapore statement signed by Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Pressed on what peace on the peninsula refers to, the ministry said the term can be rendered as the denuclearization of North Korea. The distinction carries weight. Denuclearization means Pyongyang giving up the weapons it has built. Peace on the peninsula, left undefined, is compatible with an arrangement that leaves them in place. Cho and Rubio spoke late Monday evening Seoul time, their first call in five months. Rubio serves as both secretary of state and White House national security adviser. He briefed Cho on Iran and U.S. efforts in the Middle East. Cho raised South Korea's willingness to help restore free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has largely closed to traffic. The two also agreed to seek gains on tariffs, an investment agreement, shipbuilding and security cooperation. Scrutiny of the ministry's wording follows several weeks of signals from Washington that have unsettled Seoul. Trump posted a photograph of his 2019 meeting with Kim at Panmunjom to his social media account on Aug. 15. He said the next day that he has a very good relationship with Kim, and disclosed that he had ordered a substantial reduction in combined military exercises. Cho and Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back both said afterward that they had not been told in advance. The ministry said the government hopes North Korea responds to steps taken by Seoul and Washington and that talks between the United States and North Korea resume. It described South Korea as a peacemaker and a party to peace on the peninsula rather than an observer of it. The ministry did not say which side requested Monday's call, saying both had wanted it. It also declined to comment on the brevity of the U.S. readout, saying the text reflects the American side's own position. China's language has moved in the opposite direction. When Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14 and 15, the White House fact sheet issued two days later said the two leaders reaffirmed a shared goal to denuclearize North Korea. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun, addressing that line the following day, did not use the word. He said instead that China's position on the peninsula has remained consistent. Beijing has left the term out of a series of documents in recent years, including its most recent arms control white paper. The South Korean ministry cited that same summit as evidence that the goal still holds, noting North Korean denuclearization was confirmed there as a joint objective. It said it continues to press China toward what it called a constructive role. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Seoul last week and described the two Koreas as two states coexisting peacefully. The ministry said it would refrain from offering its own interpretation and is watching how Beijing uses the phrase. It did not say whether it had asked for a correction. The phrasing drew notice because North Korea declared at the end of 2023 that the South is a separate and hostile state, abandoning reunification as a goal. The ministry declined to confirm details of Trump's public remarks about North Korea's nuclear arsenal, including references to the number of weapons it holds. Park Doo-soon, the ministry spokesperson, rejected the argument that South Korea's pragmatic diplomacy has failed as Russia deepens military ties with Pyongyang, China drops the denuclearization language and Washington softens its own. "I do not agree with that judgment," he said, pointing to continuing contacts with all three governments. Speculation about a Trump meeting with Kim has centered on November, when the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum gather in Shenzhen on Nov. 18 and 19. 2026-08-25 15:17:55 -
Researchers develop embryo-like stem cell heart model SEOUL, August 25 (AJP) - By easing off the chemical signals normally used to force stem cells into heart tissue, researchers at Sookmyung Women's University and Sungkyunkwan University have grown a model that lengthens and bends on its own, reproducing a stage of human heart development that has been almost impossible to observe. Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect in the world, occurring in about nine of every 1,000 live births since the mid-1990s, or roughly 1.35 million newborns a year, according to a systematic review published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. A later update covering 260 studies put Asia's rate highest among world regions, at about 9.3 per 1,000. Most of those defects begin in the first weeks after conception, when the heart is a straight tube that has to stretch, curve and sort itself into an ordered sequence of future chambers. That window is effectively closed to observation. Human embryos at that stage are inaccessible, and animal hearts diverge enough from human ones to limit what mouse studies can settle. Laboratory heart models have grown more sophisticated over the past five years, but most of them stay round. Researchers typically drive stem cells toward cardiac fate with strong external chemical signals, an approach that reliably produces beating heart tissue and just as reliably produces it as a sphere. Shape does not emerge, and neither does the ordering that depends on shape. Bae Gyu-un, a professor at Sookmyung's College of Pharmacy, and Kang Jong-sun, a professor in the Department of Molecular Cell Biology at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, went the other way. Their permissive culture strategy weakens the external signals and leaves the cells to arrange themselves. Grown from human induced pluripotent stem cells, adult cells reprogrammed back to an embryonic-like state, the resulting structures elongated and curved without being pushed into shape. The team named them elongating heart organoids. Cells inside them settled along a venous-to-arterial axis in the order a developing heart follows, with sinus venosus-like cells at one end, then atrial cells, then ventricular cells. The sinus venosus is the inflow region of the embryonic heart and the site where the sinoatrial node, the heart's natural pacemaker, later forms. The organoids also beat in sequence rather than all at once. Contractions started at the venous end and traveled toward the ventricular end, accompanied by a matching wave of calcium ions, the signal that triggers each contraction in heart muscle. To work out what drove the lengthening, the team sequenced individual cells and ran trajectory analysis, a computational method that infers how cell populations relate to one another. That analysis pointed to dividing splanchnic mesoderm cells at the venous end, an early tissue layer that supplies cardiac cells in the embryo, feeding new cells into the structure as it grew. The inference comes from gene expression patterns. No one tracked individual cells making the journey. The disease result came from deleting TBX5, a gene mutated in Holt-Oram syndrome and linked to septal and conduction defects in patients. Organoids missing it failed to elongate or bend, and contracted irregularly. Bae claimed priority for the result. "This study is the first to reproduce the three-dimensional form and axis organization of the early heart outside the body by inducing the self-organizing capacity of stem cells," he said, adding that it should "raise the competitiveness of organoid-based drug development platforms and help establish the mechanisms behind congenital heart disease." Other groups have built human heart models with patterned regions. Heart-forming organoids reported in Nature Biotechnology in 2021, multi-chamber cardioids in Cell in 2023, and a patterned primitive heart organoid in Nature Communications the same year each reproduce parts of early cardiac structure, and the Nature Communications model elongates and contorts as it grows. Reviews of the field describe most human systems as reaching heart tube formation without elongation. Whether the Sookmyung model is first in the narrower sense Bae describes cannot be checked against the university's summary alone. Several things remain unshown. The organoids correspond to the earliest weeks of development and do not form chambers, septa, valves, coronary vessels, or the nerve tissue that regulates heartbeat. The university released no measurements, no culture duration, no count of organoids grown, and no success rate, leaving open how consistently the structures form. The TBX5 experiment establishes that removing the gene disrupts the model, not that the same sequence causes disease in patients. No drug has been tested in the system. The work was carried out with researchers at AniMusCure Inc., a Suwon-based biotechnology company founded in April 2020. Bae and Kang are its co-chief executives. The company, whose existing pipeline covers sarcopenia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy rather than cardiac disease, plans to use the technology for congenital heart disease modeling, cardiac toxicity testing and screening cardiovascular drug candidates, the university said in announcing the work Aug. 20. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Developmental Cell (IF 9.2, JCR top 3.95%) 2026-08-25 14:19:47 -
Kazakhstan marks 35 years since closing of nuclear site SEOUL, August 25 (AJP) - The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb on the Kazakh steppe on Aug. 29, 1949. Kazakhstan shut the place down 42 years later, to the day. Saturday marks 35 years since the closure of the Semipalatinsk Test Site. The anniversary is also the International Day against Nuclear Tests, a United Nations observance that exists because Kazakhstan asked for it. The site absorbed 456 nuclear explosions over four decades, 340 of them underground and 116 in the open air. Eight countries have conducted 2,056 nuclear tests since 1945. More than a fifth of them happened here, on 18,000 square kilometers of steppe, an area about the size of Wales. Soviet planners called the land uninhabited when they selected it in 1947. It was not. Villages stood within tens of kilometers of the detonation points, and prison camp labor built the first facilities. Kazakh experts estimate about 1.5 million people were exposed to radioactive fallout over the life of the site. Health studies conducted since the closure identify roughly 200,000 residents whose health was directly affected, with elevated rates of several cancers and of thyroid disease. The two figures do not contradict each other. One counts exposure across a vast area over 40 years. The other counts demonstrated harm in the populations nearest the blasts. Neither number existed at the time. Soviet authorities concealed the effects for decades, and the scale of the damage emerged only after the site closed. Glasnost and a protest movement broke the silence. The Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov founded Nevada-Semipalatinsk in February 1989, naming it for his own country's test site and the American one. It pulled tens of thousands into the streets and became one of the first mass anti-nuclear movements in Soviet history. The last explosion at the site came on Oct. 19, 1989. Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the closure decree on Aug. 29, 1991, four months before the Soviet Union dissolved. Kazakhstan then gave up the world's fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, inherited rather than built, and joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. What followed turned that history into a diplomatic position. Kazakhstan ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in May 2002. It hosted the signing of the treaty creating a nuclear-weapon-free zone across Central Asia at Semipalatinsk on Sept. 8, 2006, in the 15th anniversary year of the closure. The General Assembly adopted resolution 64/35 unanimously in December 2009, establishing the International Day against Nuclear Tests and fixing it to Aug. 29. The ground took longer. Fissile material sat in the tunnels and boreholes of the Degelen mountain complex, effectively unguarded after the Soviet collapse and ranked among the most serious nuclear security risks of the period. Kazakh, Russian and American scientists spent 17 years securing it, sealing tunnels and pouring specialized concrete to bind waste plutonium. The work cost about $150 million, ran largely in secret and finished in October 2012. Parts of the site have since reopened to mining, farming and tourism. The old testing infrastructure now does the opposite job. Kazakhstan hosts five facilities in the International Monitoring System, the global sensor network that verifies compliance with the test ban treaty. They include a primary seismic array at Makanchi and an auxiliary station at Kurchatov, about 120 kilometers from the city of Semey. Those sensors watch for the tests that still happen. When North Korea conducted its third nuclear test in February 2013, the Makanchi array was among the stations that recorded it and sent data to the treaty organization's international data center in Vienna. Kazakhstan also hosted the organization's large-scale on-site inspection exercise in 2008. Seoul is party to the same treaty. Pyongyang has never signed it. North Korea has tested six times. Its detonation of Sept. 3, 2017 remains the most recent nuclear test conducted anywhere in the world. 2026-08-25 10:50:40