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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KAIST finds molecular lock that traps cells in cancer-like states SEOUL, August 21 (AJP) - A cell that turns cancer-like tends to stay that way long after whatever triggered the change has gone. Researchers in South Korea say they have identified which molecular circuits hold it there and have shown in computer models how to release them. The method is called ROOT, short for Revelation Of the Original circuit of irreversible Transition. It was developed by a team led by Cho Kwang-hyun, a professor in the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and published online Aug. 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The university announced the work Friday. Cells constantly change their properties and functions in response to signals from outside. Sometimes the change reverses when the signal stops. Sometimes it does not. Biologists call that second case irreversibility. An ordinary switch springs back when the finger comes off it. Some cellular switches stay on. The molecules that drove the original change keep activating one another after the outside signal has vanished, and the new state holds. That property is not a defect. Cells rely on it to become and remain specialized, which is why a liver cell stays a liver cell. It also drives disease. In epithelial-mesenchymal transition, cells that normally sit fixed in a tissue layer acquire the ability to detach, move and invade what surrounds them. Cancer uses that transition to spread, and once a tumor cell has made it, the cell does not go back. The obstacle has been sorting out which circuits do the holding. A cell's molecular network contains thousands of positive feedback loops, arrangements in which one molecule activates another that in turn reactivates the first. Only some of them lock a cell into a state it cannot leave, and there was no way to tell which. ROOT represents those interactions as a computational logic model and simulates the full arc of a stimulus arriving and then being withdrawn. Circuits that keep the cell in its altered state after withdrawal are flagged. The team calls the resulting set an irreversibility kernel. The team compares the exercise to picking out, from thousands of tangled wires, the few that are actually keeping a door locked. Finding the lock suggested two ways to work on it. The first, resetting control, leaves the cell's capacity for irreversible change intact and returns the individual cell to its earlier state, the equivalent of opening the door without touching the lock. The second, reversing control, removes the source of irreversibility altogether, so the cell can move between states more freely afterward. The researchers ran ROOT on B cell differentiation, epithelial-mesenchymal transition in lung cancer, and the development of enterocytes and beta cells, the intestinal absorptive cells and the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, using data on which genes are switched on in individual cells. In each case the circuits ROOT identified matched regulators already known from earlier laboratory work to govern those transitions. Nothing in the study reversed a cell in a laboratory. The work is computational throughout, tested against networks built from published experimental data, and the applications to cancer and aging that the university describes are prospective rather than demonstrated. What the study offers, KAIST said, is an answer to a question that precedes treatment. Not how to bring a cell back, but why it cannot come back by itself. Kim Jong-wan and Jang Seong-hoon were co-first authors. Lee Jong-hoon and doctoral student Corbin Hopper were co-authors. The work was funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Ministry of Science and ICT, and the Korea Dementia Research Center. "The core of this study is that we identified the circuits that make a cell unable to return once it has changed, and developed a technology that controls them to bring the cell back to its previous state," Cho said. 2026-08-21 14:34:02 -
Viet Nam's Gen Z protests without gathering SEOUL, August 21 (AJP) - The flowers under the tree outside No. 55 Nguyen Huy Tu Street arrived one at a time, which is why the police had nothing to break up. Over roughly a week in August, young Vietnamese walked to the spot in central Hanoi, left a bouquet, photographed it and went home. By the time the pile was large enough to be a problem, no crowd had ever formed. The tree marks the place where a car crossed into oncoming traffic on May 30, 2025, and struck a motorbike carrying a father and his 18-year-old daughter. The teenager, Do Ngoc Phuong Thuy, suffered a severe injury to her right leg and died on June 8, days before her high school graduation examination. Her father, Do Viet Hung, was seriously hurt. Vietnamese newspapers reported the crash once, on May 31, identifying the driver only by his initials, and then stopped. The driver was Nguyen Sy Cuong, 64 at the time, a National Assembly deputy across two terms from 2011 to 2021 and a former deputy chair of the legislature's Foreign Affairs Committee. His wife, Lam Thi Phuong Thanh, was appointed minister of culture, sports and tourism in April. That silence held for more than a year. It broke this month after the culture ministry banned more than a dozen songs by the rapper MCK, which pointed public anger at the minister and, through her, at her husband. By the afternoon of Aug. 12, more than a million posts on Threads had mentioned the case. On Aug. 17, state broadcaster Vietnam Television devoted six minutes of its flagship current affairs program to the crash. In a country where more than 10,000 people die on the roads each year, a traffic case from the previous spring does not normally receive that treatment, and the timing put it two weeks ahead of National Day on Sept. 2. Colonel Nguyen Duc Long, deputy chief of the Hanoi police, said investigators found that Nguyen Sy Cuong had driven in the wrong lane and violated traffic regulations. He tested negative for alcohol and admitted responsibility, Long said, and met the conditions for exemption from criminal liability after the victim's family withdrew its complaint. It was the first official acknowledgment that he was the driver. Do Viet Hung appeared in the broadcast with his face obscured. He thanked people online for their concern and said the family had no complaints about the investigation. The matter, he said, "is now in the past." A spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Security used the same program to accuse "hostile and reactionary forces" of stringing together unrelated incidents to manipulate young people and students. Nothing in the case has been established about the allegation that drove most of the online anger. Users across Threads and Facebook asserted the driver had been drunk. The only official statement on the point is the negative alcohol test, and no evidence has been produced either way. What makes the episode unusual is not the anger but the shape it took. Protesters renamed the tree the justice tree and created a listing for it on Google Maps under the label Cay BMW NSC 30525, which collected more than 230 reviews. They checked in at the location the way people check in at restaurants. They wrote poems. They filed a petition. They generated images of the victim with artificial intelligence and circulated them. After the flowers were cleared on Aug. 14 and plainclothes officers were posted at the site, some young people began tying white ribbons to their backpacks. Every one of those actions is deniable. A person laying a bouquet is not an assembly. A ribbon on a backpack is not a banner. A Google Maps review is not a leaflet. Vietnamese law gives police wide latitude to disperse gatherings and prosecute organizers, and this campaign has produced neither a gathering nor an organizer. The state's response was to clear a place and watch it, because there was no crowd to address. The contrast with the rest of the region is sharp. Youth-led movements have swept South and Southeast Asia over the past two years, and most of them took the street. In Nepal, protests that began on Sept. 8, 2025, over corruption and a social media ban brought down Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli within days and left at least 76 people dead in the first 48 hours, with parliament and the presidential residence burned. Indonesian protesters forced President Prabowo Subianto to cut lawmakers' housing allowances last August after police killed a 21-year-old delivery driver during demonstrations. In the Philippines, tens of thousands turned out over graft in flood control projects. In India, thousands marched on Parliament in New Delhi in July over education reform. The obvious explanation is that Viet Nam is a one-party communist state and the others are not, but that does not survive contact with the facts. Oli led the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), and his government fell in five days. The difference lies in enforcement rather than ideology. Viet Nam has had street protests, and it has taught its young people what follows them. Weekly anti-China demonstrations ran for three months in the summer of 2011 outside the Chinese embassy in Hanoi and the consulate in Ho Chi Minh City before security forces began clearing them in late August and detained 47 people. Mass protests against a proposed cybersecurity law and a special economic zone bill in 2018 ended with organizers in prison, among them Huynh Truong Ca, who served five years. Article 331 of the penal code, which criminalizes infringing on state interests, carries sentences of up to seven years and has been applied to ordinary people for posts about local officials. A generation that watched those outcomes did not conclude that protest was impossible. It concluded that the assembly was the vulnerable part, and removed it. The pressure has not disappeared. Threads users posted screenshots on Aug. 13 showing notices that their posts had been restricted inside Viet Nam at the culture ministry's request, citing local law. Others said their accounts were limited. The petition demanding an investigation continues to collect signatures from outside the country, where it cannot be blocked. At the tree on Nguyen Huy Tu, only scattered petals remain. The plainclothes officers are still there, watching from across the street. 2026-08-21 10:40:24 -
Retirement age fight halts every Hyundai Motor plant in S. Korea SEOUL, August 21 (AJP) - Every production line at South Korea's largest automaker went down Friday morning as workers began their first full-day strike in a decade, a walkout that turns on how long they get to keep their jobs rather than on how much they are paid. Morning-shift members of the Hyundai Motor union, who normally clock in at 6:45 a.m., did not come to work. The afternoon shift that starts at 3:30 p.m. will not report either, leaving plants in Ulsan, Jeonju and Asan without production for 16 hours across the day. The union counted about 39,000 members taking part, office staff included. The full day will bring the union's strike total for the year to 60 hours, and double that in stopped line time. Industry estimates put cumulative losses through Friday at 55,200 vehicles and more than 2.3 trillion won ($1.65 billion) in revenue. Hyundai does not publish its own figures. Pay was not the obstacle. The company put an offer on the table at the 15th bargaining session on July 8 that included a monthly base wage increase of 89,000 won ($64), performance pay worth 350 percent of monthly base pay, a lump sum of 10 million won ($7,174) and 15 shares of company stock. The union turned it down and has since built its campaign around three demands that sit outside the wage package entirely. The largest of the three is the retirement age. South Korean law requires employers to set retirement at 60 or later, and the union wants Hyundai to extend that toward 65, timed so that a departing worker can draw the national pension without a gap. Hyundai already rehires retirees for up to two years, which the union considers a substitute rather than a solution. At Tuesday's session, the company proposed settling the timing of any extension through a supplementary agreement once the National Assembly changes the law, and taking up the reinstatement question at the end of the year. The union rejected both. Hyundai's position is that all three items fall outside this year's wage talks, that there are no grounds to reinstate members who were lawfully dismissed for illegal acts during past union activity, and that politicians have to settle the retirement age before a single company can. The second demand concerns the bonus. Hyundai pays an annual bonus set as a multiple of monthly base pay, currently 750 percent, and the union wants it raised to 800. The union argues that fixed pay, including base wage, makes up only 54.8 percent of what a member takes home, which forces workers into overtime and weekend shifts to hold a living income. It pointed to the company's retained earnings, which are accumulated profits rather than cash on hand, and which grew from 11.4 trillion won ($8.2 billion) in 2007 to 101.3 trillion won ($72.7 billion) as of last year. Talks have gone nowhere since. The two sides met 16 times starting May 6, and Tuesday's session at the Ulsan plant broke up after less than three hours with no date set for the next one. Money Today quoted Lee Jong-chul, the union's branch chairman, as saying the next session would wait until working-level talks produced something better. The last time the union struck this hard was 2016, when it logged 106 hours of strikes and 212 hours of stopped lines. Friday's walkout is not Hyundai's alone. The Korean Metal Workers' Union announced at a press conference Wednesday that roughly 90,000 workers across the auto sector would stop work over two days, with parts makers, subcontractors and Hyundai Motor Group affiliates halting Thursday and assembly plants following Friday. Union officers were due at the group's Yangjae-dong headquarters in Seoul for a rally at 2 p.m. Underneath that action sits a second dispute. An amended trade union law now recognizes that a prime contractor carries employer responsibility toward workers it does not directly employ, but the Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU) says Hyundai and affiliates, including Hyundai Mobis, Hyundai Wia and Hyundai Glovis, have refused to post notice of bargaining demands or to attend. About 80 percent of the 20,000 KMWU members seeking such talks work for Hyundai Motor Group companies, according to Ulsan Journal. The retirement age fight reaches well past the auto industry. South Korea crossed into super-aged status in December 2024, when people 65 and older passed 20 percent of the population, and the country now has one of the world's longest life expectancies alongside one of its lowest birth rates. A worker who leaves at 60 cannot claim the national pension until 63 today, and that threshold rises to 65 by 2033. The National Assembly has been circling the problem for a year. The governing Democratic Party set up a special committee on extending the retirement age in November 2025, the government accepted phased extension in principle in March, and the discussion was then pushed past the June 3 local elections. The committee has been working toward a bill for the regular session that opens next month, built around a staged increase toward 65 starting near the end of the decade. Business groups have argued for rehiring schemes instead, which is the same argument Hyundai made at the bargaining table this week. The union plans to strike for four hours on each of the next two working days, Monday and Tuesday, and will convene its central strike committee on Tuesday to decide whether to go further. Kang Sung-ho, who leads the metal union's Kia branch, made the demographic case at Wednesday's press conference. "About 2,000 workers reach retirement age and leave the floor every year," he said, adding that once the income gap between retirement and the first pension payment is taken into account, extending the retirement age is a task that can no longer be put off. 2026-08-21 09:44:28 -
Kazakhstan to elect first Kurultai under new constitution SEOUL, August 20 (AJP) - Voters in Kazakhstan choose all 145 seats of the Kurultai on Sunday, filling the single-chamber legislature that replaced the country's two houses of parliament and completing an institutional change written into a constitution that took effect seven weeks ago. The Central Election Commission has registered 12,605,788 voters and 545 candidates across seven party lists. Every seat is contested in one nationwide district under closed-list proportional representation, with a threshold of 5 percent of valid votes. Deputies serve five years. This is the first national vote under the new constitutional order, and the first in which every seat in the legislature is filled by election. The old Parliament paired an elected lower house, the Mazhilis, with a Senate of 50 members, 10 of them named by the president. Neither chamber exists now, and the Kurultai has no appointed seats. The new body passes legislation, approves the national budget, oversees the executive and may consider confidence in the government. Its consent is required for presidential nominees to the newly created post of Vice President, to the office of Prime Minister, and to senior positions including the Constitutional Court, the Central Election Commission (CEC) and the Supreme Audit Chamber. The same constitution creates a second new institution alongside it. The Halyk Kenesi, or People's Council, is designated the highest consultative body, and its members are appointed by the president rather than elected. Its 126 seats are split evenly three ways, among ethnocultural associations, major public organizations, and local assemblies and regional public councils. It meets in full session at least once a year, with a standing presidium known as the Toralka working between sessions. Its powers reach into the legislative process. The council may submit draft laws to the Kurultai and may initiate national referendums, which places an unelected body alongside the elected one. It absorbs two institutions now being retired, the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, created in 1995 to represent the country's ethnic groups, and the National Kurultai. Parliament passed the first reading of the constitutional law establishing the council in May, and it has not been seated. Ballots list the seven parties in an order drawn by lot, followed by an option to vote against all of them. Voters mark a single choice and cannot pick individual candidates, because seats won by a party go to the names on its registered list in the order the party set. Only registered parties may nominate, and self-nomination is not allowed. If only one party clears the threshold, the party with the next-highest total also enters the chamber. The name reaches back to the assemblies of the Kazakh Khanate, where khans were raised to power and questions of war, migration and succession were settled collectively by the leading figures of the tribes rather than by a single ruler. The word is Turkic in origin and means gathering or council, and versions of it survive in the names of legislatures and public assemblies from Bashkortostan to Kyrgyzstan. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed applying it to the new parliament in January, at a session of the National Kurultai in Kyzylorda, arguing that the historical weight of the term was worth carrying into a modern institution. That body, a consultative forum he established in 2022 for officials, academics and public figures, shares the name but not the function. The Kyzylorda session was its last. Tokayev first raised the shift to a single chamber in his address to the nation in September 2025, when he proposed putting it to a referendum in 2027 and said the public discussion would take at least a year. He appointed a working group on parliamentary reform in October under State Counselor Erlan Karin. In January he told the Kyzylorda session that the changes had grown extensive enough to amount to a new constitution rather than an amendment, and a Constitutional Commission chaired by Constitutional Court head Elvira Azimova took over the drafting. The text was published Feb. 12 and went to a nationwide referendum on March 15, more than a year ahead of the original date. The CEC put support at 87.15 percent on turnout of 73.12 percent. The constitution entered into force July 1, ending the mandate of the old Parliament, and Tokayev signed the decree calling the election the same day. Adilet holds first place on the ballot and the largest list, with 186 candidates. The party held its founding congress May 7 and was registered by the Justice Ministry on June 1 under Aibek Dadebay, who had stepped down as head of the presidential executive office. Amanat, which took 53.9 percent in 2023 and held the largest bloc in the Mazhilis, voted at its congress June 12 to join Adilet, and Adilet delegates approved the accession two days later. The remaining six lists carry between 33 and 75 candidates. Auyl, an agrarian party, finished second in 2023 with 10.9 percent. Respublica, associated with business, took 8.59 percent and Ak Zhol, which campaigns on market liberalization and stronger parliamentary oversight, took 8.41 percent. The People's Party of Kazakhstan won 6.8 percent and the Nationwide Social Democratic Party 5.2 percent. Baitaq, an environmental party, fell short at 2.3 percent. Adilet did not contest that election, so the two ballots cannot be compared party for party. Of the 545 candidates, 172 are women and 373 are men, with an average age of 45.4 years, according to the CEC. The field includes 74 candidates under 35 and 19 with disabilities. Each party had to reserve at least 30 percent of its list for women, young people and persons with disabilities and must apply the same proportion when distributing the seats it wins. All seven met the list requirement. More than 10,400 polling stations will open across the country, staffed by roughly 71,000 commission members. Another 79 stations will operate at Kazakh diplomatic missions in 61 countries. Voting is in person only, with no postal or online option, and the CEC is printing 12,731,847 ballots in Kazakh and Russian, including a statutory 1 percent reserve. Campaigning began July 23 and ends at midnight on Aug. 21, with Aug. 22 set aside as a day of silence. Publication of opinion polls, forecasts and other election research has been barred since Aug. 18. The CEC had accredited 781 foreign and international observers as of Aug. 17. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has deployed 39 long-term and 208 short-term monitors through its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which is expected to release initial findings the day after the vote and a full report later. Once results are published, the president has 30 days to convene the first session, and the government surrenders its powers before the incoming chamber. Within two months of that sitting, and only with the Kurultai's consent, Tokayev must appoint a Vice President along with the leadership of the Constitutional Court, the CEC, and the Supreme Audit Chamber. 2026-08-20 20:41:14 -
Kookmin students win grand prize at Korea AI content festival SEOUL, August 20 (AJP) - A music video created by Kookmin University students, depicting a man who tries to break off his relationship with the robots that think for him, then orders another one, has won the top prize in its category at a South Korean competition for work made using artificial intelligence solutions. The film, titled "Epos," was made by five undergraduates in Kookmin University's Department of AI Design working under the team name Holy. It beat 255 other entries in the music video category of the 2026 Korea AI Content Festival, which drew 1,066 submissions across four categories between February and July. Awards were presented Aug. 6 at the Construction Hall in Gangnam, southern Seoul. The team members are Kim Se-hyun, Lee Song-won, Yoon Hee-won, Seong Yeon-woo and Han Ji-woo. The idea came out of their own habits. The students said that after working constantly with generative AI, a class of tools that produce images, video, text and sound on command, they had come to see a clear gap between work that uses AI well and work that leans on it entirely. That gap became the starting point for the film. In "Epos," the protagonist relies on cloned robots that take over one role after another in his life, a figure the team drew for AI itself. He decides to cut them off. He places another order instead. The team said it was not trying to reject AI. What worried them was the possibility that heavy dependence gradually dulls human thinking, judgment and creativity. They ended the film without resolving anything, they said, because whether AI turns out to be a threat or a larger opening depends on how people use it. Seong Yeon-woo, who accepted the award for the team, said the technology was never the point. "The more we work in an era of making things with AI, the more I think the value of a work is decided by what question you ask, what message you put in it and how you direct it," Seong said. The prize, Seong added, appeared to recognize "the process of thinking it through with the team, over and over, for the sake of the message and the planning and the direction." Entries were judged by a panel of working drama directors, heads of AI production companies and university professors, who weighed creativity, story construction, use of AI technology, finish and potential for further use. The festival was organized by Chorokbaem Media, a Seoul production company, to find creators capable of making content with AI and to surface strong examples of it. Submissions were taken in four categories covering advertising, music video, short-form drama and mid-form drama. Kookmin University opened the Department of AI Design in 2022 as the ninth department in its College of Design, with the aim of training designers who can work with data and AI systems rather than simply operate them. The university, which marks 80 years since its founding this year, has grouped design and content alongside AI convergence among eight fields it is concentrating on under a long-term plan called KMU VISION 2035: EDGE. The winning works will be released in stages through Chorokbaem Media's website and official YouTube channel. 2026-08-20 14:15:34 -
US ambassador meets American executives in first Seoul business talks SEOUL, August 20 (AJP) - The new U.S. ambassador to South Korea met senior executives from American companies operating in the country on Thursday, her first group engagement with the U.S. business community since taking up her post three weeks ago. The American Chamber of Commerce in Korea hosted Michelle Steel for a breakfast roundtable at its office in Yeouido, Seoul. The chamber, founded in 1953, says it represents more than 800 member companies and affiliates, making it the largest foreign business organization in South Korea. The American Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AMCHAM) kept the session small and did not release the names of the executives who attended. It said the group covered opportunities and challenges facing American companies here, and how continued contact between the embassy and the chamber could strengthen bilateral trade and investment. "We are delighted to welcome Ambassador Steel for her first official meeting with the U.S. business community in Korea," said AMCHAM chairman and chief executive James Kim. Kim said he had known Steel for years and had already met her at the U.S. Embassy during her first week in Seoul. Her early contact with business leaders, he said, "sends a clear and encouraging message about the importance of American companies to the U.S.-Korea economic partnership." AMCHAM said Steel used the meeting to stress the part American companies play in the economic relationship between the two countries, and told the executives she would work with the chamber to address the difficulties they face and improve the environment they operate in. The chamber did not quote her directly. The two sides also discussed cooperating on Freedom 250, a program marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. AMCHAM held its annual Doing Business in Korea seminar in April as a Freedom 250 edition. Steel arrived in Seoul on July 30, filling a post that had been vacant since Philip Goldberg left in January 2025. President Donald Trump nominated her in April and the Senate confirmed her on June 17. Born in Seoul in 1955, Steel moved to the United States in 1975 and served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing California from 2021 to 2025. She is the second Korean American to serve as ambassador to South Korea, after Sung Kim, who held the post from 2011 to 2014. She submitted a copy of her credentials to Foreign Minister Cho Hyun on Aug. 4 and presented them to President Lee Jae Myung at the Blue House on Aug. 12. 2026-08-20 11:17:33 -
KAIST solves oxygen problem blocking 3D memory for AI chips SEOUL, August 20 (AJP) - In a bid to stabilize memory stacked directly on top of artificial intelligence chips, a joint research team led by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said Thursday it had developed an insulating film that steers oxygen atoms toward the parts of a vertical memory transistor that need them and away from the parts they damage, allowing the devices to achieve higher current flow and longer data retention. The device held its electrical characteristics after more than 10 million switching cycles, with the voltage at which the transistor switches on drifting by less than 50 millivolts. A test memory cell built around it held stored data for more than 648 seconds, close to 11 minutes, without being refreshed, and survived more than 1,200 write cycles. The biggest drain on an AI chip is not the arithmetic. It is the constant shuttling of data between the memory that stores it and the processor that computes on it. Stacking the two together is one of the few remaining ways to shorten that trip, and oxygen has been the specific thing breaking it. For decades the memory industry improved chips by making each component smaller, packing more storage into the same square of silicon while drawing less power. That approach is now close to its physical floor. The alternative is to build upward, stacking components in three dimensions rather than shrinking them sideways. It is what a city does when it runs out of room for single-story houses and starts putting up apartment towers. The vertical channel transistor is one way to do that. In a conventional transistor, current runs horizontally through a strip of material called the channel. Turning that channel on its end frees floor space, letting engineers pack far more devices into the same area. Making the channel out of an oxide semiconductor rather than silicon adds a second advantage. Oxide leaks very little current when switched off, which is what allows a memory cell to hold its contents without constant electrical topping up. The trouble is oxygen. Oxide channels are missing some of the oxygen atoms that belong in their crystal structure, a defect known as an oxygen vacancy. A few of them help current flow. Too many and the transistor stops behaving predictably. The obvious remedy is to feed oxygen back into the channel. But oxygen does not stay where it is put. It migrates to the metal electrodes and corrodes them, raising resistance and degrading the device that the repair was meant to improve. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) team attacked the problem through the interlayer dielectric, the insulating film that separates the wiring and components inside a chip. Engineers normally treat it as an electrical barrier and nothing more. By sandwiching silicon dioxide between two layers of silicon nitride, the researchers turned the film into what they call an oxygen tunnel. It is a one-way passage that lets oxygen reach the channel where it is needed and blocks the path toward the electrodes where it does damage. KAIST said the resulting transistors achieved the highest current flow and data retention reported for oxide vertical channel devices. The team then combined the oxide transistors with conventional silicon CMOS circuitry, the basic technology inside almost every processor and phone chip made today, and modeled how the hybrid would perform as embedded memory. Simulations projected roughly 45 times longer data retention than a comparable CMOS design and a 38 percent smaller memory cell. The payoff the researchers are aiming at is compute-in-memory, an approach that performs calculations inside or beside the memory that holds the data instead of hauling that data across the chip to a separate processor. The current arrangement is the equivalent of carrying every ingredient from the pantry to a kitchen in another building and back again. As AI models grow, the carrying costs more energy than the cooking. Kwon Ji-min, a professor in KAIST's School of Electrical Engineering, led the work. "Building a tall building is not just about adding floors, it is about making the structure stable, and the same is true of three-dimensional semiconductors," Kwon said. "This technology should speed up development of next-generation memory that raises AI processing speed while cutting power consumption." Gu Hyeon-ho was the first author. Lee Yong-woo and Jung Hak-soon were co-corresponding authors with Kwon. Researchers from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Yonsei University, the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Seoul National University of Science and Technology and Seoul National University also took part. Several claims remain untested outside the laboratory. The results were demonstrated on individual transistors and a small test memory cell, not on a production wafer. The 45-fold retention gain and the 38 percent area saving are simulation outputs rather than measurements from fabricated hardware. No full compute-in-memory array using the design has been built, and KAIST did not name a manufacturing partner. The paper ran in the materials science journal Advanced Functional Materials on May 20 and was selected as a front cover article. KAIST announced the results Thursday, three months after publication. AJP Takeaways ● A KAIST-led team built a three-layer insulating film that steers oxygen inside a stacked memory transistor, removing the defect problem that has blocked 3D memory for AI chips. ● The device held steady after more than 10 million switching cycles, with switch-on voltage drifting under 50 millivolts. A test memory cell retained data for more than 648 seconds without a refresh. ● Simulations pairing the oxide transistors with silicon CMOS projected 45 times longer data retention and a 38 percent smaller memory cell than a comparable conventional design. ● Those projections have not been verified in fabricated hardware, and no full compute-in-memory array has been built. 2026-08-20 10:59:39 -
Truth-Seeker's Odyssey: From world of gods to world of man - Part 2 This is part 2 of a two-part column series by Aju Media Group's senior columnist Abe Kwak. 5. The Pale Blue Dot: Ithaca for All Humanity Let us leave, for a moment, the Mediterranean of Odysseus and turn our eyes toward space. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, photographed Earth on February 14, 1990, from a distance of roughly 6 billion kilometers. Against the immensity of space, Earth appeared smaller than a single pixel — a tiny point suspended in a shaft of sunlight. Carl Sagan transformed the image into one of humanity’s most enduring symbols of self-understanding: the Pale Blue Dot. Everything in human history happened on that dot. The Trojan War. Homer’s songs. Odysseus’s Ithaca. The land walked by Jesus. The place where the Buddha awakened. The worlds of Confucius and Laozi. The Korea in which the 20th-century religious thinker Dasuk Ryu Young-mo contemplated heaven, humanity and the meaning of existence. Every empire human beings built, every religion they founded, every revolution they fought, every war, every love, every hatred, every triumph and every failure — all occurred on that tiny point. The Pale Blue Dot reveals two apparently contradictory truths. Human beings are infinitesimally small before the universe. And yet human beings are capable of understanding that smallness. We can imagine the scale of the cosmos and ask what our existence within it means. We are not the center of the universe. Yet we can look at the universe and reflect upon ourselves. We are mortal, yet we contemplate eternity. We are imperfect, yet imagine perfection. We know we will die, and still we love, have children, build civilizations and attempt to leave something behind for generations we will never meet. Perhaps human greatness lies not in imagining ourselves to be the center of existence, but in recognizing how small we are and nevertheless choosing to live meaningfully. Then perhaps this pale blue Earth is the largest Ithaca humanity will ever share. For centuries we have fought over religion, ethnicity, borders, ideology, skin color and language. Seen from space, all those conflicts occur within a single tiny point. To love human beings, respect cultures and live together with nature is therefore more than noble rhetoric. It is among the most practical conditions for sustaining civilization on this fragile planet. And here I am reminded of the Korean thinker Dasuk Ryu Young-mo. Dasuk’s achievement did not lie in mixing religions together until their differences disappeared. Christianity and Buddhism are not the same. Confucianism and Daoism are not the same. Their understandings of the Absolute, the human being, salvation, awakening, world and life emerged from different histories and different languages. Erasing differences is not spiritual convergence. Dasuk’s distinctive form of religious dialogue began by respecting those differences while listening for the deepest questions that different scriptures direct toward human beings. At the bottom, one question returns: How will you live? Dasuk studied the Bible intensely while engaging Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoist thought. He used the Korean word jena to describe the self-centered ego — the self that grasps, possesses and insists upon itself. Against it he developed the idea of eolna, a uniquely Korean expression pointing toward the true or higher self, the human spirit awakening beyond ego toward a greater dimension of truth. Put in Dasuk’s language, jena wants to pull everything toward itself. To possess more. To win more. To rise higher. It resembles, at another philosophical level, the Buddhist diagnosis of greed, anger and delusion. The human being moving toward eolna, by contrast, learns to observe desire, discipline it and move beyond the narrow self toward a greater world of truth and life. Seen through such eyes, the voyage of Odysseus acquires another meaning. The Cyclops, Sirens, Circe and the storms are not only outside him. Greed is inside us. Pride is inside us. Anger, fear and revenge are inside us. The most formidable adversary a human being confronts over a lifetime may finally be oneself. Odysseus’s journey toward Ithaca can therefore also be read as an inner odyssey: a voyage from the ego-bound jena toward the deeper center of eolna. The Bible raises this essential question in another way. Jesus did not seek merely to abolish religious law. His conflicts arose when law, having lost its original purpose of sustaining human life, hardened into formalism or became an instrument of power. He healed on the Sabbath. He ate with tax collectors and people treated as sinners. He touched lepers. He welcomed children. Again and again the question was not merely whether a rule had been observed. The deeper question was: Whom does the rule serve? What kind of life does it protect? The parable of the Good Samaritan makes the point with breathtaking clarity. A man lies beaten beside the road. Religiously respected figures pass him by. Then a Samaritan — someone viewed with suspicion by many Jews of that period — stops. He treats the man’s wounds. Takes him to an inn. Pays for his care. The important question is not who knows the most law. It is: Who became a neighbor to the wounded man? Again and again, the Bible treats the way a society deals with widows, orphans and strangers as a test of justice and faith. Faith reveals itself not simply in how often one invokes God’s name, but in how one treats the vulnerable. The words of the Gospel of John — “the truth will set you free” — also sound newly urgent in the age of AI. Freedom does not mean merely doing whatever one wishes. There is a deeper freedom: freedom from falsehood; freedom from slavery to appetite; freedom to confront truth and accept the consequences of choosing it. AI can generate language. That does not mean it knows truth. An abundance of information is not the same as wisdom. The ability to generate millions of sentences does not itself entail moral responsibility for what those sentences do in the world. The final responsibility for judging what is true, choosing the truth and bearing the consequences remains human. Buddhism approaches the human problem from another direction. The Heart Sutra teaches: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Emptiness is not simple nihilism. It points toward the insight that no phenomenon exists as an eternally fixed, completely independent substance. Things arise through causes, conditions and relationships. Seen from the Buddhist understanding that intrinsic, independent self-nature is empty, Odysseus himself cannot be Odysseus alone. Because Penelope exists, he is a husband. Because Telemachus exists, he is a father. Because Ithaca exists, he is a king and a homecomer. Because companions sailed beside him, he was a commander. So it is with us. We become who we are through family and friends, society and nation, history and culture, nature and Earth, and even generations not yet born. Laozi’s Daodejing speaks of another kind of strength: “The highest goodness is like water.” Water nourishes all things without contending with them. It seeks the low places others avoid. And yet, over time, soft water can reshape stone. Human civilization has too often understood strength only as the capacity to dominate, conquer and prevail. Laozi points toward another strength: the strength to descend; the strength not to contend; the strength that sustains life. Odysseus, too, does not reach Ithaca through strength and cunning alone. He is a king who hides his name. A famous hero who returns to his own palace dressed as a beggar. To proclaim oneself endlessly is not maturity. Sometimes the greater power is the ability to become low like water. The Book of Changes, or I Ching, places change at the center of existence. Nothing remains fixed forever. Day becomes night. Winter becomes spring. Prosperity declines. Decline can become renewal. Individuals change. Companies change. Nations change. Civilizations change. One of the tradition’s enduring formulations reads: When things reach an impasse, they change; through change they find a way; finding a way, they endure. The age of AI is profoundly an age of yi — of change. Jobs are changing. Corporations are changing. Journalism and education are changing. The relationship between human beings and machines is changing. Yet to accept change does not mean accepting everything merely because it is new. We must decide what should change and what must be defended. Technology and institutions must evolve. Truth, justice, human dignity, freedom, responsibility and reverence for life must not simply be swept away by the velocity of technological change. The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean asks how human beings maintain moral centeredness in a world of motion. Its opening lines speak of human nature, the Way and cultivation: “What Heaven confers is called human nature; to follow that nature is called the Way; cultivating the Way is called education.” To understand the “mean” as merely splitting the difference between two sides is to miss the point. The center is not mediocrity. It is the capacity to discover what is fitting and right amid constantly changing circumstances. AI confronts us with the same demand. We must neither worship AI as a god nor fear it as a demon. We cannot simply refuse technology. Nor can we surrender humanity to technology. To use it without becoming its servant; to develop it while accepting responsibility; to increase efficiency without sacrificing human dignity — this may be a new expression of the Mean for the age of AI. These scriptures and traditions arise from different languages and histories. There is no need to force them into sameness. Yet, through the dialogical vision associated with Dasuk Ryu Young-mo, one can descend beneath their differences and encounter recurring human questions. How we live matters at least as much as what we profess to believe. What we choose matters at least as much as what we know. What we can relinquish matters at least as much as what we possess. And knowing where to return may matter at least as much as knowing how high we can climb. 6. Humanity Needs a Second Odyssey Looking back, human history has largely been an outward odyssey. We searched for more land. Built larger empires. Created faster ships, railways, automobiles and aircraft. We sent spacecraft beyond Earth. The internet connected the planet. And now we have created AI systems capable of imitating aspects of our language and thought. But perhaps the journey humanity most urgently needs is no longer only outward. We need an odyssey inward. A voyage back toward ourselves. In Dasuk’s language, from jena toward eolna. Freedom is not the realization of every desire. A deeper freedom emerges when a person can govern desire. Success is not possessing everything one wants. Sometimes success is knowing what must be surrendered. The human beings we need are not those who can know more than machines. We need human beings capable of judging what is right. Not people who calculate faster than machines, but people willing to accept responsibility for their judgments. Not simply people who produce more, but people capable of asking what is truly worth producing. As AI grows more powerful, human inner maturity may become more important than human external ability. This is not an argument for fearing technology. Nor for rejecting it. It is an argument that human ethics and responsibility must develop at a pace commensurate with technological power. Civilization becomes dangerous when the moral maturity of the human beings using a technology falls behind the power of the technology itself. The question Oppenheimer asked in the atomic age has returned in a new form in the AI age. AI can analyze every great love poem ever written. But taking the hand of someone we love and sharing that person’s suffering remains a human act. AI can explain thousands of years of philosophy concerning justice. But whether I remain silent before injustice or stand against it is a choice I must make. AI can define freedom. It cannot bear my responsibility for what I do with freedom. AI can calculate the dangers of climate change. But the decision to sacrifice some present convenience in order to protect nature for future generations belongs to humanity. AI can calculate the fastest course to Ithaca. But human beings must decide what their Ithaca is. That is our freedom. And that is our responsibility. Human beings will always need an Ithaca. And so we return to where we began: From the world of the gods to the world of man. This does not mean humanity expelled God. Still less does it mean that humanity became God. It means that as human beings awakened to themselves as creatures capable of thought and choice, they also acquired responsibility for those choices. The greater the freedom, the greater the responsibility. The stronger the technology, the stronger the ethics must become. The greater the knowledge, the deeper the humility required. Seen from space, all of us live upon a Pale Blue Dot. Kings and the poor live there. Christians and Buddhists. Easterners and Westerners. People divided by ideology. All live upon the same small planet. Our wealth, power, fame and wars cannot escape it. Perhaps, then, the greatest things human beings can do on this small world are simpler than we imagine: To defend truth. To choose justice. To love freedom while accepting responsibility. To love other human beings. To respect cultures different from our own. To live with nature rather than against it. To leave the next generation a world slightly better than the one we inherited. This, I believe, is the humanism we must rebuild in the age of AI. The goal is not to become stronger than machines. It is to become more fully human. The more machines resemble us, the more urgently we must remember what humanity is. Three thousand years ago Homer sent one man onto the sea. Odysseus crossed war and storm, gods and monsters, desire and temptation, and at last returned to the place to which he belonged. It was not the world’s greatest empire. It was a small island called Ithaca. Yet to him it mattered more than any empire. The people he loved were there. The people for whom he was responsible were there. The life that reminded him who he was was there. Three thousand years later Christopher Nolan summons that ancient man onto the screen again. And he asks those of us who have created a new presence called artificial intelligence: Where are we going? What are we racing so quickly to acquire? What are we losing along the way? And when this long voyage ends, where shall we return? Perhaps civilization’s progress cannot be measured only by its ability to go faster, higher and farther. Perhaps an even greater progress lies in remembering, however far we travel, where we began; in remembering what we set out to protect; and in knowing where, at the end, we must return. For Homer’s Odysseus, that place was Ithaca. For Dasuk Ryu Young-mo, it was the ascent from jena toward eolna. In the Bible, it is the path of truth and love. In the Heart Sutra, it is the wisdom of emptiness that releases attachment. For Laozi, it is the way of water flowing toward the low places. In the Book of Changes, it is the wisdom of changing without losing the Way. In the Doctrine of the Mean, it is maintaining moral centeredness amid the extremes of the world. And in Carl Sagan’s cosmic vision, it is the Pale Blue Dot we must protect together. The Ithaca we seek today must therefore be a world in which truth, justice and freedom remain alive — a world in which humanity, culture and nature breathe together rather than destroy one another. Homer’s Odysseus returned to Ithaca. Humanity’s odyssey is not yet over. Now that AI resembles human intelligence, robots increasingly resemble human physical agency, and machines have begun to speak in human language, we must ask the human question at a deeper level than ever before. What must remain, irreducibly, human? What must human beings continue to take responsibility for? And what is the final purpose of this immense adventure we call civilization? The answer will not belong simply to those who are stronger, richer or faster. The future may belong to human beings who are more truthful; more just; free, yet capable of responsibility; able to feel another person’s pain; able to respect cultures unlike their own; able to live with nature; and humble enough to know that they spend only a brief moment upon a Pale Blue Dot suspended in an immense universe. In the age of myth, human beings asked the gods for directions. In the age of philosophy, they asked reason. In the age of science, they asked the laws of nature. In the age of AI, human beings will ask the machines they created for an endless number of answers. But however powerful artificial intelligence becomes, there is one final question we must never hand over to a machine: How should I live? The moment we surrender that question, we become Odysseus without Ithaca. We may build the most powerful AI ever imagined. We may reach the farthest regions of space. But we will have lost home. That is why the story Homer began 3,000 years ago is not over. Nolan has placed the ancient question on the modern screen. But the person who must answer it is neither Homer nor Christopher Nolan. Nor AI. It is us. Where are we sailing now? And after all the storms and temptations of this long voyage have passed, what kind of human beings will we be when we finally return? 7. Westward With the Woman He Loves: The Final Voyage of Odysseus Nolan goes one step beyond the point at which Homer closes his story. At the end of the film, Telemachus becomes the new king of Ithaca. Odysseus and Penelope leave the island and sail once more into the open sea. This time the voyage is not toward Troy. It is not a voyage of war. Nor is it a homecoming undertaken to reclaim a stolen throne. Odysseus carries with him the memory of those who fought beside him and never returned, along with the burden of war, death, guilt and responsibility. And with Penelope beside him, he sails west. I would like to read that western sea as humanity’s final Ithaca. The West is where the sun goes down. Where the day ends. Where a life moves toward evening. Where human beings, having passed through all the years granted to them, cross toward something beyond the horizon. One may read it as the final return of a human being who was born into the world, loved and fought, succeeded and failed, endured countless desires, sufferings and relationships, and at last turns back toward the source from which life came. The throne is relinquished. Power is relinquished. The title of war hero is relinquished. What remains at the end is a man and a woman. Odysseus and Penelope. After almost 20 years of separation, war, waiting and wandering, the two who found one another again now sail together toward the setting sun. Perhaps human beings have an Ithaca to which they must return while still alive. And perhaps there is also a greater Ithaca to which, one day, life itself must return. At this scene, I am reminded of the concluding mantra of the Buddhist Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya Sūtra, the Heart Sutra: Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. No single translation can exhaust the Sanskrit. But in the language of this essay, and beside the final voyage of Odysseus, I would like to hear it this way: Go. Go. Go beyond. Go altogether beyond the beyond. Go toward awakening. Or, rendered still more freely in the language of Odysseus: Go. Let us go again. Cross this sea of life and go beyond. Beyond desire, beyond fear, beyond attachment — until at last we return to where we belong. Three thousand years ago, a man set out from Troy for Ithaca. On the sea he lost almost everything. He lost his companions. He lost his youth. He confronted his own pride and desire. Yet he returned. And now he departs once more. This time not to win. Not to conquer. Not to become a king. But to relinquish everything and travel farther with the person he loves. Perhaps this is the final odyssey given to every human being. We are born and enter the world. We learn. We love. We struggle. We work. We dream. We succeed. We fail. We raise children. We hand our place to the next generation. And in the end we begin the journey back toward wherever it was that we came from. If so, must death be understood only as an absolute ending? If the voyage from Troy to Ithaca was a homecoming for Odysseus, might the final journey westward also be read as a homecoming of a greater kind? In Homer’s world, human beings ask the gods to show them the way. In Nolan’s world, human beings carry their memory, guilt, love and responsibility and venture onto the sea themselves. And those of us living in the age of AI must ask ourselves again: Where did I come from? What have I lived for? What will I leave to the next generation? And where, at the end, will I return? Humanity is now creating the most powerful instruments of intelligence in its history. But no matter how extraordinary the technology becomes, we cannot outsource the answer to those questions. The final course must be chosen by human beings themselves. Toward truth. Toward justice. Toward freedom. Toward a world that loves human beings, respects cultures and lives in harmony with nature. And, finally, toward the greater Ithaca to which all of us must one day return. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Go. Let us go again. Across this sea of life, let us go beyond. The voyage of Odysseus does not simply end there. At last, it begins the greater homecoming. *The author is a senior columnist of AJP. 2026-08-20 09:54:11 -
Kazakhstan gives month to prepare Chinese waste plant deals SEOUL, August 19 (AJP) - Kazakhstan has given itself a month to prepare agreements for a new set of Chinese-built waste-to-energy plants, the government said Wednesday, extending a program that has yet to put a single incinerator into operation anywhere in the country. Three plants are already under construction, in Astana, Almaty and Shymkent, at a combined cost of 293.3 billion tenge ($637.4 million). Together they are designed to burn 4,500 tons of municipal waste a day and generate 134 megawatts of electricity. None is finished, and the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources said this month that Kazakhstan has no operating incineration plants at all. The instruction came out of a meeting between Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov and Dai Daoguo, chairman of the board at Hunan Junxin Environmental Protection, the Chinese company building the Almaty plant. Bektenov told the ministry and other state bodies to examine all aspects of further cooperation with the company as a matter of urgency, and to prepare agreements for signing within a month covering plants in a number of major cities, according to the statement from the prime minister's press service. Work on the Almaty project began in May under an investment agreement signed with the ministry last August. The government put the investment at 145 billion tenge. Dai said the site was preparing to start construction and installation work. Once running, the plant is designed to process up to 2,000 tons of waste a day and generate up to 60 megawatts of electricity. The company expects it to cut carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 200,000 tons a year and to save around 800,000 cubic meters of landfill space annually. At least 700 jobs are planned during construction, and 120 permanent positions once the plant starts operating. Commissioning is due within two years of the May start. Waste-to-energy plants burn household rubbish and use the heat to drive turbines, cutting the volume that goes into landfill while producing power. Under Kazakhstan's Ecological Code, adopted in 2021, waste can be burned only after recyclable material has been pulled out of the stream. The ministry estimates that five to 10 percent of the original volume survives the furnace as ash and residue, which still has to be buried, leaving landfills in the system with a narrower role. Bektenov said at the meeting that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev pays particular attention to environmental responsibility, and that the new Constitution, which took effect July 1 after a March referendum, makes environmental protection one of the founding principles of state policy and civic responsibility. It was the second such deadline in five weeks. On July 16, Bektenov instructed the same ministry to finish talks with China Tianying Inc. and submit an investment agreement within two weeks for waste plants in at least three major cities. The government has not said which cities either company would build in. Electricity from waste-to-energy plants qualifies for a feed-in tariff of up to 55 tenge per kilowatt-hour, and the projects are carried out through investment agreements with the state. Hunan Junxin has described larger ambitions in Kazakhstan than incineration. In talks with the state investment promotion company Kazakh Invest in July last year, Dai put the company's plan at $600 million across three plants and said it would extend to data centers running on the power those plants generate, training facilities and automated waste management systems. The company built Central Asia's first waste-to-energy plant, which opened at Bishkek's main landfill in December last year. It started a second phase there in June, designed to add up to 2,000 tons a day and 60 megawatts, and is building another plant in Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second largest city. The government is working on waste plants in Karaganda, Atyrau, Aktobe, Pavlodar and other cities. 2026-08-19 17:30:42 -
Türkiye rejects Israeli claim on troop deployment at Syrian airbase SEOUL, August 19 (AJP) - The justification Israel gave for bombing a Syrian airbase this week, that Turkish soldiers were about to deploy there, was rejected in full by Ankara on Wednesday, which called the allegations untenable and said their purpose was to make unlawful strikes appear legitimate. Eight strikes hit the runway at the Abu al-Duhur airbase in eastern Idlib province early Tuesday, damaging runways and hangars without killing anyone, according to Syria's state broadcaster Ekhbariya, citing a military source. The base lies about 70 kilometers east of the Turkish border and has not operated as a dedicated military airfield since 2013, having changed hands repeatedly during the civil war. Israel said nothing for most of the day, and its military declined to comment, leaving the Turkish foreign ministry and Damascus to condemn an attack nobody had yet claimed. Ankara called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for disregarding international law, while Damascus called the strikes an act of aggression and a violation of the United Nations Charter. Confirmation came instead from Washington, where Tom Barrack, the U.S. special envoy for Syria and Iraq who also serves as ambassador to Türkiye, said Israel had carried out the attack and called it an unnecessary escalation that did not advance regional stability. The Israeli explanation arrived roughly 20 hours after the bombs fell, in an English statement posted on X by the Prime Minister's Office, which said Israel and Syria had agreed to a status quo in security matters that Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo, and that Damascus had ignored repeated warnings. Turkish forces have been rebuilding Syria's army since Ahmed al-Sharaa toppled Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, ending more than five decades of family rule. The two defense ministers signed a training and consultancy memorandum in Ankara last August, Syrian cadets entered Turkish military academies that October, and Syrian troops joined multinational exercises in western Türkiye in May, all of it at the invitation of the government in Damascus. Israeli forces hold their own ground in Syria without that invitation, occupying positions inside the buffer zone patrolled by the United Nations on the Golan Heights and on Mount Hermon since December 2024, taken after Netanyahu declared the 1974 disengagement agreement void. Damascus wants them gone as a condition for any security arrangement, and Defense Minister Israel Katz has said they will stay. Türkiye's Directorate of Communications answered the following day. "The untenable allegations put forward by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office are intended to legitimise Israel's unlawful airstrikes targeting Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity," the statement said. Ankara did not stop at denial but tied the accusations to Israeli domestic politics, saying they stem from Netanyahu's intent to pursue expansionist and destabilising policies in the region ahead of the elections in Israel, where voters go to the polls on October 27, the last date the law allows. Barrack, for his part, said the strike reflected a perception, accurate or misplaced, that Türkiye might soon expand its presence at the base, and that Washington is working to build a deconfliction channel linking Israel, Syria and Türkiye. "The sole path to this objective lies in Netanyahu's abandonment of his aggressive and coercive policies and in his respect for international law," Ankara's statement said. 2026-08-19 17:08:41