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Park Sae-jin박세진

Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy

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

Latest by Park Sae-jin

S. Korea says no one knew Trump would cut joint drills SEOUL, August 19 (AJP) - South Korea had no advance word that President Donald Trump would order this week's combined military exercises cut back, and neither did officials in his own administration, the Minister of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday. The move shortened the exercise by nearly a week, underscoring a sudden and highly unusual shift in alliance operations. Cho Hyun told the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee that the government learned of the decision the same way the public did. He noted the revelation came entirely from Trump's post on Truth Social. "What President Trump wrote on Truth Social was not known in advance to our government, and it was not known to United States government officials either," Cho said. "So we received no prior notification." Trump wrote Sunday evening (local time) that he had instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce the exercises, saying it was too late to cancel them outright. He called the drills costly and said they sent a signal that was totally inappropriate and hostile to North Korea. He also tied the decision to Seoul's refusal to help the U.S. against Iran. The Joint Chiefs of Staff announced Wednesday that Ulchi Freedom Shield will end Friday rather than Aug. 27, cutting the exercise roughly in half at Washington's request. It is the first time a major combined exercise has been altered after it was already underway. Field training will also be scaled back, with the two militaries still working out the details. A U.S. defense official said some live events had been canceled outright and others converted to simulations, adding that essential readiness was preserved. The shortened schedule drops the second half of the exercise, which is a phase built around a counteroffensive. North Korea has for years denounced that specific segment as a rehearsal for invasion. About 18,000 South Korean troops began the exercise Monday alongside U.S. forces. The mobilization proceeded just hours after the social media post appeared. Cho declined to describe the cut as something imposed on Seoul. Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back had been in close consultation with his U.S. counterparts since the post went up, Cho said, and that consultation was the reason he did not regard the outcome as a unilateral notification. Ahn told the National Assembly's Legislation and Judiciary Committee the same day that no official in either government had known what was coming. He added that he had been in continuous discussion with the U.S. side since. Cho also predicted the reduction would not slow the transfer of wartime operational control of South Korean forces, which reverts to Seoul from Washington under a conditions-based timetable. Because the United States asked for the cut, he said, it cannot then cite the cut as grounds for further delay. President Lee Jae Myung said Tuesday the transfer should proceed during his term without disruption. Trump said Monday at the White House that Kim Jong-un had responded to his overtures, calling the exchanges very positive. Recounting his call with Lee Jae Myung, Trump said the U.S. keeps 39,000 soldiers in South Korea guarding it from Kim Jong-un. In reality, about 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in the country. Cho called the opening with Pyongyang a shift into a new phase. The government had made every preparation to get a channel to North Korea running again, he said, and would work closely with Washington so that the opening was not wasted. He said the ministry was consulting immediately with U.S. counterparts to keep the alliance from weakening. This was a direct response to concern that Washington might deal with Pyongyang over Seoul's head. Cho also welcomed the proposal from President Lee, made in his Liberation Day address on Aug. 15, for multilateral talks to formally end the Korean War. Cho said he believed it would prove an important breakthrough in relations with the North. Seoul has told Washington where it stands on the outreach to Kim Jong-un and has asked to be briefed on the state of U.S. contacts with Pyongyang. Cho said no reply had come. 2026-08-19 15:53:48
Truth-Seeker's Odyssey: From world of gods to world of man This is part 1 of a two-part column series by Aju Media Group's senior columnist Abe Kwak. A single film has summoned the world back to the seas of ancient Greece, nearly 3,000 years after Homer first sang of them. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has filled theaters in major cities around the world and rekindled an extraordinary interest in Homer, Greek mythology, the Trojan War and the origins of Western philosophy. Film critics, historians, philosophers, writers and ordinary moviegoers have all entered the conversation, each finding a different meaning in the same ancient voyage. In South Korea, too, the enthusiasm has been strong enough to suggest something approaching an “Odyssey phenomenon.” A story born almost three millennia ago has returned to the center of global popular culture through the most advanced technologies of 21st-century cinema. Some groups have gone so far as to rent an entire IMAX theater to watch the film together, followed by discussions with prominent film critics. Afterward, one reads reviews and essays, each approaching the work from a different direction. Historians speak of myth and antiquity. Philosophers examine human nature and fate. Film critics analyze Nolan’s visual language and cinematic architecture. All are illuminating. Yet the more explanations one hears, and the more interpretations one reads, the clearer becomes the question that first remained after the theater went dark. Must great art yield only one answer? The moment a film leaves its director’s hands, does it not enter the life of every person who watches it? One viewer sees a family. Another remembers a war. Another thinks of youth, failure, love or waiting. Great art does not end when the screen goes black. It begins again when the audience walks out of the theater and carries it into life. The most powerful question The Odyssey left with me was, in the end, unexpectedly simple: What is a human being? How did humanity emerge from a world ruled by gods into a world in which human beings think and choose for themselves? And now, confronted by an artificial intelligence of our own making, what kind of human beings must we become? Nolan revives an ancient myth in a contemporary cinematic language. Yet the question could hardly be more modern. We send spacecraft beyond the familiar reaches of the solar system. We build machines capable of learning human language and absorbing vast stores of human knowledge. And still we stand before essentially the same questions that confronted Homer’s men and women thousands of years ago. That is why Homer’s Odyssey is great. Its greatness does not lie merely in its age. Empires have risen and vanished. Dynasties have disappeared. Religions and philosophies have been born. Humanity has passed through the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, arriving now at the threshold of artificial intelligence. Yet Odysseus is still alive. A true classic is not a relic preserved under glass. It is a work that asks a new question of every new age. That is why a classic never grows old. Homer sang of a Greek warrior crossing the Mediterranean, but within that voyage reside the permanent problems of humanity: desire and fear, love and betrayal, pride and restraint, war and peace, temptation and responsibility, death and homecoming. What Nolan ultimately finds behind the mythology is the human being. Odysseus is a hero, but never a perfect one. He is strong, yet vulnerable. Clever, yet capable of error. Brave, yet afraid. At times he becomes intoxicated by his own intelligence and success, and his pride brings new suffering upon himself and those around him. He wins a war and loses his way. The Trojan War is over, yet he cannot return home. A man who conquers the world but cannot return to himself; a civilization capable of astonishing achievement but unable to guarantee happiness; a species that accumulates immense knowledge without necessarily knowing how to live — in these respects, the Odysseus of 3,000 years ago and the humanity of the AI age are not so far apart. Nolan’s film brings this vast mythological world into modern cinematic form. Drawing upon Homer’s Odyssey, it follows the long and perilous homeward journey of Odysseus after the Trojan War. Matt Damon plays Odysseus; Tom Holland his son, Telemachus; Anne Hathaway his wife, Penelope; and Robert Pattinson Antinous, one of Penelope’s most dangerous suitors. Zendaya appears as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Samantha Morton as Circe, Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, John Leguizamo as the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus and Elliot Page as Sinon. But behind the spectacle lies an ancient human drama. 1. The Odyssey: A Man Who Won the War but Could Not Get Home At the center stands Odysseus, played by Matt Damon. He is king of Ithaca, a small island kingdom west of mainland Greece. But Odysseus is not merely another warrior skilled with the sword. Among Homer’s heroes, what distinguishes him is not brute force but intelligence: cunning, judgment, adaptability and command of language. If Achilles represents strength, and Hector honor and duty, Odysseus represents the thinking human being. He leaves home because of the Trojan War. His wife, Penelope, and his young son, Telemachus, remain in Ithaca while he sails to battle. The war lasts 10 years. And when it ends, his suffering does not. His journey home consumes almost another decade. The simplest way to describe the architecture of The Odyssey is therefore this: a man spends 10 years fighting a war and nearly 10 more trying to return home. But those 20 years are not merely a measure of time. They are the story of a warrior slowly becoming a husband again, a father again, a human being again — after passing through temptation, terror, loss and death. For 10 years the united Greek armies cannot breach Troy. Its walls are formidable. Its defenders refuse to surrender. Then comes the stratagem that ends the war: the Trojan Horse. The Greeks construct an enormous wooden horse and hide Odysseus and other elite warriors inside it. The Greek forces then create the illusion that they have abandoned the war and sailed away. The Trojans, believing the horse to be a trophy of victory, drag it inside their city. Night falls. As Troy celebrates and sleeps, the Greek soldiers emerge from the horse, open the gates and admit the army waiting outside. The city that force could not conquer falls to deception and intelligence. Nolan’s film includes both the enormous horse and Sinon, played by Elliot Page. The figure of Sinon is elaborated less in Homer’s Odyssey than in later Greek and Roman traditions, most famously in Virgil’s Aeneid, where he helps persuade the Trojans to bring the horse within the city walls. The war ends. But that is precisely when the true Odyssey begins. Odysseus boards his ship with one destination in mind: Ithaca. There waits Penelope, who has endured years without her husband, and Telemachus, the son who scarcely remembers his father. But the sea will not release Odysseus so easily. In Homer, Poseidon, god of the sea, becomes the great divine obstacle to his return. Nolan shifts much of this divine intervention toward the realms of nature, memory, guilt and human psychology. That change makes the modern significance of the story — the movement from the world of the gods toward the world of man — all the more vivid. Polyphemus: Intelligence and Pride Among the most famous episodes is Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus, the Cyclops — the one-eyed giant. Odysseus and his companions enter an enormous cave stocked with sheep, goats, cheese and food. But its owner is no man. He is Polyphemus. The giant traps them inside, sealing the entrance with a massive stone, and begins devouring the sailors. No ordinary force can defeat him. Here Odysseus turns to his greatest weapon: intelligence. In Homer, he gives Polyphemus wine and tells the Cyclops that his name is “Nobody.” When the giant falls into a drunken sleep, Odysseus and his companions drive a sharpened, heated stake into his single eye. Polyphemus howls in agony. Yet when neighboring Cyclopes ask who is attacking him, he answers, in effect, “Nobody.” And so no one comes to his rescue. Odysseus survives through language and intelligence rather than strength. But what happens next is more important. Once safely away, unable to resist the temptation to boast, Odysseus reveals his true identity. He is Odysseus, king of Ithaca. It is a catastrophic act of pride. Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon. The sea god’s wrath now descends upon the hero. Odysseus’s intelligence saved him. His arrogance imperiled him again. Such is Homer’s understanding of humanity. Our greatest gift and our greatest weakness often live side by side. Circe: The Woman Who Turns Men Into Swine Odysseus and his companions eventually arrive at the island of Circe, the beautiful and dangerous enchantress. In Homer’s world, Circe possesses the power to transform human beings into animals. She casts a spell upon Odysseus’s companions and turns them into pigs. It is one of the most enduring symbols in The Odyssey. A human being who surrenders reason and self-restraint to appetite can descend into the animal within. With the aid of Hermes, Odysseus resists Circe’s magic and eventually restores his companions to human form. He nevertheless remains on her island for a significant period. And this raises a question that runs through the entire epic: Why does a man who so desperately wants to return home repeatedly stop, linger and succumb to temptation? The answer is one reason the Odyssey remains great. Homer does not portray his hero as a saint. Odysseus desires. He hesitates. He fails. And still he begins again. He is not human because he is heroic. He is a human hero because, after being shaken again and again, he keeps searching for the road that leads home. Into the Underworld: Asking the Dead for the Way Home Odysseus even descends, while still alive, into the realm of the dead. There he consults the spirit of the prophet Tiresias, asking how he can return to Ithaca. He encounters the spirit of his mother as well. He survived the battlefield, but while he fought and wandered, those he loved grew old and died. From this point on, the meaning of homecoming deepens. Home is no longer simply a place. It is the place one must reach before time itself disappears. The Sirens: Beauty Calling Human Beings Toward Destruction Then come the Sirens. Their song is irresistibly beautiful. Sailors who hear it lose reason and sail toward their deaths. Odysseus devises a solution. He orders his men to seal their ears with beeswax. But he himself wants to hear the song. So he commands them to bind him tightly to the mast — and, no matter how desperately he begs, never to release him. The song begins. Odysseus struggles violently. He commands his men to untie him. They refuse. The ship sails safely past. It is one of the most extraordinary images of desire and self-government in Western literature. Odysseus does not pretend that temptation can be abolished. He does something wiser. He acknowledges his own weakness and constructs, in advance, a mechanism that will prevent his weaker self from destroying his better judgment. Civilization itself may depend upon that insight. Scylla and Charybdis: When Every Choice Has a Cost Then comes an even crueler dilemma. On one side waits Scylla, the many-headed monster. On the other churns Charybdis, a whirlpool capable of swallowing an entire ship. There is no path without danger. This is also the tragedy of leadership. Not every decision offers a good outcome. Sometimes there is only the responsibility to choose the lesser catastrophe. Odysseus chooses the path past Scylla, sacrificing six men rather than risking the destruction of all. The hero survives. But the people beside him disappear one by one. Odysseus is therefore not a hero who marches triumphantly from victory to victory. The nearer he comes to home, the lonelier he becomes. Calypso: Choosing Mortal Love Over Immortality At last, after losing nearly everyone, Odysseus is washed ashore alone on the island of Ogygia, home of Calypso. In Homer, Calypso wishes to keep him with her. She can offer him what mortal life cannot: the possibility of escaping human finitude. Yet Odysseus does not ultimately want to become a god. He wants to return to Ithaca. He wants Penelope. He wants his son. He wants his home. Here one of the deepest themes of the Odyssey emerges: It may be better to live finitely as a human being with those one loves than to live forever without them. Another War Was Already Underway in Ithaca While Odysseus wanders, Ithaca is anything but peaceful. Its king has been gone for nearly 20 years. Many assume he is dead. Noblemen crowd into the palace and compete for Penelope’s hand, knowing that marriage to the queen could also deliver political power. Among the most dangerous is Antinous. Penelope refuses to surrender. In Homer, she uses intelligence to resist. She announces that she will choose a husband after finishing a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. By day she weaves. At night she secretly unravels what she has woven. She defeats time with patience. This is the famous weaving of Penelope. If Odysseus battles monsters across the sea, Penelope battles time within the palace. She, too, is an Odysseus. Telemachus: The Boy Who Goes in Search of His Father And another human being is growing. Telemachus. He was a child when his father sailed for Troy. Now he is a young man. Yet his palace has been occupied by suitors consuming his father’s wealth and pressuring his mother into marriage. Telemachus leaves home to discover whether Odysseus is still alive. He seeks out veterans of the Trojan War and asks what they know. Among them are Menelaus, king of Sparta, and Helen. The fact that the opening books of Homer’s Odyssey belong largely to Telemachus matters greatly. The father is trying to return home. The son must leave home in search of the father. They travel in opposite directions and finally meet. This is more than a reunion. It is the story of a boy who grows into a man in the absence of his father. Ithaca at Last: The King Returns as a Beggar After nearly 20 years, Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca. But he does not enter as a king. He disguises himself as a poor beggar and enters his own kingdom unnoticed, seeking to discover who remained loyal and who betrayed him. In Homer, one of the most heartbreaking recognitions comes not from a human being but from an animal. Argos, Odysseus’s old dog, has waited for his master through the passing years. Ancient and neglected, he recognizes Odysseus beneath the disguise. And after seeing that his master has finally returned, Argos dies. Then comes the final trial. Penelope declares that she will marry the man capable of stringing Odysseus’s bow and shooting an arrow through the aligned openings of a series of axes. One suitor after another fails. Then the ragged beggar takes the bow. He strings it. The arrow flies. The king has returned. Odysseus and Telemachus fight together against the suitors occupying the palace. For the first time, father and son stand on the same battlefield. Penelope’s Final Test: Homer’s Bed, Nolan’s Golden Pin Even then, Homer does not allow recognition to come cheaply. Penelope must know whether this man is truly her husband. Twenty years have passed. His face has changed. His body has changed. Life has changed him. So she sets one last test, referring to a secret known only to the two of them. Their marriage bed was built by Odysseus around the trunk of a living olive tree rooted in the earth. It cannot simply be moved. Only Odysseus understands what Penelope means. At that moment she knows. The man before her is her husband. Nolan does not reproduce this celebrated episode exactly. In the film, a golden Athena pin associated with Penelope becomes an important sign of recognition. The details differ. The meaning does not. The war is over. The voyage is over. The monsters have been survived. And a human being has finally returned to the person to whom he belongs. Ultimately, The Odyssey is the story of a homecoming. But homecoming does not mean merely returning to a physical house. It means the warrior becoming a husband again, the soldier becoming a father again, the figure who contended with gods becoming human again. 2. The Trojan War: The War Before the Homecoming To understand The Odyssey, one must first understand the war that precedes it. Why did Odysseus go to Troy? Why did the kings and heroes of Greece sail across the Aegean? Why did Achilles and Hector die? In mythic tradition, it begins with a wedding and a golden apple. The sea goddess Thetis is marrying the mortal Peleus. Many gods are invited. Eris, goddess of discord, is not. Enraged, she throws a golden apple into the celebration. Upon it are words meaning: “For the fairest.” Three goddesses claim it: Hera, queen of the gods; Athena, goddess of wisdom; and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. Who is the most beautiful? The judgment is ultimately placed in the hands of Paris, prince of Troy. Thus comes the famous “Judgment of Paris.” Each goddess offers him a reward. Hera promises power. Athena promises wisdom and victory in war. Aphrodite promises the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chooses Aphrodite. There is one problem. The most beautiful woman, Helen, is already married. Her husband is Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris nevertheless brings Helen to Troy. Depending on the ancient tradition, Helen is abducted, persuaded or leaves voluntarily. But to Menelaus, the result is the same: humiliation. He appeals to his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who becomes commander of the Greek coalition. The great warriors gather. Achilles, the greatest fighter of Greece. Odysseus, king of strategy. Menelaus of Sparta. Ajax, the mighty warrior. Nestor, the veteran king. And Agamemnon, commander of them all. They cross the Aegean with a vast fleet and lay siege to Troy. On the other side stand the defenders: Priam, the aging king of Troy; Queen Hecuba; Paris; and, above all, Hector, Paris’s brother and Troy’s greatest warrior. Two names must be remembered. For Greece, Achilles. For Troy, Hector. Their collision produces the greatest tragedy of the war. Achilles: The Strongest Warrior, and Yet Entirely Human Achilles is nearly invincible. His mother is Thetis, a goddess. In a famous later tradition, Thetis immerses the infant Achilles in the River Styx, granting near invulnerability. But she holds him by the heel, leaving that one place untouched. From this story comes the expression “Achilles’ heel” — a fatal weakness. That particular version, however, is not found in Homer’s Iliad itself. It belongs to later mythological tradition. The Trojan War lasts 10 years. Yet Homer’s Iliad does not narrate all 10 years from beginning to end. It focuses primarily on a period near the war’s conclusion and on the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. Agamemnon takes Briseis, a woman awarded to Achilles as a prize of war. Achilles sees it as an intolerable insult. He refuses to fight. The greatest Greek warrior withdraws from battle. The war turns. Hector drives the Greeks back. Patroclus, Achilles’s closest companion, can no longer bear to watch the Greek forces suffer. He puts on Achilles’s armor and enters battle. The Trojans believe Achilles has returned and recoil in fear. But Hector kills Patroclus. When Achilles hears the news, something within him collapses. His rage is no longer directed at Agamemnon. It turns toward Hector. Achilles returns to war. Everything changes. Hector knows that he may die. He has a wife, Andromache, and a young son. Yet he cannot simply run away. He is a prince of Troy. He bears responsibility for his city. At last Achilles and Hector meet before the walls of Troy. Hector dies. But victory does not ennoble Achilles. Consumed by rage, he ties Hector’s corpse to his chariot and drags it behind him. It is the moment when triumph threatens to destroy the victor’s humanity. Then comes one of the greatest scenes in the Iliad. Priam, Hector’s elderly father, secretly enters the Greek camp at night. The king of Troy kneels before the man who killed his son. He begs for Hector’s body. Achilles looks at the old king and thinks of his own father. The two men weep. One has lost a son. The other has lost a beloved companion. For a moment they are no longer enemy king and enemy warrior. They are simply human beings joined by grief. Achilles returns Hector’s body. The Iliad moves toward this profoundly human moment. The war, however, continues. In later traditions Achilles is killed by an arrow shot by Paris, sometimes said to have been guided by Apollo. The greatest warrior in Greece is gone. Yet Troy still stands. Then the intelligence of Odysseus becomes decisive. When strength fails, thought must fight. The Greeks build the horse. Odysseus and selected warriors conceal themselves within it. Sinon helps convince the Trojans to bring it into the city. The Trojan priest Laocoön warns against trusting the Greek gift. His warning goes unheeded. The horse enters Troy. Night falls. The people celebrate what they believe to be the end of war. Then, while the city sleeps, the horse opens. Odysseus and the Greek soldiers emerge. The gates are opened. The Greek army pours in. Troy, after 10 years of resistance, falls. There is victory. But almost no one is truly happy. Troy burns. Priam is killed. The royal house collapses. Women and children are enslaved or taken captive. Hector is dead. Achilles is dead. Paris dies as well. Those who caused the war, those who tried to prevent it, and those who fought most bravely are swept away by it. Greece has won. Yet strangely, one searches in vain for the true victor. Agamemnon returns home only to be murdered in a cycle of vengeance involving his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Ancient traditions and tragedies differ in detail, but the great commander’s reward is not a glorious homecoming. It is death. Menelaus and Helen endure their own difficult return. Countless soldiers never see home again. And no one pays a longer price for the journey home than Odysseus. The strategist who helped bring down Troy goes back to sea. Ahead of him wait storms, Cyclopes, Circe, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso, temptation and death. He no longer seeks victory. He seeks no empire. He wants no new glory. He wants one thing. Home. That is why the Iliad and the Odyssey form one continuous story while offering profoundly different visions of humanity. The Iliad is a story of war. The Odyssey is a story of return. The Iliad, through Achilles and Hector, asks how a hero dies. The Odyssey, through Odysseus, asks how a human being survives — and becomes human again. For Achilles, the central value is glory. For Hector, responsibility. For Odysseus, homecoming. For Penelope, fidelity and endurance. For Telemachus, growth. And above them all stand Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Aphrodite and the other gods. Yet something extraordinary happens as the stories advance. At first the gods seem to determine everything. A quarrel among gods helps begin the conflict. A god raises the wind. A god blocks the sea. Gods influence victory and defeat. But what remains at the end is not the gods. It is the human being. Penelope, who waited. Telemachus, who grew to adulthood without his father. Odysseus, wounded and aged, returning after losing nearly everyone around him. Read together as a single story of civilization, Homer’s two epics reveal a remarkable movement: from the conflicts of the gods to the wars of men; from the wars of men to the homecoming of one man; and finally to the question: What is a human being? That is why humanity has remembered Odysseus for nearly 3,000 years. And it is here that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey speaks directly to our time. Artificial intelligence can remember more than we can. It can calculate faster. It can generate human language and images. And so we must ask once again: What makes a human being human? For Odysseus, the answer was never perfection. He erred. He boasted. He succumbed to temptation. He lost almost everything. But he never completely forgot the place to which he must return. Ithaca. There was something there more important than a throne. Penelope. Telemachus. A community for which he bore responsibility. Odysseus’s greatest victory, therefore, was not the destruction of Troy. Troy was the victory of Odysseus the hero. Ithaca was the victory of Odysseus the man. And at that moment the story passes from the world of the gods into the world of humanity. From the Iliad to the Odyssey comes one of civilization’s great humanistic movements: from force to intelligence; from conquest to return; from war to ordinary life; from glory to responsibility; and, ultimately, from a world in which gods determine human destiny toward a world in which human beings begin to think, choose and bear the consequences of their choices. 3. Christopher Nolan: A Director Who Has Spent His Career Filming the Human Being Looking back across Christopher Nolan’s work, one begins to understand why he would eventually arrive at Homer. Nolan has always filmed the human being. He simply approached humanity indirectly — through memory, dreams, time, space, war and science. In Memento, he asks what happens to human identity when memory collapses. If I lose my memory, am I still myself? In Inception, he destabilizes the boundary between dream and reality and turns unconscious desire, memory and guilt into cinematic architecture. It is a world that inevitably touches the questions raised by Freudian psychoanalysis. In Interstellar, Nolan enters the worlds of relativity, black holes, time and astrophysics, yet what he refuses to abandon is the bond between a father and his daughter. In Dunkirk, he explores survival under the extremity of war. In Tenet, the direction of time itself becomes a problem of human choice. And in Oppenheimer, the triumph of human intelligence becomes the power to destroy humanity itself. What responsibility falls upon science, the scientist and civilization when knowledge becomes a weapon capable of annihilation? The forms change. The question beneath them does not. What is a human being when memory becomes unreliable? What remains of us when dream and reality collapse into one another? What does love mean when time and space themselves are distorted? What should humanity do when it acquires powers it may not be morally mature enough to wield? Now Nolan travels nearly three millennia backward and asks the same question of a man wandering among gods and monsters: Can a human being remain human to the end? In that sense, The Odyssey feels both like a new departure and like the origin point toward which Nolan’s entire career has been moving. He films time — and finds the human being. He films space — and finds the human being. He films war — and finds the human being. He films science — and finds the human being. And after filming myth, what remains is again the human being. However large Nolan’s cinema becomes, its conclusions repeatedly return to something small and intimate. Interstellar travels across the universe only to return to a father and daughter. Oppenheimer confronts the atomic bomb only to leave us with the human conscience and the burden of responsibility. And The Odyssey, after filling the screen with gods, monsters, war and oceans, leaves behind a single mortal man who wants to go home. Here one cannot help thinking of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Chihiro’s parents enter a strange world, encounter unattended food, surrender to appetite and are transformed into pigs. In Homer, Circe turns Odysseus’s companions into swine. There is no need to claim a direct line of influence between the works without evidence. The more fascinating truth is that, across thousands of years and across the immense geographical distance separating the Mediterranean from Japan, the same human symbol appears again: When human beings cease to govern desire and allow desire to govern them, they risk surrendering their humanity. That is the power of a classic. A classic is not copied intact. It is reborn within another culture, another era and another human life. 4. From Mythos to Logos: From the World of the Gods to the World of Man This, to me, is the most important way to read The Odyssey. In the mythic world of ancient Greece, the gods intervene directly in human life. Zeus presides over order. Poseidon shakes the sea. Athena aids mortals. Aphrodite governs love. Human beings are weaker than gods and smaller than fate. Yet as we travel through the Odyssey, the human figure becomes increasingly distinct within that divine universe. Odysseus thinks. He judges. He chooses. He makes mistakes and suffers the consequences. Then he thinks again and chooses again. Fate exists. But within fate, human beings must still act. One of the great achievements of ancient Greek civilization was not that it abolished the gods. It was that, even in a world crowded with gods, it began to discover the human right to think and the human responsibility to choose. At some point, human beings no longer looked at thunder and felt satisfied merely to call it the anger of a god. They began to ask: Why does thunder occur? What is the world made of? What is justice? What is the good life? How should human beings live? This is the movement from mythos to logos: from myth toward reason; from received explanation toward inquiry; from a world explained for us toward a world we attempt to understand for ourselves. We should not reduce history by claiming that Greek philosophy emerged directly from one literary work. But Homer’s epics, in their profound exploration of character, fate, choice and responsibility, formed part of the cultural and intellectual soil from which Greek philosophy grew. Thales and Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would continue the questioning. Human beings turned their gaze not only toward the cosmos but toward themselves. Who am I? Why do I exist? How should I live? Three thousand years later, those questions have not disappeared. AI has made them more urgent. Artificial intelligence learns from human language and knowledge. It writes. It draws. It composes music. It generates video. It analyzes vast quantities of data. Physical AI, joined to robotics, is moving rapidly into domains once reserved for human physical labor. The steam engine expanded human muscle. The computer expanded calculation. The internet expanded connectivity. AI now enters territories human beings long regarded as uniquely their own: language, reasoning, creativity and judgment. And so the questions change. What does it mean for a human being to write when AI can write? What is human creativity when machines make images and music? Where does responsibility lie when AI analyzes information and assists decisions? What is wisdom when a machine remembers more and calculates faster than any person? We can find part of the answer in Odysseus. AI may calculate the fastest route to Ithaca. It cannot decide why Ithaca is worth returning to. AI has no Penelope waiting. No Telemachus longing for a father. An algorithm has no homeland. To calculate a destination and to choose the purpose of a life are entirely different acts. Human beings possess that “why.” We love. We remember. We accept responsibility. We seek to make a meaningful whole from the lives we have lived. *The author is a senior columnist of AJP. 2026-08-19 14:42:46
Researchers find technique to boost water-based battery performance SEOUL, August 19 (AJP) - Developing safe and affordable batteries is essential for operating large-scale energy storage systems, but current water-based models struggle to store energy quickly and in large volumes. To resolve this, researchers have designed a new electrode material that increases both energy capacity and charging speeds by utilizing particles previously thought to degrade battery performance, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said Wednesday. Conventional aqueous zinc-ion batteries face limitations because zinc ions are large and move slowly, restricting charging speeds. Additionally, smaller protons moving within the battery often create byproducts that hinder the zinc ions, leading engineers to traditionally suppress proton activity. The new design shifts this approach by controlling the sequence in which these particles are stored, allowing both the zinc ions and the protons to contribute to the battery's overall energy capacity instead of interfering with each other. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)'s announcement outlines research led by Professor Park Sun-ah from the university's chemistry department, alongside co-first authors Park Geun-chan and Lee Kyu-won from the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). The research team used a two-dimensional conductive metal-organic framework with microscopic pores as the electrode material. They added amine functional groups inside these pores to act as designated storage spots for protons at specific voltages. This mechanism ensures the larger zinc ions enter the electrode first, followed by the smaller protons. The process is similar to filling an empty jar with large rocks first and then pouring in fine sand to fill the remaining gaps. By securing the zinc ions first, the researchers prevented the protons from reacting too early and blocking the movement of other ions inside the device. The newly developed material demonstrated a high storage capacity of 368.7 milliampere-hours per gram, meaning a small amount of the material can store a large volume of electricity. When the charging and discharging speed was increased by 16 times, the battery maintained 46.9 percent of its initial capacity, whereas standard batteries typically lose significant storage capability at high speeds. The material also showed stable performance after 500 rapid charge and discharge cycles. Water-based zinc-ion batteries use water as an electrolyte to help ions move inside the device. Because they are less prone to fire risks, cheaper to produce, and carry a lower environmental burden than standard lithium-ion batteries, they are considered a strong candidate for future energy storage infrastructure. "We have shown that protons, which were previously considered a hindrance that could degrade battery performance, can actually be utilized to store more energy," Professor Park Sun-ah said. "We expect that this principle can be applied to various electrode materials to develop batteries capable of rapidly storing larger amounts of energy." (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Chem Title: Sequential Zn2+–H+ Storage in a 2D Conductive Metal-Organic Framework for Advanced Aqueous Zinc-Ion Battery Link/DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2026.103129 2026-08-19 10:52:18
Kookmin University joins $1.2 mln project to develop vehicle security chip SEOUL, August 19 (AJP) - A government-funded project has picked Kookmin University to build two of the main defenses for a new chip meant to keep hackers out of cars. The project runs from July this year to December 2030, four years and six months, on a budget of 10 billion won ($7.07 million). Kookmin University gets 1.7 billion won of that. The Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea are paying for the work. Ranix, a Seoul chip design company, leads the group. Kookmin University, Sungkyunkwan University, Ajou University, the Korea Automotive Technology Institute and Hyundai Mobis are doing the research together. Hyundai Motor is taking part as the buyer, not as a researcher. Carmakers are shifting to what the industry calls the software-defined vehicle, a car whose features are controlled by software that can be updated after it is sold. That means more of what a car does runs through software and internal networks, and every one of those is a possible way in for an attacker. Two international rules, UNECE R155 and ISO/SAE 21434, now require carmakers to guard against this. The group wants to put several defenses that are now scattered across different parts onto one chip. Among them are encryption designed to resist future quantum computers, a hardware vault for storing encryption keys, a chip fingerprint that cannot be copied, a generator of truly random numbers, and a system that watches for intruders. Kookmin University is handling three pieces. It will build the intruder detection system and test it in a real car. It will work out how to run ML-KEM and ML-DSA, two quantum-resistant encryption methods approved by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, directly in hardware. And it will build tools to check whether a chip's random numbers are truly random, which decides whether an encryption key can be guessed. The detection work takes a different path from the usual one. Most systems watch either what happens inside the chip or what moves across the car's internal network, and look at each on its own. Kookmin University plans to link the two, so a strange event in the processor and odd traffic on the network are read as one signal. Jeon Sang-hoon, a professor in Kookmin University's Department of Automotive IT Convergence, is leading the work. Yeom Yong-jin and Kim Dong-chan, both professors in the Department of Information Security, Cryptography and Mathematics, are handling the random number checks and the quantum-resistant encryption, respectively. "This project is national recognition of Kookmin University's convergence research capability spanning vehicle network security, chip-level security and cryptographic theory," Jeon said. "By 2030 we will secure a multi-layer intrusion detection system and post-quantum cryptography implementation and verification technology proven in real vehicle environments, and contribute to raising the national competitiveness of South Korea's future mobility security technology." 2026-08-19 10:41:15
Lee keeps wartime control plan as Trump cuts drills SEOUL, August 18 (AJP) - South Korea will take back wartime control of its own troops on schedule and accelerate work on a nuclear-powered submarine, President Lee Jae Myung said Tuesday, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the allies' annual exercise scaled back. Trump said Sunday (local time) that he had instructed U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" the drills, writing on his social media platform that it was too late to cancel them outright. He cited his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and said South Korea had declined a request to join U.S. efforts against Iran. The exercise, Ulchi Freedom Shield, began Monday and runs through Aug. 27, involving about 18,000 South Korean troops. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said this month that 14 field training events at battalion level or larger were planned, down from 22 last year. Speaking at the Ulchi cabinet meeting at the presidential office Choeng Wa Dae, Lee gave no ground on the timetable. "The return of wartime operational control within this term must be pushed ahead without disruption, in line with the government's original plan," he said. The timing carries weight beyond the rhetoric. Wartime operational control, or OPCON, has stayed with the U.S.-led combined command since the Korean War (1950~1953), and the handover runs through a three-stage certification process. Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back said in June that verification of the future combined command's full operational capability would be completed at the annual Security Consultative Meeting with the United States later this year. The two governments would then recommend a target year to their presidents. Large-scale exercises are where that capability is tested. Lee argued that the country has already outgrown its dependence. He said South Korea is rated the world's fifth-strongest military and a top-four defense industry power, and that its defense spending amounts to 1.4 times North Korea's gross domestic product. "In terms of weapons systems and force size, it is no exaggeration to say our capacity to defend ourselves is more than sufficient," he said. Lee then turned to the submarine program, the most concrete piece of the self-reliance agenda. He asked officials to "speed up the nuclear submarine project, which will symbolize a more constructive and solid future for the alliance." The defense ministry released its basic development plan in May. The boat is to run on low-enriched uranium fuel with a long refueling cycle, be designed and built domestically, and reach launch in the mid-2030s and service in the late 2030s. Fuel supply depends on Washington. The bilateral nuclear agreement bars South Korea from enriching uranium or reprocessing spent fuel without U.S. consent, and talks on that point have been running since the two leaders agreed last year to support a South Korean boat. He also asked that preparations for a unified armed forces academy proceed without wavering, pointing to changes in how wars are fought. "Recent warfare is evolving into a hybrid form in which conventional combat, terrorism and cyberattacks work together," he said. Before the cabinet meeting, Lee chaired a full session of the National Security Council for the exercise period and reviewed wartime transition procedures across government agencies. "Creating a peace in which there is no need to fight matters most, but we must also prepare for the worst," he said, according to a written briefing by Kang Yu-jung, the chief presidential spokesperson. Kang said Lee made clear that the exercise is defensive, aimed at protecting the lives and safety of South Koreans, and that the country has no intention of attacking North Korea or raising tension on the peninsula. Pyongyang warned Friday of unspecified stern measures, calling the drills a rehearsal for war. Lee instructed officials not to run the exercise the way it has always been run, but to rebuild it around current forms of conflict. 2026-08-18 15:34:48
Seoul expects Trump message to lead to talks with Pyongyang SEOUL, August 18 (AJP) - South Korea expects President Donald Trump's outreach to Kim Jong Un to produce meaningful talks between Washington and Pyongyang, the foreign ministry said Tuesday. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not disclose whether Seoul had been told in advance that the North Korean leader had replied. Foreign ministry spokesperson Park Doo-soon said the two allies had consistently declared themselves open to dialogue with North Korea and were maintaining close communication on North Korea policy, including efforts to restart talks. "The government expects President Trump's message to lead to meaningful North Korea-U.S. dialogue," Park said at a regular briefing. "We will continue the necessary diplomatic efforts under close South Korea-U.S. coordination." Trump said Monday (local time) at the White House that Kim had answered him. He said the exchanges were "very positive" and gave no further detail, then praised the relationship, saying Kim had always treated him with respect and that the two men understood each other. The remarks came a day after a Truth Social post in which Trump said he had instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" the annual combined exercises with South Korea. He wrote that the drills were costly and sent a signal that was "totally inappropriate and hostile" to a country he described as unthreatening and respectful throughout his presidency, and that it was "too late to cancel" them outright. Ulchi Freedom Shield is one of two large combined exercises the allies stage each year. This year's began Monday, hours after the post, with about 18,000 South Korean troops training alongside U.S. forces in computer-simulated command post drills, live field maneuvers and civil defense exercises. Neither government has said what a reduced exercise would look like. A Joint Chiefs of Staff official told reporters Monday that the training was proceeding as planned, and the defense ministry said the same. Park said the two countries had coordinated closely on maintaining combined defense readiness and on exercises and training, and would keep working together on the specifics. In the same post, Trump tied the decision to Seoul's refusal to join the U.S. war against Iran. He wrote that he had recently asked the South Korean president whether the country wanted to join the "Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran," and was told, "No thanks!" He described the two matters as "somewhat unrelated." Recounting the call on Monday, Trump said he had told President Lee Jae Myung that Washington did not need help in Iran but would take it, and that the United States keeps 39,000 soldiers in South Korea guarding against Kim. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in the country. Park gave a different account of Seoul's role. He said the government had taken an active part from the earliest stage in international discussions aimed at securing a ceasefire in Iran and restoring free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, and that it was in close discussion with Washington on practical military contributions, weighing Korean Peninsula readiness posture and domestic legal procedure. That position has been consistent throughout, Park said, declining to confirm details. Trump met Kim three times during his first term and has not seen him since returning to office. After the 2018 Singapore summit he suspended what he called provocative drills with Seoul, and that year's Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise was canceled. Pyongyang has given no public sign of interest in returning to nuclear talks. Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader's sister, said in a statement carried by state media last July that personal relations between her brother and Trump were not bad, but that any relationship serving the purpose of North Korea's denuclearization would amount to a mockery. The exercise runs through Aug. 27. 2026-08-18 15:19:39
Kazakhstan lines up social infrastructure push for 2027-2029 SEOUL, August 18 (AJP) - Hospitals, children's rehabilitation centers and sports facilities will top Kazakhstan's construction priorities for the 2027~2029 budget period, committing the state to another round of building at a time when its own auditors report that much of the last round went unfinished. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev set the priority at a meeting on the economy and budget planning at Akorda on Monday, according to the presidential press service. He was briefed on the state of the economy, the socio-economic forecast for 2027~2029 and the republican budget indicators for those years, and told officials to hold both republican and local budgets in balance and to meet this year's growth targets. The room reflected how much of the government's fiscal machinery the question touches. Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov attended, along with presidential administration head Roman Sklyar, National Bank of Kazakhstan Governor Timur Suleimenov, Supreme Audit Chamber Chairman Alikhan Smailov, Deputy Prime Minister and National Economy Minister Serik Zhumangarin, presidential economic assistant Nurlan Baibazarov and Finance Minister Madi Takiyev. What Tokayev asked for is not a new departure. Kazakhstan has spent the past three years building social facilities at exactly this scale, through a set of national projects that now offer a clear record of what the state can and cannot deliver. The largest of them, Modernization of Rural Healthcare, has just finished. The Health Ministry says all 655 planned primary care facilities are built, including first-aid posts, feldsher-midwife stations and rural outpatient clinics. Of those, 226 went to villages that had no medical building of any kind, and 419 replaced premises the ministry judged unfit for use. The ministry puts the population served at about one million rural residents. A second stage is still running. Thirty-two district hospitals are being rebuilt as multidisciplinary central hospitals, with eight completed by late last year in Temirtau, Balkhash, Zhanaarka, Urzhar, Shuskoye, Merke, Talas and Beineu. Renovation is under way at 36 regional hospitals and 17 perinatal centers, and pediatric bed capacity has risen 38 percent. The school program, Comfortable School, was built to end three-shift teaching and the shortage of pupil places, with schools put up to common standards in cities and villages alike. It opened 105 schools in 2024 and 112 in 2025, of which 45 percent were rural. Another 245 existing schools are being renovated. Sitting above both is the National Infrastructure Plan, which runs to 2029 and lists 204 priority projects in energy, transport, water and sanitation, and digital infrastructure, at an estimated 40.1 trillion tenge. Roughly 90 percent of that money is expected from outside the state budget, which makes private capital and public-private partnerships the load-bearing assumption of the entire plan. The need is not in dispute. A separate national project is spending 13 trillion tenge between 2025 and 2029 on 86,000 kilometers of utility networks, aiming to bring average wear on the country's infrastructure down to 40 percent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which reviewed the plan this year, found more than a third of Kazakhstan's power plants running at 70 to 90 percent degradation. The gap opens at delivery. Yulia Engel, a member of the Supreme Audit Chamber, told the Mazhilis on May 21 that the four national projects running in 2025 were rewritten repeatedly during the year, in deadlines, delivery mechanisms, funding volumes, lists of facilities and target indicators, until they no longer functioned as long-term commitments with fixed parameters. "They have turned into mechanisms for adaptively redistributing budget resources to match the current level of execution," Engel said. Total underfunding of the four came to 38 percent of the planned volume in 2025 alone. The chamber's wider audit of last year's budget execution found that more than 20 percent of over 600 investment projects due for completion were not finished, that 99 projects worth 75 billion tenge were dropped mid-year, and that 2.4 trillion tenge was shifted between budget lines during the year. The volume of money spent inefficiently rose by a factor of 1.7 from 2024. Healthcare showed the same pattern in miniature. From January to October last year, fixed capital investment in the sector reached 214.8 billion tenge, or 89 percent of the 241 billion tenge planned. Smailov's chamber will assess the draft 2027~2029 budget itself, and its audit program for this year covers both Comfortable School and Modernization of Rural Healthcare. The three years Tokayev was briefed on are also the years the budget is supposed to tighten. Kazakhstan has committed to cutting the republican deficit from 2.5 percent of GDP this year to 1.7 percent in 2027 and 0.9 percent in 2028, and to weaning the budget off transfers from the National Fund, the sovereign wealth fund built on oil revenue. The 2026 budget carries no targeted transfers from it. That squeeze is happening in difficult conditions. Value-added tax rose to 16 percent from 12 percent in January, annual inflation was still 10.2 percent in July, and the National Bank has held its base rate at 18 percent since October. The bank expects growth of 3.5 to 4.5 percent this year, below the 5.4 percent the government used in building the current budget. The construction categories Tokayev named on Monday are also the ones foreign contractors have been circling. Korean engineering, urban development and hospital groups spent this year pitching projects in Astana, and healthcare has featured in bilateral talks alongside energy, transport and critical minerals. Tokayev accepted President Lee Jae Myung's invitation to Seoul in April. The first Korea-Central Asia summit is set for Sept. 16 and 17. 2026-08-18 11:11:10
Brain tumor chip predicts which drug works for each patient SEOUL, August 18 (AJP) - Patients with the deadliest form of brain cancer usually learn whether a drug works by taking it and waiting for the next scan. A South Korean research team has built a chip that can run that test first, outside the body, using cells taken from the patient's own tumor. The waiting is not free. Glioblastoma kills most patients within 15 months of diagnosis even after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and fewer than five percent live five years. Four months spent on a drug that never reaches the tumor is a third of what a patient has left. KAIST said Tuesday that a team led by mechanical engineering professor Ahn Song-ih built a patient-specific chip that predicted how three glioblastoma patients would respond to treatment, and that those predictions closely tracked how the patients actually fared. The work was done with Sungkyunkwan University's Ahn Jung-ho, neurosurgeon Lim Jae-joon at Bundang CHA Medical Center and CHA University's Kang Youn-jung, and appeared June 27 in the journal Small. Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults and among the hardest to treat. It does not sit as a neat lump a surgeon can lift out. Its cells crawl outward into healthy brain tissue, and that ragged edge, called the tumor margin, is where the disease resists treatment most stubbornly and where it comes back. The KAIST chip models the margin rather than the center of the tumor. Getting a drug to that edge is the second problem. The brain is walled off from the bloodstream by the blood-brain barrier, a lining of tightly sealed vessel cells that keeps harmful substances out of brain tissue. It keeps most cancer drugs out as well. When a tumor takes hold, it remodels the vessels around it. The wall turns leaky in some places and stays shut in others, and how leaky it gets, and where, differs from one patient to the next. That variation has been largely invisible to the tests doctors use now. Predictions about who will respond to what rest mostly on the tumor's genes and biomarkers, which describe the cancer cells and say nothing about the road a drug has to travel to reach them. The chip closes that gap by building the road. Inside a small transparent device threaded with fluid channels, the researchers grew tumor cells taken from newly diagnosed patients alongside human brain vessel cells and astrocytes, the star-shaped support cells that make up much of normal brain tissue. The vessel cells line an upper channel and stand in for a blood vessel. The tumor cells and astrocytes sit below in a three-dimensional network and stand in for the brain the tumor is invading. A porous membrane separates the two, so a drug delivered into the vessel channel has to cross the barrier the way it would in a patient. The design leaves room to add immune cells and the cells that wrap around blood vessels. The team made three chips, one from each of three patients, and dosed them with two drugs. Temozolomide is the standard chemotherapy given after surgery and attacks the cancer cells directly. Bevacizumab goes after the supply line, blocking the growth of the new blood vessels a tumor needs to keep expanding. Gene testing had suggested the three patients would respond in much the same way. On the chips, they did not. Each barrier behaved differently, and so did the response to each drug. Set against the treatment records of the patients the chips were built from, the chip results lined up. Three patients make a signal rather than a proven test. The comparison was also made against outcomes already recorded, not in a study designed to put the chip's predictions on the line before treatment began. Nothing here has yet shown that a chip can safely steer a real treatment decision, and the researchers said the platform has to be checked against a far larger group of patients first. Ahn said Tuesday in a statement released by KAIST that growing patient tumor cells together with the barrier makes it possible to "evaluate treatment responses that differ from patient to patient in a way that is close to reality." She said the team hopes to develop the work into a preclinical platform for personalized treatment strategies and drug development. The first authors are Ryoo Min-su, a doctoral student in KAIST's mechanical engineering department, and Lee Ga-eun, a doctoral student at Sungkyunkwan University. Small selected the paper for its front cover. The second use is further from the clinic and potentially larger. Brain cancer drugs fail for two separate reasons, either because they cannot kill the cells or because they never arrive. A candidate that looks powerful against tumor cells in a dish can be worthless in a person, and that failure usually surfaces late, after years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Regulators have begun pushing toward exactly this kind of testing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's roadmap for reducing animal testing, released in April 2025, named organ-on-a-chip systems among the methods it wants to see take the place of animal studies. The agency put its reasoning in one line. More than 90 percent of drugs that clear animal safety testing go on to fail in humans. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Small Title: Human Blood-Brain Tumor Barrier on a Chip to Investigate Personalized Treatment for Glioblastoma Patients Link/DOI: 10.1002/smll.202506712 2026-08-18 09:59:40
Kim Min-seok takes S. Korea's ruling party helm SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - South Korea's governing party handed its leadership on Monday to the man who served as President Lee Jae Myung's first prime minister, giving the president's closest political partner control of the party machine three days after his approval rating fell to the lowest level of his term. Kim Min-seok took 54.08 percent of the vote at the Democratic Party of Korea's national convention in Daejeon, defeating the incumbent leader, Jung Chung-rae, who finished with 45.92 percent. He becomes the second party leader to serve under Lee's government. No candidate cleared a majority on the first count. Voters had ranked the three contenders in order of preference, and when the first tally came up short, the second choices of those who had placed Song Young-gil at the top were added to the totals of the other two. Song finished third. Votes cast by delegates and dues-paying members carried 70 percent of the weight in the result, with a public opinion survey accounting for the remaining 30 percent. The party applied a one-member-one-vote rule for the first time. The new leadership serves a two-year term and will control candidate nominations for the 2028 general election, which makes the post one of the most powerful in the governing camp. Kim told the convention he would rebuild the party around a plan he labeled ABC. A stands for affordability, which he described as politics organized around the cost of living. B stands for broad, meaning a party that adds rather than subtracts. C stands for competence. "Our language, our policies, our attitude and our culture will all evolve," he said. He also set out how he intends to handle the party's dealings with the presidential office, promising what he called a creative horizontal relationship of full cooperation in which the party works for the president's success rather than against it. In his final appeal to delegates before the vote, Kim had put the case for his candidacy in blunter terms, saying the campaign was driven by fear "that the Democratic Party will be shaken, that the government will be shaken, that relations between the party and the government will be shaken, that President Lee Jae Myung will be shaken." The numbers behind that anxiety had landed the previous Friday. Gallup Korea found that 44 percent of respondents approved of Lee's performance in a survey conducted from Aug. 11 to 13, against 46 percent who disapproved. It was the first time disapproval had run ahead of approval since he took office last year. Three weeks earlier, approval had stood at 51 percent. The leadership race itself grew out of the June 3 local elections. The Democratic Party of Korea won 12 metropolitan mayor and governor posts against four for the opposition People Power Party, but it lost Seoul to Oh Se-hoon, and lawmakers began blaming Jung publicly for that defeat within a day of the count. Kim, 62, opened his speech by counting 40 years back to the start of his public life, when he was elected student council president at Seoul National University at the age of 20 and joined the campaign demanding an accounting for the military crackdown in Gwangju in May 1980. He served prison time for organizing protests against the government of Chun Doo-hwan. He has represented the Yeongdeungpo-B district of Seoul across four terms in the National Assembly, split by an 18-year absence. He first won the seat in 1996 at 32, the youngest member of that assembly, and returned to parliament only in 2020 after losing the Seoul mayoral race in 2002. In 2000, he served as chief of staff to Kim Dae-jung in the late president's separate capacity as leader of the governing party, and he has since held the posts of supreme council member, policy committee chairman, and head of the Democratic Research Institute. Lee named him prime minister in July 2025. He left office at the end of June to enter the leadership race, and Han Seong-sook, the former Naver chief executive, replaced him on July 1. The council Kim will chair, however, was shaped by the camp he beat. Choi Min-hee finished first among the five elected supreme council members, taking the senior seat, followed by Park Sun-won, Suh Mi-hwa, Lee Sung-yoon and Han Min-soo. Choi, Lee and Han had campaigned under the banner of Team Jung Chung-rae. 2026-08-17 19:22:12
President Lee sends condolences to Indonesia after quake kills 53 SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - President Lee Jae Myung expressed condolences on Monday to victims of the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck eastern Indonesia over the weekend, killing at least 53 people. "I cannot contain my sorrow at the news that a powerful earthquake in eastern Indonesia has caused great damage," Lee wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "On behalf of the government of the Republic of Korea, I extend my deep condolences to the victims and bereaved families who have lost precious family members and their homes in this sudden disaster," he said. Lee said search operations were still under way and that he hoped more survivors would be found. "As rescue and search work continues, I earnestly hope that even one more person returns safely to the arms of their family," he wrote. He also addressed the Indonesian government directly. "Under President Prabowo Subianto's leadership, I sincerely hope recovery proceeds quickly so that residents of the affected areas soon regain their peaceful daily lives," Lee said. Lee posted the message in both Korean and Indonesian and tagged Prabowo in the text. The earthquake struck at 5:58 a.m. Saturday local time off the northern coast of Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province. The United States Geological Survey placed the epicenter 68 kilometers north-northwest of the city of Ende at a depth of 10 kilometers. Indonesia's disaster management agency said at least 53 people had been killed and more than 1,300 homes damaged, over two-thirds of them severely. About 5,000 people have been forced from their homes. Landslides triggered by the quake blocked sections of the Trans-Flores Highway and cut off remote villages, slowing rescue teams. Hundreds of aftershocks followed the initial tremor. Flores has a history of severe seismic disasters. An earthquake of similar magnitude in December 1992 triggered a tsunami that killed about 2,500 people on the island. The South Korean government has not announced humanitarian assistance for the affected areas. 2026-08-17 17:36:16