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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Third-heaviest rainfall in Korean records kills 1 in southern city SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - Record rainfall along South Korea's southern coast killed one person and injured four on Monday, and the island city of Geoje logged the heaviest single day of rain since observations began there in 1972. Geoje recorded 577.4 millimeters between midnight and 1 p.m., the Korea Meteorological Administration said. Among the 97 surface stations whose records the agency ranks, only two days have produced more, both on Aug. 31, 2002, when Typhoon Rusa dropped 870.5 millimeters on Gangneung and 712.5 millimeters on Daegwallyeong. Geoje took 124.5 millimeters in a single hour, and nearby Tongyeong took 97.4 millimeters, both hourly records. Tongyeong also set a daily record of 409.7 millimeters. The weather agency put the hourly intensity at a level expected once every 200 years in Geoje and once every 100 years in Tongyeong. The rain came from the remnant of Typhoon Dolphin, which weakened well before reaching the Korean Peninsula. At about 4:42 a.m., a landslide swept soil onto the lower floors of an apartment building in Geoje's Okpo-dong, killing one resident and injuring two others. On Gonri Island in Tongyeong, a landslide buried a house and a resident trapped from the waist down was rescued and taken to hospital. In Ulsan, a taxi passenger was hurt when the driver braked to avoid a fallen roadside tree. Damage reports reached 838 nationwide as of 10 a.m., the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters said. A total of 159 people from 116 households evacuated in Busan and South Gyeongsang Province, and 108 had not returned home. The National Fire Agency said it had taken 1,947 calls from Geoje and Tongyeong and rescued 136 people. Power was cut to 2,030 households and 25 school facilities were damaged, 12 of them flooded. More than 20 roads in Geoje were closed at one point and most city bus services stopped running. Hanwha Ocean and Samsung Heavy Industries, which operate shipyards in Geoje, told workers not to travel in because roads around the yards were impassable. The government approved 3 billion won ($2.2 million) in special disaster management grants and 40 million won ($29,000) for relief operations. "Extremely heavy rain of more than 800 millimeters has fallen on the Geoje area since the 15th," Interior and Safety Minister Yoon Ho-jung said. "The rain band is moving toward Busan, Ulsan and other neighboring areas and continues to produce rain, which makes this a very serious situation." The rain eased a drought in South Gyeongsang Province. Average storage at agricultural reservoirs across the province's 18 cities and counties rose to 43.1 percent as of 2 p.m. from 32.2 percent on Aug. 14, and Geoje's reservoirs climbed from 28.7 percent to 73.6 percent. Five counties were at the severe drought level on Aug. 14. By Monday afternoon only Miryang remained there. 2026-08-17 16:04:03 -
CJ targets 12 tln won North America sales by 2028 SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - The South Korean conglomerate behind bibigo dumplings, Olive Young beauty stores and the KCON music festival is rebuilding its American operations, betting that people who watch Korean shows will keep buying Korean food and cosmetics. CJ Group has put a number on it, aiming for 12 trillion won ($8.49 billion )in North American revenue in 2028, about a 50 percent increase from more than 8 trillion won it took in there last year. Last year's figure was already more than 10 times the roughly 800 billion won the group recorded in 2017, growth that averaged about 33 percent a year. The plan came out at a briefing on Aug. 15 (local time) at the Hilton Los Angeles North Glendale, where executives from the food, entertainment and beauty businesses described how the three will be linked so that cultural interest converts into repeat purchases. Heo Min-hoe, chief executive of CJ Corp., the group's holding company, said the pieces have been more than three decades in the making. "We will build an ecosystem that carries the popularity of the K-wave into K-lifestyle experience, and accelerate our advance into the North American market," he said. CJ invested in the American film studio DreamWorks in 1995 and staged the first U.S. edition of KCON, a festival pairing K-pop concerts with Korean food and cosmetics, in 2012. The acquisitions came later, among them the Minnesota frozen food company Schwan's in 2019 and the content studio Fifth Season in 2021, bringing cumulative investment in North America to 9.7 trillion won as of the first half of this year. Schwan's changed the arithmetic more than any other purchase, because its plants and its shelf space carried bibigo, CJ CheilJedang's Korean food brand, into roughly 80,000 American stores including Walmart, Kroger and Costco. CJ CheilJedang now runs 20 production sites across the United States and booked 4.91 trillion won in American sales last year. Kim Jin-sik, a co-chief executive of CJ America, described the sequence the group is counting on. "We will extend American consumers' interest in K-content into habitual, repeated consumption of K-food and beauty, and that will lead back into offline cultural experience, creating a virtuous cycle," he said. Food carries the largest share of the target. CJ CheilJedang plans to widen local production and distribution, and to move the advantage it built in frozen food into shelf-stable products, the category that needs no freezer space at home or in the store. Federico Arreola, president of the Asian cuisine business unit at CJ Schwan's, said the lineup will broaden well past the dumplings that opened the door. "Beyond dumplings, we will actively grow global strategic products such as Hetbahn rice, chicken, seaweed snacks, kimchi and K-sauces, and raise bibigo into a global brand enjoyed at any table in the world," he said. 2026-08-17 13:39:33 -
Korean trade minister flies to US as $200 bln deal snags SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - South Korea's industry minister arrived in Washington on Sunday and said that detailed disputes had surfaced in the final stretch of talks over a $200 billion investment package, casting doubt on a late-August announcement of the first project Minister of Trade, Industry and Resources Kim Jung-kwan told reporters at Dulles International Airport on August 16 (local time) that video conferences and working contacts had not resolved the issues and that the whole file needed sorting in one pass. The end of the month remains the goal, he said, though more has come up than expected. He made the trip three weeks after his last visit and without a chief trade negotiator. President Lee Jae Myung removed Yeo Han-koo from the post effective midnight on Aug. 15 through compulsory dismissal, a step rarely used against a political appointee, and gave no reason. No successor has been named. The $200 billion is the strategic investment portion of a $350 billion commitment made under last year's tariff agreement, which cut U.S. tariffs on Korean goods from 25 percent to 15 percent, with $150 billion allocated to shipbuilding. A joint fact sheet and a strategic investment memorandum released on Nov. 14 set the total to be pursued by January 2029 and capped outflows at $20 billion a year. Kim said he had received no warning that tariffs would rise if Seoul did not move faster. He said Trump had been calling for speed since early this year and that Seoul shared the aim, with a year already passing. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Jan. 26 that because the National Assembly had not enacted the trade deal, he was raising tariffs on Korean automobiles, lumber and pharmaceuticals and all other reciprocal tariffs from 15 percent to 25 percent. The increase was not carried out, and the National Assembly passed the special law on Korea-U.S. strategic investment on March 12. The tariff ceiling is the second front. The U.S. Trade Representative opened two Section 301 investigations in March, one into forced labor and one into structural overcapacity, and Korea was a target of both. The forced-labor measure took effect July 24 and raises most-favored-nation rates up to 12.5 percent rather than adding 12.5 points on top of them. The overcapacity finding has not been issued. Seoul's position is that the combined total must not exceed 15 percent. Kim said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had both said they would honor the spirit of the agreement, and that he would not prejudge the outcome. Washington had indicated late August for the overcapacity result, he said, but it now felt like it was running longer. He would not confirm that combined-cycle power generation remained the leading candidate for the first project, saying only to wait and see. Three weeks ago he said the first project was being discussed with energy at the center. Commercial reasonableness is the governing principle, and the law permits only investments whose principal and interest can be repaid over the investment period. Among the candidates Washington has proposed, few have been found commercially viable. Japan closed its tariff talks in July 2025 and announced its first two projects in February and March. Korea finished about three months later and has yet to name one. 2026-08-17 11:25:14 -
Trump orders cut to US-S. Korea joint military drill SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - Hours before South Korea and the United States opened their largest annual exercise, United States President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint military drills on the peninsula, pointing to his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was not happy the U.S. had agreed long ago to take part in the exercises, which he called costly and largely paid for by Washington. He said the drills send a signal that is "totally inappropriate and hostile" to a country that has been unthreatening and respectful during his presidency. "Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises," he wrote, using the title Secretary of War for the Pentagon chief. The post went up at 5:04 p.m. Sunday in Washington, 6:04 a.m. Monday in Seoul, the morning the exercise began. It was the first time in his second term that Trump had publicly faulted the combined drills and ordered them cut. Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) runs from Aug. 17 to Aug. 27. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Forces Korea said at a joint briefing on Aug. 10 that UFS 26 is a defensive annual exercise involving about 18,000 South Korean troops, a scale similar to previous years. This year's exercise also carries part of the full operational capability assessment for South Korean forces, a step toward the transfer of wartime operational control, while the field training component was cut sharply. The reduction has been read in Seoul as the Lee Jae Myung government managing military tension with Pyongyang. North Korea has spent decades describing the exercise in the language Trump echoed. North Korea's Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried by state media on Friday, called the combined training a rehearsal for an aggressive war that was driving a different level of instability in the region. The statement threatened that the North would exercise its right to self-defense and said this year's drills are more provocative than last year's. North Korea fired ballistic missiles into the East Sea on Aug. 6 and again on Aug. 12. Pyongyang has not commented on the launches, which outside analysts assess were meant either to protest the exercise or to advance weapons systems. The framing has held for years. In 2024, North Korea's Institute for American Studies, which sits under the Foreign Ministry, called the exercise preparation for aggression and described it as the most offensive and provocative in the world. In 2016, the Korean People's Army, North Korea's military, threatened a preemptive retaliatory strike against forces taking part. The exercise grew out of an attempt on a South Korean president's life. North Korean commandos raided the Blue House in January 1968, prompting a government mobilization exercise that was renamed Ulchi the following year after Eulji Mundeok, the Goguryeo commander who turned back a Sui invasion. It merged in 1976 with Focus Lens, a command post exercise the U.N. Command had run since 1954, and the combined drill was renamed Ulchi Freedom Guardian in 2008. Seoul and Washington suspended it in June 2018 after Trump's first summit with Kim in Singapore, where he called the drills expensive and provocative. The allies restored large-scale field training in 2022 under the name Ulchi Freedom Shield, after a four-year suspension imposed while the two sides tried to negotiate away the North's nuclear weapons. North Korea later said Trump had personally committed to halting the exercises and cited their resumption as evidence Washington had broken faith. Trump's reference to Kim follows a year of open signaling. He met Kim three times in his first term, in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019 and briefly at the Demilitarized Zone that same year, and since returning to office he has raised the idea of another meeting repeatedly. He told Lee on the sidelines of the Group of Seven (G7) meetings in France in June that he would restart diplomacy with North Korea, then posted a photograph of his walk with Kim at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. On Saturday he posted another picture of the two of them, writing that they get along well. Kim has said he holds fond memories of Trump while ruling out any discussion of surrendering his nuclear arsenal. Trump closed the post with a line he flagged as unrelated, writing that he had asked South Korea's president to join U.S. efforts on the denuclearization of Iran and was told, "No thanks!" He did not say what he had asked of Seoul. South Korea's presidential office and its Ministry of National Defense had not commented as of Monday morning, and no change to the exercise schedule had been announced. 2026-08-17 09:23:11 -
Sookmyung AI learns when to react, not just how SEOUL, August 14 (AJP) - A research team at Sookmyung Women's University has built an artificial intelligence model that works out when a listener should react during a conversation, treating that as a separate question from what the reaction should look like. The model, named CaReDiff, took second place in the REACT26 Grand Challenge organized by ACM Multimedia, and the work has been accepted for an oral presentation session at the conference, which opens in Rio de Janeiro in November. CaReDiff generates a video of a listener whose face responds to what a speaker is saying and to how the speaker looks while saying it. The team is led by Kim Byung-gyu, a professor in the university's Department of Artificial Intelligence Engineering. The difficulty the work addresses is timing. Earlier systems learned to react at the right moment and to use the right expression as a single task, which left them reacting at the wrong points in a live conversation. The same design meant that tuning a model to one person's habits could damage the reaction patterns it had already learned. The team split the two problems apart. One technique, which the researchers call causal lead-lag cross attention, lines up the moment of the reaction explicitly rather than leaving it to be inferred. A second works in stages, planning the overall arc of the expression first and then refining the detail. Personal style is handled by a separate lightweight module, the Personalised Residual Adapter, which sits alongside the trained model instead of altering it. It carries personality traits and a record of how the individual has reacted in the past. Less than one percent of the model's total settings are trained to produce a personal reaction style, and the rest are left as they are. The team tested the system on the MARS dataset. On FRCorr, the measure the challenge uses to score how closely a generated reaction matches the reactions real people gave, the model reached 0.7671 in the offline setting. In the real-time setting, it reached 0.6462, up from 0.5680. With the personalization module applied, the offline figure rose to 0.7868 from 0.5899 and the real-time figure to 0.6510 from 0.5475. The reaction timing the model had learned before personalization was applied stayed intact. Those figures come from tests against recorded conversation data. The team has not reported results from human viewers judging whether the generated faces read as natural, and has not shown the system running inside a working chatbot or robot. The researchers expect the technology to be used in chatbots, social robots and humanoid robots, in services where a machine has to hold an emotional exchange with a person. Choi Ji-hoon was the first author. Choi Se-in, Lee Han-seul and Qurat Ul Ain Aisha took part in the research. "What matters about this result is that we have secured the core underlying technology that lets AI understand the context of a conversation and the characteristics of an individual, and respond at the right moment," Kim said. "We will refine this human-centered empathetic AI so that it understands human emotion and intent and communicates naturally, and carry it through to real-world demonstration." 2026-08-14 21:34:53 -
Iran envoy urges South Korea to rebuild ties SEOUL, August 13 (AJP) - South Korea should draw on its historically strong relationship with Iran to seek a role in postwar reconstruction and favorable terms for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Iranian envoy in Seoul said. “We should close our eyes and look to the future,” Mohammad Esmaeil Passandideh, counselor and deputy head of mission at the Iranian embassy in Seoul, said in a recent interview with AJP. “The post-war period will be a great time for Korea to rebuild damaged relations,” he said. “It will be too late for Korea to wait for the green light from the United States.” The appeal comes after South Korea spent months reshaping its energy supply chain around disruptions in the Gulf. Before the war, roughly 70 percent of South Korea’s crude had historically passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Middle Eastern crude has since fallen to about half of total imports, from roughly two-thirds a year earlier, with American, African and Latin American barrels taking its place. The war began on Feb. 28, when joint American and Israeli strikes hit Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. His son Mojtaba Khamenei was elected to succeed him on March 8. A ceasefire brokered by Pakistan and a memorandum signed in June halted the largest exchanges, but disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, the Strait of Hormuz and sanctions remain unresolved. Passandideh said more than 3,000 Iranians had been killed and strikes had damaged energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. He did not provide an estimate of the financial cost. He described the postwar outlook as uncertain, but said one Iranian response was predictable. “Some concepts are not acceptable for Iranians — like surrender,” he said. “They will resist, not only for one month or two months.” That resistance, he said, has reshaped Tehran’s approach to Hormuz. Before Feb. 28, Iran’s goal had been to maintain peaceful and safe passage through the strait. The attacks fundamentally changed the security calculation. “The security situation around the Strait of Hormuz fundamentally changed,” Passandideh said. But he rejected the idea that Tehran wanted a permanent postwar closure. “I want to mention again: Iran is not looking to close or blockade the Strait of Hormuz after the war,” he said. Iran nevertheless no longer appears to view security in the waterway as something it should provide at its own expense. Tehran created the Persian Gulf Strait Authority in May and began imposing fees reportedly ranging from about $1 million to $2 million per voyage, depending on vessel size and cargo. Iran’s parliament is also considering legislation that would bar vessels linked to the United States, Israel and other states Tehran considers hostile while charging others for passage. U.S. President Donald Trump has separately demanded that vessels pay the equivalent of 20 percent of their cargo value in return for U.S. Navy protection of the waterway. Asked how Iran would price its own system, Passandideh answered by comparison. “I think that we will be cheaper than Trump,” he said. He said the strait could not simply return to its prewar order and argued that regional states should take more responsibility for their own security. “We believe bringing safety and security to our region is not by the United States, by foreigners,” he said. “By ourselves, by our countries.” “I believe it is time to know the United States cannot secure safety for others.” Pressed on whether high tolls could ultimately drive Asian shipping away from the Gulf and hurt Iran itself, Passandideh returned instead to what Iran had already paid during the war. “We paid a lot during this war. We paid the cost for our safety,” he said. “We expected the international community to defend us, to condemn the aggressors. Who blamed the United States and Israel? Who?” Iran, he argued, should no longer be expected to bear the cost of securing one of the world’s most important energy corridors by itself. “Maybe some countries should pay more for reaching this security,” he said. South Korea, he suggested, is among the countries from which Tehran expected more. “During this war, we provided free and secure passage for Korea,” Passandideh said, adding that Iran had expected Seoul to speak more forcefully in return. South Korea and Iran have a relationship stretching back more than six decades, including years when Korean builders were heavily involved in Iranian infrastructure projects and Iranian crude was an important part of Korea’s energy supply. But relations deteriorated as U.S. sanctions tightened and billions of dollars in Iranian oil proceeds became frozen in South Korean bank accounts. The funds were eventually released in 2023 as part of a U.S.-Iran prisoner exchange. The nuclear dispute remains another obstacle to the relationship Passandideh wants rebuilt. He argued that the issue was not weapons but Iran’s right to maintain a civilian nuclear program on the same terms as other countries. “A peaceful nuclear program is our choice, and it is our right,” he said. “Iranians cannot accept any double standard.” He said Tehran had no intention of developing nuclear weapons. “We don’t want nuclear weapons, and we don’t have any plan to make nuclear weapons,” he said. Iran and six world powers reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, restricting enrichment and expanding international monitoring before Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. For Passandideh, the postwar question is whether South Korea treats its retreat from Iran as permanent or tries to rebuild a relationship that once carried considerable economic weight. His argument was defiant on sovereignty and security, but he ended on the cost being borne inside Iran. “I hope my country and our people can overcome these challenges,” he said. “Living is so hard. The cost of living is so high.” 2026-08-13 17:47:53 -
Researchers' hacking dataset wins best artifact award at VehicleSec SEOUL, August 13 (AJP) - A record of real cyberattacks carried out on a moving car has won the best artifact award at the USENIX Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy, the main international meeting on the subject, held in Baltimore on Monday and Tuesday alongside the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, Kookmin University said Thursday. The winning submission cleared all three checks the symposium applies to research materials. Reviewers confirmed that the data was publicly available, that the accompanying software ran as described, and that an outside party could reproduce the results in the paper. Awards at the event went to two entries, one for the best paper and one for the best artifact, the term the field uses for the data, code and documentation that sit behind a published result. The dataset came out of a joint project between the Mobility Cybersecurity Lab at Kookmin University, led by Jeon Sang-hoon, and the Hacking and Countermeasure Research Lab at Korea University, led by Kim Huy-kang. Ahn Se-jun of Kookmin and Song Yu-chan of Korea University share first authorship on the paper, with Kim Hyeon-seong and Baek Seung-jin as co-authors. Jeon and Kim are joint corresponding authors. Their paper, titled "AutoHack: A Physically Verified Multi-Bus CAN Dataset for Intrusion Detection System Evaluation," argues that the field has been grading itself on an easy test. Systems designed to spot hacking inside a car have been reporting near-perfect accuracy for years, but most were measured against data recorded in simulations or on a workbench, where messages arrive at tidy intervals. A detector trained on that kind of traffic learns to flag anything irregular, which works until it meets a real car, where a great deal of perfectly normal communication is irregular. Cars carry an internal network called a Controller Area Network, which lets the dozens of small computers inside a vehicle send instructions to one another. The Controller Area Network (CAN) standard dates to the 1980s and was never built with security in mind, so it has no way to verify that a message came from where it claims. Modern vehicles run several CAN lines at once, divided by function into powertrain, chassis, and body, linked through a central gateway. Almost every public dataset covers only one of them. The Kookmin and Korea University team recorded three at the same time. Using a single two-channel capture device so that both channels shared one internal clock, they logged the chassis, powertrain and body lines with the traffic aligned to within a millionth of a second, which lets a researcher see how a message on one line relates to activity on another. The car was a 2023 Hyundai vehicle, and the researchers ran it on internal roads on a university campus, closed to public traffic. They stripped out interior components to reach the wiring behind the central gateway, then injected attacks from a laptop while the vehicle was being driven. The paper does not identify the model, and the vulnerabilities exploited are structural features of the CAN standard rather than defects specific to one manufacturer. What separates the dataset from earlier ones is that the team confirmed each attack by watching what the car actually did. Flooding the powertrain and body lines with randomized messages stopped the vehicle while it was in Drive and, on another run, placed an automatic call to an emergency call center with no crash having occurred. Impersonating the diagnostic tool a mechanic would plug in allowed the researchers to switch off the forward-facing camera and restrict power steering assistance while the car was moving. Lesser attacks triggered parking brake warnings, false fuel alerts and unrequested operation of the turn signals and windows. The finished dataset runs to roughly 9.6 million messages drawn from about 33 minutes of driving, covering 2,048 distinct message identifiers, with attack and normal traffic labeled at the moment each injected frame finished transmitting rather than when the attack script started. The team then handed it to 10 teams of undergraduates at a three-day competition Kookmin ran last year, giving each team five submission attempts against a live leaderboard. Final scores ranged from 39 percent to 66 percent on a combined measure of how many attacks a system caught and how often it cried wolf. The strongest entry in the room missed roughly a third of the attacks. The researchers' own reference models fared similarly. A standard machine learning classifier handled denial-of-service flooding perfectly and caught most randomized injections, but scored 0.68 on replayed traffic and 0.79 on impersonated messages, the two attack types that most closely resemble ordinary driving data. The paper is direct about what the results do not show. All of it comes from one vehicle model over a limited set of driving conditions, so the benchmark cannot be read as evidence that a detector will generalize across manufacturers, and message identifiers, payload meanings and gateway routing differ from car to car. The attacks covered representative categories rather than every known technique, and all of them required physical access to wiring inside the car. The researchers describe the risk of the work being turned to vehicle theft or worse as negligible, because the weaknesses involved are already documented properties of the protocol. The dataset and the benchmark code are archived on Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, with the code released separately under the MIT license, and the team disclosed the targeted message identifiers only for the chassis line to avoid publishing more of the manufacturer's internal specifications than the paper required. The work was funded through the Convergence and Open Sharing System program run by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea, under which Kookmin leads the future mobility field and says it stages the attack and defense competition annually. Jeon said he hopes the published data becomes "a shared asset for automotive cybersecurity research and for training people in the field, in South Korea and abroad." 2026-08-13 16:30:56 -
Fiji takes Pacific fuel crisis to Seoul as Hormuz closure drags on SEOUL, August 13 (AJP) - Much of the Pacific has spent this year rationing diesel and living with blackouts. On Thursday, Fiji brought that issue to Seoul, asking South Korea to expand energy cooperation at the first meeting between the two countries' foreign ministers in nearly 11 years. Sakiasi Ditoka, Fiji's minister for foreign affairs and external trade, told Cho Hyun that the Asia-Pacific has no choice but to be more exposed than most regions to the supply disruption caused by the war in the Middle East, because its core energy shipments run through the Strait of Hormuz, South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a readout. He said he hoped Fiji could strengthen energy cooperation with South Korea, which he described as holding advanced refining and stockpiling capacity. Both ministers agreed that building stable and resilient energy supply chains among countries in the region has become more important than ever, and said they would communicate more closely, according to the ministry. What Fiji imports, much of the Pacific ends up burning. The country functions as the regional distribution point for fuel that moves on to smaller island states, so a shortfall in Suva turns into a shortfall across a dozen economies within weeks. That chain has been under strain since Feb. 28, when commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed after fighting broke out between Iran and the United States and Israel. Kerosene prices across the Pacific rose 42 percent in the months that followed and diesel rose 35 percent, according to the United Nations Development Programme. Tuvalu declared a state of emergency in April and imposed rolling blackouts. The Marshall Islands declared a 90-day economic emergency. The United Nations reported daily outages in parts of Fiji itself, one of the better-prepared economies in the region. South Korea imports effectively all of its crude and ranks among the most Hormuz-exposed economies in Asia, which is why it built the capacity Ditoka came to talk about. Its four refiners run roughly 3.4 million barrels a day, the fifth-largest refining capacity in the world, and government and commercial stockpiles together cover about 200 days of domestic demand. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources released a record 22.46 million barrels from strategic reserves in March under a coordinated International Energy Agency action. Seoul has been rerouting its own supply since. Middle Eastern crude accounted for 53.1 percent of South Korea's import mix in April, down from 65.2 percent a year earlier, according to Korea National Oil Corporation figures, as refiners pulled more barrels from the United States and Canada. Cho welcomed Ditoka in a year that marks 55 years of diplomatic relations, established in January 1971, and called Fiji the anchor of South Korea's diplomacy with Pacific island countries. The meeting schedule has not always matched that description. When 18 Pacific Islands Forum members gathered in Seoul in December for the sixth Korea-Pacific Islands Foreign Ministers' Meeting, Fiji was represented by a deputy minister, and the bilateral meetings Cho held that day were with Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Palau and Papua New Guinea. Before Thursday, the last ministerial talks between Seoul and Suva took place on Sept. 14, 2015, during an official visit to Fiji by Yun Byung-se. On development, Cho said South Korea is concentrating its assistance on sectors Fiji has identified as priorities, including health and energy, and that he hoped it could help improve clinical care and build renewable energy capacity on the islands. Fiji is the largest development cooperation partner South Korea has among Pacific island countries. The Korea International Cooperation Agency is building a national rehabilitation center there under a $10 million grant program that runs to 2027. Ditoka thanked South Korea for its assistance to date and asked for sustained attention to climate change. The ministers also exchanged views on the Korean Peninsula and the wider Pacific and agreed to cooperate on consular matters, including the protection of South Korean nationals in Fiji. No supply arrangement, storage agreement or specific energy measure was announced. The readout records an alignment of views and a commitment to talk more often. The climate request carries a deadline. Fiji hosts the Pre-COP31 preparatory meeting in Nadi from Oct. 5 to 8, with a leaders' event in Tuvalu, before the main climate conference opens in Antalya, Türkiye, on Nov. 9. 2026-08-13 15:43:03 -
Seoul defends nuclear submarine plan against Pyongyang's warning SEOUL, August 13 (AJP) - South Korea's planned nuclear-powered submarines will carry only conventional weapons and sit entirely within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday, rejecting North Korea's warning that the program will set off a nuclear domino across the Asia-Pacific. The position rests on a document the Ministry of National Defense released on May 26, the first time Seoul set out publicly how it intends to build and operate the boats. Named the Jangbogo-N project, the plan commits the navy to low-enriched uranium fuel, to designing and building the submarines at home, and to launching a first boat in the mid-2030s. It also states that South Korea will hold no nuclear weapons of any kind, and that it will work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to design a safeguards system that can be applied to a submarine reactor. Park Doo-soon, the ministry's spokesperson, told a regular briefing that the program is a justified and defensive answer to a rapidly changing security environment on the Korean Peninsula, citing North Korea's advancing nuclear and missile capability and its construction of a nuclear-powered submarine of its own. South Korea has met its treaty obligations faithfully, he said, and will stay in close contact with the agency on the basis of transparency as the program moves ahead. He said the government would put the same case to every country with a stake in it. Asked whether it had already explained itself to China or Russia, and whether the subject would come up when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visits Seoul later this month, he said he had nothing to offer. North Korean state media carried the statement that prompted the question on Wednesday, under the name of Jang Kum-chol, first vice foreign minister and director of the Workers' Party of Korea's 10th Bureau, which handles South Korean affairs. Jang said the submarine plan had entered its execution phase and was deepening instability in the region. He argued the ambition was not new, claiming Seoul had secretly advanced a nuclear submarine project from 2003, and repeated the North's position that holding unmatched retaliatory power is the responsible choice for deterrence. The submarines became possible only after Washington agreed to them. President Lee Jae Myung raised the subject with US President Donald Trump at their summit in Gyeongju on Oct. 29 last year, telling him that South Korea's diesel-electric boats have limited endurance underwater, which restricts their ability to track North Korean and Chinese submarines, and that South Korean nuclear boats would lighten the load on US forces in the region. Lee said what he wanted was fuel, not weapons. Trump announced his approval the following day in a post on Truth Social, writing that South Korea could build a nuclear-powered submarine in place of what he called its old and far less nimble diesel fleet, and adding that the work would be done at a shipyard in Philadelphia. A joint fact sheet the two governments released on Nov. 14 confirmed approval for a nuclear-powered attack submarine, along with US support for civil uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing within the terms of the bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement and US law. It named no construction site. National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac said afterward that the leaders had talked throughout on the premise that the boats would be built in South Korea, and that the request to Washington concerned fuel alone. What a reactor buys is endurance. A diesel-electric submarine runs on batteries while submerged and has to rise close to the surface to run its engines and recharge, the moment at which it is most easily found. A reactor needs no air and no refueling for years, so a boat can stay down as long as its crew holds out, cross an ocean at speed, and follow a target without ever showing itself. South Korea builds some of the finest conventional submarines in the world and not one of them can do that. Nothing in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) bars a country without nuclear weapons from using a reactor to drive a warship. The treaty governs weapons, not propulsion. The difficulty lies in the inspection system run by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose safeguards agreements allow a state to withdraw nuclear material from routine inspection when it goes to a military use that is not explosive. That provision was written decades ago and has never been carried through to a completed arrangement. Australia is working the same question with inspectors for its own submarine program. No verification model exists for fuel sealed inside a reactor that spends months at sea, and the May plan commits South Korea to designing one with the IAEA. The fuel itself remains unsettled. South Korea cannot enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel under its nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States, and widening those rights requires the consent of the US Congress. Delegations from both governments met in Seoul on June 2 and 3 for the first working session on the submarine, enrichment and reprocessing, with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Allison Hooker leading the American side and First Vice Foreign Minister Park Yoon-joo the South Korean side. North Korea has been building a nuclear submarine of its own. State media reported on Dec. 25 that Kim Jong Un had inspected construction of an 8,700-ton nuclear-powered vessel designed to launch strategic guided missiles, disclosing its displacement and publishing an image of the full hull for the first time. Standing at the site, Kim said South Korea's plan "seriously infringes upon the security and maritime sovereignty of our state," calling it "an aggressive act" and "a security threat that must be answered." --- AJP Takeaways ● Park Doo-soon, the South Korean foreign ministry spokesperson, said at a regular briefing Thursday that the country's planned nuclear-powered submarines will carry only conventional weapons and comply fully with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that Seoul will work with the International Atomic Energy Agency on transparency as the program advances. ● Jang Kum-chol, North Korea's first vice foreign minister, said in a statement carried by state media Wednesday that the South Korean program had entered its execution phase and would set off a nuclear domino across the Asia-Pacific, claiming Seoul had secretly pursued nuclear submarines from 2003. ● Donald Trump approved South Korean construction of a nuclear-powered attack submarine in a Truth Social post on Oct. 30 last year, and a joint fact sheet released on Nov. 14 confirmed the approval without naming a build site. Neither the approval nor the May 26 basic plan behind the ministry's position was raised at the briefing, and both were established through separate reporting. ● Kim Jong Un inspected construction of an 8,700-ton nuclear-powered submarine designed to launch strategic guided missiles, North Korean state media reported on Dec. 25, calling the South Korean plan an aggressive act and a security threat that must be answered. 2026-08-13 15:11:57 -
KAIST develops AI to detect foreign-linked online commenters SEOUL, August 12 (AJP) - Software built to catch foreign influence campaigns online has long had the same blind spot. It can tell a platform which accounts look suspicious, but not why. A research team in South Korea says it has closed that gap with an artificial intelligence system that points to the exact words behind every judgment it makes, so a person can check the machine's reasoning instead of taking it on faith. Run across nearly two decades of comments on Naver News, the news service of South Korea's largest web portal, the system flagged 23,998 accounts whose writing and behavior matched patterns of foreign-linked influence activity. What those accounts posted was not praise for any foreign country. It was moral condemnation of South Korea and of South Korean politicians. KAIST announced the results Wednesday. The work was carried out with Germany's Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and will be presented August 13 at USENIX Security Symposium 2026, one of the leading conferences in computer security. Organized efforts to spread comments or posts in order to shift how the public sees an issue are known as online influence operations. They are cheap to run and reach large audiences, and they tend to intensify around elections and diplomatic disputes, when attention is high and trust is fragile. Earlier detection tools mostly sorted accounts and posts into suspicious or normal. That left platforms with a verdict they could neither review nor explain to the user on the receiving end of it. The team started from 70 accounts that the Institute for National Security Strategy had already reported as foreign-linked. From those, it traced outward to users connected through Naver's follow feature and to users who had commented on the same articles, building a pool of 112,658,554 comments written by 4,047,831 users between April 2006 and March 2025. That is more than two comments for every person living in South Korea. The AI reads each comment in three steps. First it looks for signs that the writer may be connected to a foreign country, drawing on the region the comment was written from, which Naver displays, along with the username and phrasing that reads as non-native. Then it checks whether the comment carries moral emotion, either condemnation expressed through anger, contempt and disgust, or admiration and praise. Finally it works out where that emotion is aimed, at South Korea, at a rival state, at a major neighboring state, or at a country friendly to it. At each step the model marks the stretch of text that led it to its answer, whether in the comment itself, the username, the writing region or the headline of the article. That is what makes it explainable, in the sense that a reviewer can look at the highlighted words and disagree. Reading 112 million comments with a large model would have been prohibitively expensive, so the team used a technique called knowledge distillation, in which a large model teaches a much smaller one to make the same calls at a fraction of the cost. The account-level judgment combined those content signals with plain behavioral ones, including how many comments a user wrote, how long the account stayed active, how often it repeated itself, how other users reacted, and whether it was connected to the accounts already known. Of the roughly four million users in the pool, 23,998 came out consistent with the known accounts on all three fronts. KAIST said the model was checked against comments people had labeled by hand and against comments deliberately reworded, and that the flagged accounts clustered in time with the known accounts more closely than ordinary users did. The team was explicit about what the result is not. Identification does not amount to a finding that any of these accounts is actually operated by a foreign government or agency. KAIST also stressed that the technology should be used as an explainable content management tool supporting expert review rather than as a system that blocks or penalizes accounts on its own. The strategy findings are where the numbers get uncomfortable. Naver ranks comments by like ratio, meaning likes divided by likes plus dislikes, so a comment above 0.5 has drawn more approval than objection and rises toward the top of the thread. Comments condemning South Korea averaged 0.514, the only strategy examined that cleared that line. Praise for a foreign country did not come close. Among the condemning comments that drew the strongest response, seven of the top 10 targets were domestic politicians, including presidents and major party leaders, drawn from both the liberal and conservative camps. KAIST said that pattern fits a strategy of widening distrust in politics generally and deepening conflict between the two sides, rather than backing either one. Oh Hye-yeon said the system analyzed not only the surface meaning of comments but the emotions that drive conflict and the organized behavior of the accounts behind them, adding that she expects it to be used against influence activity that keeps growing more subtle. Cha Mee-young, a KAIST professor who also holds a directorship at the German institute, called the study a case of actionable data science, work that connects data science to solving a real social problem, and said she hoped it would become a practical tool for raising transparency and trust in the digital public square. The timing data points to when that work matters most. During presidential, parliamentary and local election periods, an average of 34.19 suspected accounts began posting each week, compared with 22.61 outside those windows, about 51 percent more. Lee Won-jae said the findings offer "a standard for sorting out which messages should be examined first at times when social conflict runs high, such as elections." 2026-08-12 10:09:00