South Korea establishes diplomatic ties with Cuba, North Korea’s old friend

SEOUL, (Reuters) - South Korea has established diplomatic relations with Cuba, one of North Korea’s Cold War-era allies,the South Korean foreign ministry said yesterday.

With their United Nations representatives exchanging letters in New York, the two countries have agreed to open diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level, the ministry said in a statement.

Cuba continues to maintain close relations with North Korea, which were established in 1960, with their shared socialist ideology and their hostility towards the United States helping to bind them together.

“I want to know how much they will pay for this. Because you recognise your thing was broken you see it on all sorts of global news and it took you this long to come forward? The press release said perhaps it’s from (February) 4 they were reporting this thing was lost from them, and if that was the case nobody reached out to them between then and now and said something washed up in Tobago?”

“We could have avoided so much. Even Cuba maintains an embassy Pyongyang.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called late Cuban leader Fidel Castro a “comrade-in-arms”, according to North Korean state media. North Korea observed three days of official mourning in 2016 when Castro died aged 90.

The new diplomatic ties between Seoul and Havana mark an “important turnaround” for South Korea in its efforts to strengthen its diplomacy in the Latin American region, the foreign ministry said in its statement. in as we speak and we are containing the hydrocarbons in that area located off Canoe bay, the vessel continues to leak that substance…We need to know that information so we can work on extracting it as soon as possible. We were able to save our paradise. This situation should not result in paradise lost but we need those responsible to come clean and we need those responsible to know that they have to pay for this mess. They are culpable as part of this mess,” he said.

BOGOTA, (Reuters) - The number of critically endangered animal and plant species in Colombia has more than doubled since 2017 and the total list of threatened species in the Andean country stands at 2,103, the environment ministry said on Wednesday.

The list includes two types of manatee in the Amazon and the Caribbean - which are considered endangered, and a number of Colombia’s emblematic frailejon plant varieties which are considered vulnerable or endangered.

Colombia, with its soaring Andes mountains, lush rainforests and Pacific and Caribbean coasts, is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries. It will host COP16, the U.N. biodiversity conference later this year.

It boasts more than 75,000 different species, the environment ministry said in a statement announcing “exhaustive technical” revisions to the threatened and endangered species list, which was last updated seven years ago.

“We call on environmental and regional authorities to take the necessary steps to protect these threatened species,” Vice Minister of Policy and Environmental Normalization Mauricio Cabrera said in a video message.