Japan’s Abe seeks Baltic support against North Korea
VILNIUS: Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday urged Baltic NATO states to support pressure on North Korea, as he hammered home his hawkish message that Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programmes pose a global threat.
Despite a recent cooling of tensions in the run-up to the Winter Olympics in South Korea, Shinzo Abe has insisted on ‘maximising pressure’ on the North.
“We should work closely together to maintain and strengthen a rule of law-based international order on North Korea, which is now a threat to the global community”, Abe told reporters in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius.
His Lithuanian counterpart Saulius Skvernelis voiced support as did Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis with whom Abe met earlier in the day in Latvia’s capital Riga.
Briefing reporters, Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Norio Maruyama said that although the threat posed by Pyongyang was ‘unprecedented’, the full implementation of UN sanctions would have ‘ a very strong effect on North Korea’.
New UN sanctions passed against North Korea last month ban the supply of nearly 75 per cent of refined oil products to Pyongyang and cap crude deliveries among other measures.
Abe kicked off his visit in fellow Baltic eurozone state Estonia on Friday, where he also discussed deepening cybersecurity and economic ties.
Japan is keen to raise its profile in the region as China bolsters its ties there.
China is pushing its massive 1 trillion ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative, which seeks to build rail, maritime and road links from Asia to Europe and Africa in a revival of ancient Silk Road trading routes.
Yesterday Abe will head to Lithuania’s second largest city Kaunas to pay tribute to Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who saved 6,000 European Jews from the Holocaust by issuing visas to allow them to escape war-torn Lithuania.
Abe is the first sitting Japanese leader to visit the Baltic states and will also visit Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania before returning to Tokyo Wednesday. — AFP PARIS: Airbus said Saturday it had been fined 104 million euros for a dispute dating from 1992 over missile sales to Taiwan by the Matra group, which was later acquired by the aerospace giant.
Airbus, which this week agreed to sell China 184 A320 planes by 2020, said in a statement it had been ordered to pay the fine ‘for a complaint of breach of contract concerning the sale of missiles’.
Matra Defence SAS., which joined the Airbus group in 1998, said for its part it was ‘studying the fine and evaluating next steps’, the statement said.
An Airbus spokesman declined to provide details on the case when contacted by AFP.
In a separate case, the European group said it was in discussions with prosecutors in Munich that could close a German probe into alleged corruption related to the sale of Eurofighter jets to Austria.
In February, Austria sued Airbus over a 2003 Eurofighter deal that was long alleged to have been highly shady, seeking up to 1.1 billion euros ( US$ 1.2 billion) in damages.
Austria’s defence ministry said at the time that the lawsuit accused Airbus and the Eurofighter consortium of deliberately hoodwinking Vienna over the two-billioneuro order.
At the time Airbus chief Tom Enders was head of the defence division of European Aeronautic Defence Space Company, which became the Airbus Group in 2014.
“We will reveal the results when the investigation is closed,” the Airbus statement said. — AFP
We should work closely together to maintain and strengthen a rule of law-based international order on North Korea, which is now a threat to the global community. Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Prime Minister