Speculation grows over Sweden visit
North Koreans fly in for meetings ahead of planned summits with US and South
North Korea’s Foreign Minister met with his Swedish counterpart yesterday after making a surprise trip to Stockholm that has fuelled speculation about a meeting between United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho landed at Stockholm Arlanda Airport on a direct flight from Beijing and spent several hours at the Swedish Foreign Ministry before returning to the North Korean Embassy.
Ri’s talks with Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom were expected to resume overnight.
Sweden has had diplomatic relations with North Korea since 1973 and is one of the few Western countries with an embassy in Pyongyang. It provides consular services for the US in North Korea.
“If the key actors want Sweden to play a role, facilitate [talks], be a forum or a link or whatever it may be, then we are prepared to do that,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told Sweden’s TT news agency yesterday.
“We shouldn’t be naive and believe it is Sweden that solves these problems,” Lofven added.
Sweden’s Foreign Ministry said the talks between Wallstrom and Ri “will focus on Sweden’s consular responsibilities as a protecting power for the United States, Canada and Australia”, but would also address the security situation on the Korean Peninsula.
The ministry referred to the UN Security Council’s condemnation of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programmes, saying the UN “emphasised the need for intensified diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict”.
Ri, a former diplomat in Stockholm and London and an ex-nuclear envoy with experience negotiating with rivals South Korea and the US, was tapped as Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister in 2016.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month, he urged the UN not to remain silent about what he called “the US dangerous game of aggravating [the] situation in and around the Korean peninsula and driving the whole world into a possible disaster of nuclear war”. The trip by Ri is being closely watched because there remains a huge amount of preparation that needs to be done and relatively little time before Kim is supposedly planning to sit down for summits with South Korean President Moon Jae In and Trump.
Trump has agreed to meet Kim by the end of May. So far, North Korea has yet to publicly comment on what it hopes to gain from the summits, adding an extra element of mystery and scepticism.
Sweden has been rumoured as a possible site for the summit between Kim and Trump, though a truce village on the South Korean side of the Demilitarised Zone between the Koreas is seen as more likely.
Senior South Korean officials who travelled to Pyongyang earlier this month and met with Kim say he is willing to discuss the North’s nuclear weapons programme.
It could suggest a potential breakthrough, or a fallback to the North’s longstanding position that it’s willing to get rid of its nuclear weapons if the US guarantees its safety.
In the past, that has meant Washington would have to withdraw all of its troops from South Korea, a condition no US president has been willing to consider.
Niklas Swanstrom of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy said the meeting between the two foreign ministers would only be preliminary to higherlevel talks but they could give an indication of North Korea’s interests and demands.
“The assumption is of course that [they] will speak a bit about the proposed talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un,” Swanstrom told the Associated Press.
He said he did not expect the announcement of a date or location for a Trump-Kim meeting. AP PM and his Government resign Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and his Government have resigned as a way out of the political crisis triggered by the slayings of an investigative journalist and his fiancee. President Andrej Kiska accepted the resignation and asked Peter Pellegrini, Fico’s Deputy Prime Minister, to form a new government. The move is meant to keep the current three-party coalition in power and avoid the possibility of an early election. Fico’s resignation came after tens of thousands of Slovaks joined anti-government protests across the country last week to demand the Government’s resignation and a thorough investigation into the shooting deaths of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova. Kuciak was writing about ties between the Italian mafia and people close to Fico when he was killed. The reporter also wrote about corruption scandals linked to Fico’s leftist Smer Social Democracy party.
Clashes in Madrid over death
Street clashes erupted in central Madrid yesterday over the death of a 35-year-old African vendor who witnesses said died trying to escape from police cracking down on illegal street sales. Hundreds of protesters burned plastic trash bins, blocking narrow streets in the Lavapies neighbourhood of the Spanish capital, and threw stones at riot police officers. Rioters also set fire to the facade of a bank branch and broke glass partitions at a bus stop. The Spanish news agency Europa Press quoted police as saying the vendor died of cardiorespiratory arrest while running from officers. One resident, who gave his name only as Marcos, told AP that earlier in the day he saw police on foot and on motorbikes pursuing a group of street vendors.
Special tags for flying pets
United Airlines has announced it will issue special bag tags for animal carriers and prosecutors have launched an investigation to determine if criminal charges are warranted following the death of a French bulldog puppy that was forced into an overhead compartment on a United flight. The Chicago-based airline said a flight attendant who ordered the passenger to put her pet carrier in the overhead compartment aboard a Houston-to-New York flight on Tuesday didn’t know there was a dog inside. The family that owned the dog and other passengers contradicted the airline’s account, saying the dog could be heard barking from inside the compartment. The Harris County, Texas, district attorney’s office said its animal cruelty division was working with the county’s animal cruelty task force on a criminal investigation into what happened.
Pledges for Palestinians
The United Nations yesterday received pledges of nearly US$100 million ($137.6m) in new funding for the UN relief agency for Palestinians after the US slashed its aid, but it is still facing a nearly US$350m shortfall this year. New Zealand joined Qatar, Canada, Switzerland, Turkey, Norway, South Korea, Mexico, Slovakia, India and France in pledging new funding during an emergency donor conference that called as the UN Relief and Works Agency experiences the worst funding crisis in its 68-year history.