Chinese woman charged with 'reckless foreign interference' in Canberra
The Australian Federal Police revealed the unnamed woman was charged with reckless foreign interference, contrary to section 92.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). She appeared in court on Monday.
Officers from the AFP will address the media shortly.
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New Statesman
3 hours ago
- New Statesman
North Korea's guide to going nuclear
Photo by AFP via Getty Images On the bright, sunny afternoon of 24 June, Kim Jong Un's gleaming mega-yacht docked in Wonsan on North Korea's east coast. The portly young dictator strolled down the gangway in a sharply tailored dark suit and sped off in a convoy of black armoured limousines. His destination was the Wonsan Kalma coastal resort, a sprawling new development featuring high-rise hotels, pristine sandy beaches and an enormous water park, whose construction he was said to have personally overseen, directing workers to create 'a tourist attraction without equal in the world'. The North Korean leader spent much of his early childhood on the Kalma Peninsula, secluded from the struggles of the rest of his impoverished country behind the high walls of the sumptuous villas reserved for the ruling family. After ascending to power in 2012 around the age of 27 (his precise birth date is unknown), following the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, Kim frequently returned to the area, building a palatial summer residence and hosting visitors on a personal yacht that the former Chicago Bulls basketball star Dennis Rodman described as a 'cross between a ferry and a Disney boat'. It was also a favoured location to flaunt his growing power. In 2014, he ordered the commanding officers of his navy to swim ten kilometres around the bay to prove their fitness, while he supervised from beneath a white parasol. During the years since, he has presided over numerous missile tests and live-fire military drills along the same stretch of coast. As Kim arrived at the opening ceremony of his new tourist resort, 'cheers of 'Hurrah!' resounded far and wide', according to the official media reports. The assembled crowd jumped up and down and fireworks exploded along the bay as Kim cut the ribbon and held his scissors triumphantly aloft. He toured the new facilities, marvelling at the entirely unremarkable furnishings of the hotel rooms and admiring the sun loungers on the beach. The first lady, Ri Sol Ju, valiantly struggled to remain upright alongside him as her high heels sank into the sand. Finally, he took a seat at the base of an alarmingly steep yellow water slide alongside his wife and daughter, a crystal ash tray and a packet of cigarettes placed discreetly on a small folding table to his side. He pointed and smiled, apparently delighted, as a few intrepid patrons tried out the new ride, coming perilously close to splashing the supreme leader and his family. Even a few years ago, this was the sort of scene that would have elicited widespread ridicule, the latest addition to a series of online memes depicting 'Kim Jong Un Looking at Things', in which the running joke was the North Korean ruler – seemingly the living embodiment of the Team America: World Police caricature – pointing excitedly at mundane objects. But those jokes don't seem quite so funny any more. During his first decade in power, Kim has transformed his small, isolated nation into a de-facto nuclear power, at a terrible cost to his own citizens. He has an arsenal of missiles he claims can reach the US, and a new security alliance with Russia. As an American intelligence assessment concluded earlier this year, 'North Korea is in its strongest strategic position in decades.' Forty-eight hours before his visit to Kalma, on 21 June, the US bombed Iran. A group of B-2 stealth bombers – the same aircraft that had once flown to the Korean Peninsula to demonstrate their ability to reach Pyongyang – dropped 14 massive ordnance penetrators on Iran's main nuclear facilities. The contrast was stark. In North Korea, which had nuclear weapons, Kim was sauntering around his new water park, seemingly safe from the prospect of any imminent US military action. In Iran, which did not, the regime was left to survey the smouldering rubble of its once-prized underground enrichment sites. But the reality was more complicated. 'The easy conclusion is to say that Kim Jong Un is once again vindicated in his pursuit of nuclear weapons because if Iran had nuclear weapons, like he did, they would not have gotten bombed,' said Sydney Seiler, who led negotiations with North Korea as a US special envoy during the Obama administration, and has served in senior roles in the US intelligence community and National Security Council over the past four decades. 'But this has got to send a shock to Kim, because all of a sudden this US president, who everybody said was an isolationist and focused on 'America First', has demonstrated that he is willing to take action overseas.' While the US strikes on Iran undoubtedly cemented the Kim regime's rationale for developing its own nuclear arsenal, Seiler told me, they would also prompt Pyongyang to reassess its prior convictions about Donald Trump's propensity to use force. 'In that sense, Kim might well be a bit back-footed and concerned that he hasn't cleared the safe zone yet.' A mural of Kim Jong Un's glorious predecessors and, respectively, his grandfather and father: Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Photo by Eric Lafforgue/Art In All Of Us/Corbis via Getty Images North Korea's nuclear programme can be traced back to Kim's grandfather, Kim Il Sung, and the early years of the Cold War. In 1956, eight years after the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the country is officially known, Pyongyang signed an agreement on joint nuclear research with the Soviet Union, which had conducted its first nuclear test in 1949, ending the US monopoly on the bomb. The Soviet leadership had concerns about emboldening Kim, who invaded South Korea at the start of the Korean War in 1950, with Stalin's blessing. Yet they did not want the North to fall behind the South, which was also pursuing nuclear research and allied to the Soviets' Cold War enemy, the United States. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe With Soviet help, North Korea began building its first research reactor around 1962-63, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kim's determination to achieve his own nuclear capability was affirmed by the international response to neighbouring China's first nuclear test in 1964. 'Kim Il Sung watched Mao Zedong's transformation after that test,' said Seiler. 'He concluded that if one wanted to be recognised and respected globally, you had to pursue this capability.' Beyond prestige, there was also the matter of survival. The US had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, and openly weighed the possibility of using nuclear weapons against North Korea during the Korean War five years later, and again during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis against China. That same year the US deployed nuclear weapons to South Korea in an attempt to counter the North's conventional capabilities, where they remained until the US withdrew almost all of its overseas-based nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War. 'Unhappily, we had sold to the rest of the world two ideas,' acknowledged the former US secretary of state Dean Acheson in 1963. 'One was that nuclear weapons were a status symbol. The great powers had them; if you didn't have them, you were a second-rate power. Secondly, if you had them, you could do anything. These were magical weapons.' The allure of these magical weapons strengthened even further for Pyongyang following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which took with it the Kim regime's main benefactor and source of foreign aid. North Korea had signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985 under Soviet pressure and after Moscow had agreed to help build its own nuclear power plant, which the regime insisted was for peaceful, civilian purposes. Yet the Kims never abandoned their nuclear ambitions. They had witnessed first hand how quickly long-standing autocratic regimes could collapse as a wave of popular uprisings swept across eastern Europe in 1989. These culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolution that ousted Nicolae Ceaușescu, the dictatorial communist ruler of Romania, who was overthrown and summarily shot, alongside his wife. 'Every Kim's fear since then has been the Ceaușescu scenario,' said Seiler, 'where the forces of change overthrow the autocratic system from within.' When Kim Jong Il took over after the death of his father in 1994, his early years in power were characterised by a devastating famine that was made worse by the regime's determination to retain control by limiting access to foreign aid organisations. The second Kim doubled down on his father's Songun, or 'military-first' policy. He authorised a covert uranium enrichment programme, which relied on supplies from the Abdul Qadeer Khan network in Pakistan, and experimented with processing spent plutonium fuel rods at the Yongbyon nuclear research facility, which was estimated to have produced enough fissile material for one or two nuclear bombs. The regime also sought to develop its ballistic missile capabilities in cooperation with Iran. North Korea formally withdrew from the NPT in 2003, citing the 'hostile policy' of the US after the then president, George W Bush, grouped the country with Iraq and Iran in his notorious 'axis of evil' speech. Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, which resulted in a pitifully low yield, but it turned out to be just a starting point. Over the next two decades, North Korea pressed ahead with its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the missiles needed to deliver them. Far from the unpredictable 'rogue state' that is often portrayed, argues Edward Howell, a lecturer at the University of Oxford and author of North Korea and the Global Nuclear Order: When Bad Behaviour Pays, Pyongyang has in fact pursued a coherent strategy, alternating between periods of crisis and compliance as it tests the patience of the international community, and its long-time ally China. 'North Korea has learned from the outcomes of behaving badly as to how and when it should behave in the future,' Howell told me from Seoul. 'This means testing how far it can break international norms pertaining to non-proliferation and non-aggression – the norms that basically guide every sovereign state in international relations – with the aim of reaping benefits and pursuing its ultimate goal of being recognised as a nuclear-armed state.' He calls Pyongyang's approach: 'strategic delinquency'. In 2009, a new song began playing in regular rotation on North Korean radio. The lyrics were printed in soldiers' notebooks, but they were not difficult to remember. 'Tramp, tramp, tramp, the footsteps of our General Kim…/Bringing us closer to a brilliant future/Tramp, tramp, tramp, ah footsteps.' The 'General Kim' in question was soon revealed to be Kim Jong Un, the youngest son of the dynasty's second leader, Kim Jong Il; the elder Kim had suffered a serious stroke in 2008 and was said to be 'gravely ill'. 'Kim Il Sung spent 25 years laying the groundwork for his son to take over as leader,' said Anna Fifield, author of The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. 'Kim Jong Il was steadily promoted up the ranks and the propaganda machine created a narrative around why he was the right person to succeed his father.' But when it came to his own successor, he had no such time. Instead, he began hurriedly promoting his youngest son as his own health deteriorated. 'It was a very hard sell,' Fifield said, 'trying to convince a very hierarchical system that a man in his twenties with no political or military experience, whose only qualification was his surname, should take control of a nuclear-armed totalitarian state.' Still, the regime's propagandists embarked on a concerted campaign to promote the new 'General Kim', claiming that he could fire a gun by the age of three and ride wild horses by six. He was also given a physical makeover. 'Kim Jong Un started wearing suits and glasses that were very reminiscent of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, and cut his hair into that weird style,' Fifield told me. 'He even developed a gravelly voice – all traits of his grandfather, whose portrait is ubiquitous in North Korea.' The third Kim was widely viewed as young and inexperienced when he came to power in 2012. There were serious doubts among international observers as to whether he would be able to command the respect of the regime elite, and cautious optimism in some quarters that he might follow the Chinese model of reform and opening. He had been educated at a private school in Switzerland and he was known to be a fan of videogames and the Chicago Bulls. The then British foreign secretary, William Hague, ventured that Kim Jong Un's ascension could mark a 'turning point for North Korea' and a new opportunity to return to talks on denuclearisation. But those hopes were swiftly dashed. Kim ruthlessly consolidated power, in 2013 ordering the execution of his uncle and mentor, Jang Song Thaek, who was previously considered the country's second most powerful official. He later boasted to Trump that he had arranged for his uncle's head to be chopped off and displayed on top of his corpse as a warning to others about the consequences of betraying him, although it is unclear if this actually happened. He then had his half-brother Kim Jong Nam assassinated using VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur Airport in 2017. Kim also stepped up the pace of nuclear and missile tests, declaring a new policy of Byungjin, or 'parallel advance', which called for simultaneously strengthening the economy and the country's nuclear programme, ignoring that the latter brought international sanctions that stifled the former. According to the regime's narrative, there was no contradiction between the two – North Korea's future and the prospects for economic development could only be secured by the 'treasured sword' of its nuclear arsenal. On a reporting trip to Pyongyang in May 2016 that coincided with Kim's first Workers' Party congress, and took place between the country's fourth and fifth nuclear tests, I was taken to see model factory after model factory. There, model workers assured me, under the supervision of my omnipresent minders, that North Korea merely sought the means to defend itself and the peaceful lives of its citizens against the predations of its hostile foreign enemies. As the younger of the two minders put it, invoking the country's past suffering under Japanese colonial rule and during the Korean War, which North Koreans are told the US and South Korea started: 'We have learned the price of being weak.' The following year, as North Korea tested its first intercontinental ballistic missiles and carried out its sixth nuclear test – while Trump threatened Kim with 'fire and fury like the world has never seen' unless he changed course – I interviewed Pyongyang's ambassador to the UK, Choe Il. I asked whether his country would ever consider giving up its nuclear programme. Choe rattled off a list of countries without nuclear weapons that had been the subject of US military campaigns in recent years, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to which he could since have added Syria and Iran. 'The only way to protect our country is that we strengthen our power enough to suppress any enemy countries,' he insisted. 'This is a lesson we feel in our bones.' There is a lie at the heart of Pyongyang's rationale for its nuclear weapons as it claims to be defending the country against its foreign enemies. In truth, as the ruling elite knows, there is no imminent threat to North Korea's security. There is no imperialist army massing at the gates. The Kim regime's main priority is, as it always has been, the survival of the Kim regime, not the lives of its citizens. North Korea's nuclear arsenal gives the ruling dynasty power, prestige and a powerful deterrent against any external efforts to provoke regime change. So, despite his brief foray into diplomacy with Trump in 2018 and 2019, it seems unlikely Kim was ever seriously contemplating an end to his nuclear programme. When those negotiations petered out, with Trump cutting short their summit in Hanoi, Kim retreated into his previous isolation, sealing the country's borders completely at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as he embarked on a renewed crackdown on potential threats to the regime's domestic control. 'I don't think people understand how massively the Covid pandemic changed the situation,' Fyodor Tertitskiy, a Seoul-based scholar of North Korea and author of Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il Sung, told me. 'I think we entered a new age in 2020.' The government introduced a new law against 'reactionary thought and culture', which included punishments for citizens caught using South Korean slang terms. There were reports of people being executed for watching and sharing South Korean movies and pop music. Kim then led his generals on horseback to the snow-capped summit of Mount Paektu, where he invoked his grandfather's 'indefatigable revolutionary spirit' and vowed to defeat the 'unprecedented blockade and pressure imposed by the imperialists'. For good measure, he severed all contact with Seoul and had the inter-Korean liaison office near the border with South Korea blown up. Then Kim was handed an unexpected breakthrough: Russia invaded Ukraine. The few resources he had to offer were suddenly in demand. North Korea shipped millions of artillery rounds to Russia, along with short-range missiles and an estimated 10,000-12,000 troops. In return, the regime received a badly needed influx of hard cash, and perhaps also technical assistance with its long-range missile and nuclear programmes. After hosting Kim at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian far east in September 2023, Vladimir Putin was asked whether Russia would now help North Korea to build its own satellites. He replied: 'That's why we came here.' Two months later, after two previous failures, North Korea successfully launched its first reconnaissance satellite. The following June, Kim welcomed Putin to Pyongyang, where they took turns driving each other around, at speed, in the new Russian limousine the Russian leader had just presented to him. Then they signed a mutual defence pact that resurrected the earlier Cold War treaty between North Korea and the Soviet Union, cementing their new alliance and reducing Pyongyang's dependence on Beijing. 'Kim's dream would be to be able to play off Russia and China against each other, recreating the model from the late Cold War and enabling North Korea to milk both cows,' Tertitskiy explained. 'That was the golden age for the regime, and the darkest era for its people.' Presumably to underline his new friendship with Moscow, Kim was filmed meeting Russia's ambassador to North Korea at his new tourist resort in June, shaking hands by the water slide. Two weeks later, he hosted Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, onboard his yacht in Wonsan, where he reiterated his unconditional support for Putin's war on Ukraine. Lavrov said Russia understood North Korea's need for its nuclear programme, effectively recognising its status as a nuclear power. The US strikes on Iran will only intensify the Kim regime's determination to expand and advance its nuclear arsenal. Informed by hindsight, Sydney Seiler told me of his long personal history of observing North Korea's diplomatic negotiations: 'I can say with a high degree of confidence that none of those were real, authentic pursuits of diplomacy.' Rather, he observed a 'pattern of behaviour, with each major period of engagement coming to an end after about a year, or 18 months, and returning to the status quo ante with the weapons programme ending up being stronger at the end than it was going into it'. With Trump back in power, Kim may be preparing to embark on a new cycle of diplomacy, perhaps to see what he can extract from a president who has gushed over the 'beautiful letters' the two men exchanged in 2018 and how they 'fell in love'. A few days after I spoke to Seiler, Kim Jong Un's sister Kim Yo Jong announced that further talks might indeed be possible, but only if the US accepted North Korea as a 'nuclear weapons state'. Having finally secured its 'magical weapons', Pyongyang has no intention of giving them up. [See also: Disdain and apathy in Washington DC] Related
JAMnews
3 hours ago
- JAMnews
Georgian activist Giorgi Akhobadze released
Georgian activist Giorgi Akhobadze released Tbilisi City Court judge Romeo Tkeshelashvili acquitted Giorgi Akhobadze, a doctor and participant in pro-European protests who had previously faced drug-related charges. He was released from the courtroom immediately following the verdict. Akhobadze was arrested on 7 December 2024 while returning home from a protest. He had been charged under Article 260, Part 6 of the Criminal Code — illegal acquisition and possession of a large quantity of narcotic substances. 'I want to thank the media for their support and detailed coverage of my case. I'll probably be in shock once I get home,' Akhobadze told supporters gathered in the court courtyard. 'The first thing I felt was gratitude. I can't believe I'm here right now. Thank you for standing by me. I love you all very much. Keep fighting — to the end!' At the previous hearing, Giorgi Akhobadze delivered his closing statement. According to both his testimony and the defence, the drugs had been planted by law enforcement officers, and the prosecution's evidence was based on fabricated claims. 'They didn't carry out a drug test because they knew I don't use drugs,' Akhobadze said. 'If I had actually touched the [planted] item, it would have contained my DNA — the evidence was falsified.' Akhobadze's lawyer argued that the arrest warrant and police report were unlawful, and that no video evidence had been presented in the case. Initially, the case was heard for more than four months by Judge Mikheil Jinjolia, but he was later replaced by Romeo Tkeshelashvili. Georgian activist Giorgi Akhobadze released News from Georgia
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘No clear explanation': businesses reliant on Meta struggle in the wake of wrongful suspensions
This time of the year is typically the busy booking season for Sam Enticknap, a makeup artist based in Margaret River, Western Australia. But the phone has stopped ringing since her Instagram account, which had 48,000 followers, was suspended without notice by Meta three weeks ago. 'I received a horrible email saying a reference to child sexual exploitation content, which obviously was quite traumatic to see,' she said. 'Saying my Instagram accounts have been disabled with just no clear explanation.' Enticknap estimates that, as a result of her account being wrongly suspended, she has lost 80% of the bookings she otherwise would have leading into the busy wedding season in Margaret River. Sign up: AU Breaking News email 'A lot of people come through Instagram, they find hashtags and they find word of mouth, and obviously through other businesses that always tag us,' she said. Enticknap said it made her realise how reliant she was on Meta for business. She said she lost two Instagram accounts and a Facebook account as a result of the permanent suspension, and said attempts to contact the company to have the ban appealed had resulted in a 'dead end'. She said she was not alone, citing another Western Australian business – which sells artificial flowers – which had been suspended from Meta platforms and received the same reference to child sexual exploitation. 'My friend who has another successful makeup business, she went down the week after me, but she's managed to get her account back,' Enticknap said. Incorrect account suspensions on social media platforms are not a new phenomenon. Often when Meta is asked by media about an account, it is later restored. However, something changed in July. A flood of emails were sent to journalists from people all over the world saying that, without warning, their Facebook and Instagram accounts had been suspended. Many were told – erroneously – by Meta that their accounts had been suspended for breaching community standards on child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity. Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected. There are petitions with tens of thousands of signatures, a subreddit devoted to people who have had their accounts disabled and talk of a class action against Meta over the bans. From around a dozen emails received in the past two weeks, Guardian Australia has reported five accounts – including Enticknap's to Meta, which said it had internally escalated the investigation of those accounts. Media reporting of the plight of businesses struggling as a result of their Instagram ban has led to many of those accounts being restored. But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake,' a spokesperson for Meta said. Meta is reliant on a mix of human reports and automation to find and remove accounts in breach of its rules. The company publishes data on how many accounts it removes – and data on how many it subsequently restores – in its quarterly community standards enforcement report. However, the latest report only covers to the end of March, so it can't yet be judged whether the company has had a significant uptick in removed accounts or appeals. For Enticknap, the suspension carries an emotional weight. Her father died this year, and the photos and messages her father uploaded to Facebook cannot be accessed. 'I've tried to message and just say: 'Can I just get my data? Can I just get that? Shut me down, but let me get those pictures back',' she said. 'But nothing. I've not had any reply.'
