MOSCOW—Political turmoil following a disputed election in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan continued over the weekend as parliament chose a prime minister who was recently freed from jail while security services detained the country’s ex-leader. The developments appear to strengthen the hand of President Sooronbai Jeenbekov in the short term, though he has said … Read more
SEOUL—North Korea, even as it pursued denuclearization talks with the Trump administration, kept advancing its arsenal. Now the behind-the-scenes progress is in the public eye. At a military parade marking the 75th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party on Saturday, Pyongyang revealed a new intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who had … Read more
SEOUL—North Korea celebrated 75 years of communism with a military parade at which it unveiled an intercontinental missile that experts say is likely larger than anything else like it on Earth. The Saturday event, the country’s first military parade in two years, signaled a shift back to the more strident approach Pyongyang long took before … Read more
HONG KONG—Hong Kong police arrested nine people on Saturday who they said aided a group of antigovernment activists—known locally as the Hong Kong 12—that attempted to flee the city by boat only to be intercepted by mainland authorities and taken to China, where they now await trial. The arrests, which police said came after they … Read more
SEOUL—A senior North Korean diplomat who vanished from public view while serving as Pyongyang’s acting ambassador to Italy in 2018 has been secretly living in South Korea for over a year, according to South Korean lawmakers briefed by the country’s spy agency. The whereabouts of the envoy, Jo Song Gil, who the Journal has reported … Read more
HONG KONG—A small group of dissidents climbed into a speedboat and set off from a tiny Hong Kong fishing village just after 7 a.m. on Aug. 23, in a daring attempt to rush 400 miles across major global shipping lanes to safety in Taiwan. All but one of the 12 people on the boat faced … Read more
SEOUL—For decades, North Korea’s ruling Kims portrayed themselves as quasi-gods, incapable of error. Now, as the country faces some of its toughest challenges in years on several fronts, leader Kim Jong Un is taking a different approach. He is showing himself to be fallible—even human. With the country contending with the coronavirus pandemic, flood damage … Read more
ISLAMABAD—Pakistan’s top court Monday agreed to hear arguments that a death sentence should be reinstated on the British national accused of orchestrating the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl after a lower court overturned his conviction earlier this year. The Supreme Court ordered that Omar Sheikh continue to be detained for … Read more
ISLAMABAD—Pakistan’s highest court is expected to decide as soon as next week whether a British national whose conviction for killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was overturned earlier this year will be freed nearly two decades after the murder. The fate of Omar Sheikh, who was sentenced to death in 2002 for orchestrating the … Read more
SEOUL—North Korean sailors shot a South Korean official who had drifted into the Kim regime’s waters and expressed a desire to defect, then burned his body, Seoul’s military said, in an encounter that further strains inter-Korean ties. The unidentified 47-year-old man, an official at South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, had been aboard an … Read more