Here we go again with President Moon wanting a declaration to end the Korean War:
President Moon Jae-in once again renewed his call for a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War in an effort to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula, but the feasibility of his proposal is questionable, given the state of relations between the two Koreas and the U.S.
Korea Times
During a speech at the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Tuesday (EST), Moon proposed a trilateral or quadrilateral declaration to proclaim a formal end to the Korean War.
The war ended in an armistice signed in 1953 by the U.S.-led United Nations Command, China and North Korea, leaving the two Koreas technically still at war.
“Today, I once again urge the community of nations to mobilize its strengths for the end-of-war declaration on the Korean Peninsula, and propose that the three parties of the two Koreas and the U.S., or the four parties of the two Koreas, the U.S. and China, come together and declare that the war on the Korean Peninsula is over,” Moon said.
“When the parties involved in the Korean War stand together and proclaim an end to the war, I believe we can make irreversible progress in denuclearization and usher in an era of complete peace,” he added.
You can read more at the link, but the rhetoric for ending the Korean War has been going on for years because both the Moon administration and the Kim regime in North Korea want the peace treaty because it then challenges the legitimacy of the U.S. military presence in South Korea. If there is peace why is USFK needed? The Korean left and the Kim regime have always wanted the U.S. out of Korea and a peace treaty with little to nothing in return from North Korea is one path towards doing that.
The real question is if the Biden administration is going to take the bait on this or not? With all the bad headlines they may be eager for something that looks like a foreign policy victory by pursuing such a declaration. I guess we will see what happens.
It looks like China has been able to push off it Lehman Brothers moment to another day:
China Evergrande agreed to settle interest payments on a domestic bond on Wednesday, while the Chinese central bank injected cash into the banking system, temporarily soothing fears of imminent contagion from the debt-laden property developer.
Evergrande (3333.HK), Asia’s biggest junk-bond issuer, is so entangled with China’s broader economy that its fate has kept global stock and bond markets on tenterhooks as late debt payments could trigger so-called cross-defaults.
Many financial institutions have exposure to Evergrande through direct loans and indirect holdings, while any defaults will also trigger sell-offs in the high-yield credit market.
In an effort to reassure investors, the People’s Bank of China’s injected 90 billion yuan to the banking system, signalling support for markets as they braced for what is expected to be one of China’s largest-ever debt restructurings.
Reuters
You can read more at the link, but trouble could still be coming in future days and weeks for Evergrande as they have other debt payment dates coming up.
Good news in Japan with COVID cases steeply dropping and the Japanese have been able to do this without any strict lockdown measures:
The number of new coronavirus cases in Japan’s capital city fell below 300 Tuesday for the first time since June.
Tokyo reported another 253 newly infected people, the lowest figure in the virus-wracked metropolitan area since 236 on June 21, according to public broadcaster NHK and metro data online. For six consecutive days, the number of new infections has registered below 1,000 as the fifth and most extreme wave of COVID-19 appears to have waned.
Two U.S. military bases in Japan reported seven new cases on Tuesday.
Stars and Stripes
Like South Korea, Japan has been very good at keeping the COVID death rate low compared to other countries:
Japan on Monday reported 2,236 new coronavirus cases, and 23 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Japan has counted nearly 1.7 million individual cases and 17,427 deaths during the pandemic.
More than half of its population, 53.23%, or 67.2 million, people are fully vaccinated, according to the Johns Hopkins center.
Japan has weathered the pandemic with a loss in fewer lives than other developed nations.
Argentina, a nation with a population 34% that of Japan’s, has suffered more than 5.2 million cases and 114,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
You can read more at the link.
It is amazing that anyone would have thought this type of research was a good idea:
Wuhan scientists were planning to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into Chinese bat populations to inoculate them against diseases that could jump to humans, leaked grant proposals dating from 2018 show.
New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.
They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.
Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.
When Covid-19 was first genetically sequenced, scientists were puzzled about how the virus had evolved such a human-specific adaptation at the cleavage site on the spike protein, which is the reason it is so infectious.
The Telegraph
You can read more at the link, but this can be added to the mountain of circumstantial evidence of how COVID likely leaked from a Chinese lab.
It looks like the Kim regime received their talking points straight from Beijing:
North Korea on Monday denounced a United States decision to help build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia as an “extremely undesirable and dangerous” move that can trigger off a nuclear arms race.
The North will also take “corresponding counteraction in case it has even a little adverse impact on the security” of the country, the foreign news section chief of the North’s foreign ministry told the official Korean Central News Agency.
The United States on Wednesday announced the launch of a new trilateral security partnership with Australia and Britain, and said the countries will also work to equip Australia with “conventionally armed” nuclear submarines.
“These are extremely undesirable and dangerous acts which will upset the strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific region and trigger off a chain of nuclear arms race,” he was quoted as saying in the KCNA.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but these Australian submarines are not even expected to come into service until 2040.
