While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Feb 9, 2025
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Kangdong County Hospital on Feb 6.
PHOTO: REUTERS
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un vows to further develop nuclear forces
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un criticised trilateral military cooperation among the United States, Japan and South Korea for raising tensions in the region and vowed countermeasures, including the further development of nuclear forces.
Kim said US deployments of nuclear strategic assets, war exercises and military cooperation with Japan and South Korea were inviting military imbalance in the region and raising a grave challenge to the security environment, state media KCNA reported on Feb 9.
"The DPRK does not want unnecessary tension of the regional situation but will take sustained countermeasures to ensure the regional military balance," Kim said during a visit to the defence ministry on Feb 8 to commemorate the founding day of its Army.
US President Donald Trump, after a meeting on Feb 7 with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, said he would have relations with North Korea, as they expressed concern over its nuclear programme.
Tricked into Russia’s Ukraine war, Indians who escaped live with trauma
The horrors of a war he did not choose and the deaths he saw up close have broken Mr Jain T.K, an Indian citizen who once believed that his fortune lay beyond his country’s shores.
“I want to return home somehow. I am tired. It’s been too long,” the 27-year-old told The Straits Times in a video call on Jan 29, before shutting his eyes in pain as he lay half-paralysed on a hospital bed in Moscow.
The mechanical diploma holder from Wadakkanchery, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, is one of more than 100 Indians known to have been recruited into the Russian army to fight in Ukraine, a war zone that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and injured even more since 2022.
Elon Musk may not buy TikTok’s US business after all
Mr Elon Musk said he isn’t interested in buying TikTok, the popular social video app the US has tried to ban over national security concerns with its Chinese owner Bytedance Ltd.
He made the comments – his first on the topic of him buying TikTok – at a conference in Germany hosted by Mathias Doepfner, the billionaire chief executive of German media conglomerate AxelSpringer, last month.
“I have not put in a bid for TikTok,” Mr Musk said, joining the conference remotely via video, which was made public on Feb 8. “I don’t have any plans for what would I do if I had TikTok.”
Trump freezes all South African assistance as standoff escalates
US President Donald Trump froze all US aid to South Africa over what he falsely claimed were rights violations stemming from a new land-expropriation law, as well as its allegations of genocide against Israel.
South Africa’s foreign ministry expressed “great concern that the foundational premise of this order lacks factual accuracy,” in a statement on Feb 8. It reiterated the government’s commitment to finding “diplomatic solutions to any misunderstandings.”
Mr Trump’s executive order on Feb 7 evening halting assistance escalates a standoff in which South Africa has sought to respond with diplomacy, while maintaining the moral high ground in a nation still scarred by the racist legacy of White-minority rule. The US has given South Africa more than US$8 billion (S$10.8 billion) in bilateral aid over the past two decades.
Head of UN chemical weapons watchdog meets Syrian leader
The head of the world’s chemical weapons watchdog met Syria’s new leader on Feb 8, in a first visit to Damascus since the ousting of Mr Bashar al-Assad, who was repeatedly accused of using such weapons during Syria’s 13-year civil war.
More than a decade ago, Syria agreed to hand over its declared stockpile for destruction, but the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has always been concerned that the declaration was incomplete and that more weapons remained.
With new authorities now in power, the OPCW visit has raised hope Syria will be conclusively rid of such weapons after years of delays and obstructions to the body’s work.
