Seoul: Staff at embassies in North Korea appeared to be remaining in place on Saturday despite an appeal by authorities in Pyongyang for diplomats to consider leaving because of heightened tension after weeks of bellicose exchanges.
North Korean authorities told diplomatic missions they could not guarantee their safety from next Wednesday - after declaring that conflict was inevitable amid joint US-South Korean military exercises due to last until the end of the month.
Whatever the atmosphere in Pyongyang, the rain-soaked South Korean capital, Seoul, was calm. Traffic moved normally through the city centre, busy with Saturday shoppers.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a government official as saying diplomats were disregarding the suggestion they might leave the country....
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12:30 AM, Apr 07, 2013
North Korea has put foreign embassies and international organisations on notice saying it cannot guarantee their safety in the event of an armed conflict. Several missions said North Korea government officials met with ambassadors on Friday, asking if anyone needed help evacuating. ...
11:14 AM, Apr 06, 2013
London/Seoul: North Korea has asked embassies to consider moving staff out and warned it cannot guarantee the safety of diplomats after April 10, Britain said, amid high tension and a war of words on the Korean peninsula. The requests come on the heels of declarations by the government of the secretive communist state that real conflict is inevitable, because of what it terms "hostile" US troop exercises with South Korea...
10:32 PM, Apr 05, 2013
Colombo: The Sri Lankan government has decided to shut down some of its embassies in Europe, the External Affairs Ministry said on Tuesday. A spokesperson at the ministry said that the government is of the view that embassies in Europe which are not serving any purpose in obtaining support for Sri Lanka's national issues will be closed and new embassies will be opened in Asia. "President Mahinda Rajapaksa had discussed...
02:01 PM, Mar 27, 2012
Tripoli: The administration of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was running a covert programme to conceal weapons in Libyan embassies across the globe, a senior official in the new government said on Thursday. The weapons included handguns, grenades and bomb-making materials and were shipped using the diplomatic bag. They may have been intended for use in assassinations on Libyan dissidents abroad, or for operations against the embassies' host countries. The...
11:59 AM, Mar 09, 2012
Tehran: Iranian authorities blocked a website hours after it was launched by the US State Department to be a "virtual embassy" reaching out to people in the Islamic Republic. "In accordance with the cybercrime law, access to this website is not possible," read a notice to anyone inside Iran trying to visit iran.usembassy.gov. The semi-official Fars news agency commented on the blocking of the US website, saying, "A decisive reaction...
10:06 AM, Dec 08, 2011
Nairobi: The black Toyota SUV pulled up to the security checkpoint in Mogadishu. It was night, and 22-year-old Somali soldier Abdi Hassan recalls that he ordered the driver to switch the headlights off and the interior lights on. "They are the elders," said the driver, referring to the car's occupants with an honorific name for top leaders of al-Shabab, Somalia's most dangerous militant group. "I don't know the elders," Hassan...
12:39 AM, Jun 15, 2011
Port of Spain: West Indies batting legend Brian Lara has described the Caribbean cricket infrastructure as "terrible" and says it will take much more than just talent for the regional side to emerge from the prevailing slump. Lara was speaking at the World Travel Market in London earlier this week, following the West Indies' five-wicket defeat to India in the opening Test in New Delhi. "(We) still (have) a very...
12:21 AM, Mar 19, 2008
