Tuesday 19 February - DAILY NEWS SUMMARY
Pretoria News (www.pretorianews.co.za)
Page 1 – ANC wants Bosasa management held accountable Page 2 – Lady Zamar to headline with Tamia
Page 3 – Eight burglaries are enough
Page 11 – Mboweni will have to arrest debt while helping SOEs The Star (www.iol.co.za)
Page 4 – Attack on India slammed
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News24 (www.news24.co.za)
North Koreans pay tribute to Kim’s father in freezing cold
Abe mum on reports he nominated Trump for Nobel Peace Prize
Did Japan’s prime minister nominate Trump for the Nobel?
North Koreans pay tribute to Kim's father in freezing cold
2019-02-16 16:08
North Korea army (AFP)
The Day of the Shining Star dawned bitterly cold in Pyongyang. But thousands of North Koreans lined up in temperatures of minus 8 degrees Celsius on Saturday to pay their respects to late leader Kim Jong Il on his birthday.
Kim, the son of the isolated North's founder Kim Il Sung and the father and predecessor of current leader Kim Jong Un, was born on February 16.
According to Pyongyang's orthodoxy, he came into the world in 1942, in a snow-covered hut at a secret camp on the slopes of Mount Paektu, the spiritual birthplace of the Korean people, where his father was fighting occupying Japanese forces.
Outside historians point instead to official Soviet records, which say he was born a year earlier in a Siberian village where Kim Il Sung was in exile.
Either way, it is a key anniversary in a nuclear-armed nation whose people are taught from birth to revere the "Paektu bloodline", as the Kim family which has ruled it for three
generations is known.
Referred to as the Day of the Shining Star, the occasion is celebrated with ice skating displays, flower shows, and laudatory tributes in state media, all reinforcing the underlying narrative.
Driver Kim Chol Jun, 42, took his two boys to Mansu Hill, where giant statues of the two older Kims look out over the capital, to pay his respects to them and the current leader.
"No sons and daughters feel tired when they visit their parents," he told AFP. "The great leaders are regarded as our own parents, so I visit here to bow before our parents with my sons."
Ordinary North Koreans consistently express unequivocal support for the leadership and its policies when speaking to foreign media.
Silver screen
Snow dusted the two monumental panels - one to the fight against Japanese occupiers, the other to the building of socialism - that flank the statues, their faces bathed in the light of the rising sun as small children swept the steps clean.
In pride of place before the bronze effigies stood a large floral tribute emblazoned with the name of Kim Jong Un, who is due to hold his second summit with US President Donald Trump at the end of the month.
Pyongyang is under multiple international sanctions over its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which Washington is pressing it to give up. North Korea has rejected demands for what it calls its "unilateral" disarmament.
Turn by turn, groups ranging from couples and families to hundreds-strong detachments of workers or soldiers assembled in front of the images.
After placing individual blooms or flower baskets before the figures, they lined up as an announcer intoned: "Let us pay tribute", and bowed deeply, the military personnel saluting.
Kim Jong Il died in 2011 and his remains are preserved in a memorial palace on the outskirts of Pyongyang, but officially he remains eternal General Secretary of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea.
Retired actress Ri Cho Ok, 77, instantly became emotional when asked about the late leader, her voice trembling as she described how much she missed him and how standing before the statues brought the incumbent to mind.
Kim Jong Il was a film director himself and renowned cinephile, to the extent he had a top South Korean director and actress kidnapped so they could develop the North's cinema industry. Pyongyang says their eight-year stay was voluntary.
"The great general taught me step-by-step as I was becoming an actress," Ri said, "and gave me many orders and medals."
But, she added, "it was like I received all the honours in the world when I met him".
Abe mum on reports he nominated Trump for Nobel Peace Prize
2019-02-18 12:40
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. (Kyodo News via AP)
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his chief spokeperson declined on Monday to say if Abe had nominated US President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, though they praised Trump for dealings with North Korea.
Questioned in parliament about reports he had done so, Abe said: "In light of the Nobel Committee's policy of not disclosing recommenders and nominees for 50 years, I decline to comment."
Neither the prime minister nor his spokesperson denied Trump's comment to reporters on Friday that Abe had nominated him. Trump said Abe had sent him a "beautiful copy" of a letter sent to the Nobel committee.
Trump's claim could not be immediately verified.
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Abe praised Trump on Monday in a lower house budget committee meeting.
"President Trump has been decisively responding toward resolving North Korea's nuclear and missile problems, and last year he held historic US-North Korea summit talks," he said.
Abe added that Trump had also passed on to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un Japan's own concerns about abductions of Japanese citizens by Pyongyang, saying "he and the entire White House also actively cooperated in resolving the issue".
"I highly praise President Trump's leadership," Abe said.
The government's top spokesperson, Yoshihide Suga, echoed Abe in telling reporters that Japan valued Trump's efforts on North Korea's nuclear disarmament, but also refused other comment.
The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported on Sunday, citing unnamed government sources, that Abe nominated Trump's at the president's request.
Former US president Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, his first year in office, for laying out the US commitment to "seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons".
Trump complained on Friday that Obama was there "for about 15 seconds" before he was awarded the prize.
The deadline each year for nominations is midnight, January 31. According to the website of the Nobel committee, there are 304 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019. It said 219 are individuals and 85 are organisations.
The US is Japan's ally and anchor for national defence and Abe has assiduously cultivated cordial ties with Trump. He was the first foreign leader to meet with Trump after he won the 2016 presidential election.
Trump's landmark June 2018 summit with Kim in Singapore was replete with pomp but thin on substance.
However, North Korea has refrained from nuclear and missile tests since the US redoubled its diplomatic efforts early last year. That's a welcome development for Japan, which sits well within the range of Pyongyang's missile tests and has sometimes had the test rockets land in its territorial waters.
Abe personally has a large political stake in making progress on resolving the abductions issue with North Korea, an important issue for his nationalist political base.
The Nobel Committee chooses the recipient of the prize in early October by a majority vote and then announces that choice. The prize is awarded on December 10, in Oslo, Norway.
Did Japan's prime minister nominate Trump for the Nobel?
Feb 18 2019 13:36
Isabel Reynolds and Takashi Hirokawa, Bloomberg
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declined to say whether he nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, while praising the US President for “decisive” efforts to resolve the problems of a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Abe, who has worked hard to build a personal rapport with Trump, walked a fine line during a parliamentary committee meeting Monday when asked about Trump’s claim from Friday that the Japanese leader had put his name forward for the prize.
“I am not saying it’s not true,” he told an opposition lawmaker, adding that the Nobel committee doesn’t reveal nominations and he would refrain from commenting.
Abe praised Trump for his diplomacy with North Korea and helping to protect Japan, which relies on the US military for its defense. “President Trump has acted decisively toward resolving the issues of the North Korean nuclear and missile problems,” Abe said.
Abe was one of the first world leaders to embrace Trump after the 2016 presidential election.
Even though surveys in Japan show high public disapproval of Trump, there has been no major backlash to Trump’s plans to visit Japan again this year, while such visits have touched off protests in places such as the UK.
Abe’s efforts to build one-on-one ties with Trump have shown their limits. Japan was forced to accept bilateral trade talks with the US after Trump threatened tariffs on its vital auto industry.
The US Commerce Department has delivered a report to Trump on the security implications of auto imports, without making its findings public.
In a speech on border security in the White House’s Rose Garden on Friday, Trump said Abe had shown him a copy of a five-page letter he sent to “the people who give out a thing called the Nobel Prize”.
The president was responding to a question on progress made since last year’s historic summit with North Korea. The Asahi newspaper of Japan said the nomination had been made after a request from the US.
Japanese opposition lawmaker Junya Ogawa told parliament Monday that it was “shameful for Japan” to be nominating Trump for the prize. The US president had disrupted the world order by withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, breaking a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran and other acts, he said.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is pushing to improve ties with North Korea, weighed in Monday, saying through a spokesman that Trump deserved the prize.
“The president has repeatedly emphasised that President Trump’s leadership and decisiveness have played a crucial role in establishing peace on the Korean peninsula, so it is President Moon’s belief that he well deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” Kim Eui-keum, said at a briefing Monday.
The two Koreas remain technically at war and between them station about 1 million soldiers near their border.
Trump is planning to have a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi February 27-28 after an unprecedented meeting last year.
Their June discussions in Singapore led to a joint statement on North Korea’s denuclearisation but the words have not led to concrete steps to roll back Pyongyang’s atomic ambitions.
The Hanoi meeting brings both the promise of a less-dangerous North Korea and the potential peril of a weak deal that leaves Japan exposed to Kim’s weapons of mass destruction.
Abe said Trump raised Japan’s concerns about its citizens abducted decades ago by North Korea when he met Kim. Abe also told parliament he will do everything possible to work with Trump to resolve the North Korean nuclear and missile problems as well as the abduction issue.
