Build it and They Will Come, Hopes North Korea, As It Opens New Beach Resort
NEED TO KNOW
Build it and They Will Come, Hopes North Korea, As It Opens New Beach Resort
NORTH KOREA
In Spain, locals shoot water pistols at tourists while cities around Europe institute fees for landmarks. In Bali, there are brochures for tourists on how to behave.
And in Mexico, protesters harass tourists, smash storefronts, and protest with signs reading, “gringos go home,” angry at a rising number of visitors they say are pricing them out of their homes.
At hotspots around the world, surging tourism has led to local fury as local governments grapple with the fallout but want to continue earning the billions tourists bring in.
North Korea, however, doesn’t have this problem, say analysts. But it seemingly would like to.
In an effort to stimulate tourism, it recently opened a new beach resort called Wonsan Kalma on the east coast: It hosted its first tourists from Russia earlier this month.
It’s a “world-class tourist and cultural destination,” said North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, who hopes it will boost tourism to the country, known as the Hermit Kingdom, because it is closed off to much of the world. It’s “the proud first step” toward developing tourism, he added.
The resort sits on a 2.5-mile stretch of beach, with hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, and a water park, and can accommodate up to 20,000 visitors, according to state media outlet, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
North Koreans began visiting in early July, playing with inflatable balls in the open water, using water slides or just lounging on the beach.
“The guests’ hearts were filled with overwhelming emotion as they felt the astonishing new heights of our-style tourism culture blossoming under the era of the Workers’ Party,” KCNA said.
Still, the country isn’t letting Western tourists in anytime soon – this week, it announced it would “temporarily” ban foreigners from the resort.
“I was hoping this might signal a broader reopening to international tourism, but unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case for now,” Rowan Beard, co-founder of Young Pioneer Tours, told the BBC. Even so, it is “unlikely to be a major draw for most Western tourists,” he added.
North Korea began turning toward tourism after the United Nations imposed sanctions in 2017 that banned all of the country’s main exports to stop the country from financing its nuclear and missile programs.
Kim saw tourism as a way to earn badly needed foreign currency and has been building spas and ski resorts. North Korea is among the poorest countries in the world and struggles to feed its people even as it spends lavishly on its military and monuments in homage to the Kim family that has ruled the country with an iron fist since 1948.
Since 2022, North Korea has been slowly easing the restrictions it imposed during the pandemic and reopening its borders in phases. However, Chinese tourists, who made up more than 90 percent of visitors before 2020 and numbered in the hundreds of thousands, remain unable to visit because of strained bilateral ties.
Russian tourists, however, have been allowed in amid expanding military cooperation between the countries as well as warm relations – North Korea has provided thousands of soldiers to help Russia fight Ukraine.
Even so, Russians visiting the country number fewer than a thousand, hardly enough to significantly expand the country’s tourism industry, analysts said.
Meanwhile, some tour operators believe if the country opens its borders to Westerners, there will be some demand.
For example, in February, North Korea allowed a small group of Western tourists and others to cross the border from China and visit the city of Rason. But it halted that tour program within a month without explanation.
Still, Indian travel blogger, Bhuvani Dharan, was on that trip and wrote about his impressions, saying the visit was tightly controlled, staged, often perplexing, and even a little frightening.
During their four-day stay, the group visited a museum, a deer park, multiple schools, a few factories, and even courtrooms. “Things that seem ordinary in other countries were highlighted as points of pride here,” he wrote. “The group was sometimes taken on longer routes to reach destinations that were actually nearby – likely to give the illusion that they were travelling far and wide.”
He doubts he will be allowed to visit again, he added: “They told us clearly – if we say anything negative about North Korea in our videos or posts, we’ll never be granted entry again. So, no, I don’t think I’ll ever go back.”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
Japan Secures Trade Deal with US
JAPAN
Japan reached a long-awaited trade deal with the US this week, which would lower tariffs on US imports of Japanese autos and prevent new levies, in return for $550 billion in Japanese investment and loans to the US, Reuters reported.
Duties scheduled to start on Japanese goods from Aug. 1 will be lowered from 25 percent to 15 percent.
Japan’s auto sector, which makes up over a quarter of its exports to the US, will see a tariff reduction from the previous 27.5 percent to 15 percent, which will put Japan at an advantage over other major vehicle exporters who were hit with 25 percent levies in April, CNN noted.
Part of the deal also consists of Japan purchasing and increasing its annual defense spending with US firms from $14 billion to $17 billion, according to a White House official.
Japanese negotiators said that Japan’s $550 billion contribution to the US would come through equity and loans to support Japanese businesses’ investments in critical sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.
Japan is also expected to purchase $8 billion worth of agricultural and other goods, increasing its rice imports by 75 percent. However, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said the agreement does “not sacrifice” Japanese agriculture.
The deal does not cover Japanese exports of steel and aluminum, currently under 50 percent duties.
Ishiba, who on Wednesday denied rumors that he had decided to step down following his party’s recent defeat in legislative elections, welcomed the agreement as “the lowest rate ever applied among countries that have a trade surplus with the US.”
Japan is the fifth-largest US trading partner in terms of volume of goods and ran a trade surplus of nearly $70 billion with the US in 2024.
Analysts said the deal between the two allies seemed out of reach just a few weeks ago, and it is the most significant among several deals US President Donald Trump has secured since announcing sweeping global tariffs in April.
The US is hurrying to close trade deals with many of its trade partners ahead of the Aug. 1 deadline Trump has repeatedly postponed due to pressure from markets and intense lobbying by industry.
Japan is now the latest country to make a trade agreement with the Trump administration in recent months, following the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and a preliminary agreement with China.
The US also reached similar deals this week with Indonesia and the Philippines, with their tariffs lowered to 19 percent.
Mozambique Opposition Leader Faces Terrorism Charge
MOZAMBIQUE
Mozambique’s Attorney-General’s Office this week charged the country’s top opposition leader with terrorism, following unrest set off by last year’s disputed elections that left hundreds dead, Agence de Presse Africaine reported.
Venâncio Mondlane, a fierce critic of the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) party, was also charged with “incitement to disobedience,” and “public instigation to crime.” He denied all charges and said they are politically motivated.
He added he is being targeted for revealing what he described as “massive electoral fraud” in the October presidential election, won by President Daniel Chapo, Africanews added.
Western observers have complained that the election was neither free nor fair.
Mondlane ran in the election as an independent candidate and, after his loss, led months of unprecedented protests over the results, which extended the ruling party’s five decades in power.
The demonstrations spread across the country and were met with a violent government crackdown that left at least 400 people dead and 600 injured.
More than 30 police officers are on trial for their role in suppressing the protests.
Mondlane is widely popular, especially with younger voters.
Mondlane also accused the Chapo administration of breaking the peace deal they signed in March, which had raised hopes of easing the post-election crisis, paving the way for new reforms, and obtaining justice for the victims of the violence.
French Minister To Face Trial Over Renault-Nissan Lobbying Scandal
FRANCE
A French court ordered Culture Minister Rachida Dati to stand trial over allegations of corruption and influence-peddling stemming from her tenure as a lawmaker in the European Parliament, in a case that has drawn renewed scrutiny to lobbying practices within the bloc, the Guardian reported.
Dati, a former minister in the administration of right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy, is accused of covertly lobbying for carmaker Renault-Nissan while holding elected office during her term as a European Union lawmaker from 2009 to 2019 – an activity that was prohibited.
French magistrates announced the charges against her in November, alleging that she received more than $1 million in legal fees from a Renault-Nissan subsidiary between 2010 and 2012 without performing legitimate work, Reuters added.
Dati, who currently serves as mayor of Paris’ 7th district, has denied any wrongdoing and has criticized investigators for what she described as a case “marred by incidents.” Her lawyers said they would appeal the court decision.
Dati was appointed culture minister last year, even though authorities had already charged her in the Renault-Nissan case.
French investigators have also implicated former Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn in the case. Ghosn was arrested in Japan in 2018 for financial misconduct before fleeing to Lebanon in late 2019.
Ghosn has denied all charges and remains an international fugitive, according to Radio France Internationale.
Meanwhile, Dati’s indictment comes amid heightened concern in the European Parliament over lobbying following the 2022 “Qatargate” scandal.
New rules that took effect on May 1 require all lobbyists entering parliament buildings to activate their badges and declare their purpose, a move designed to track who is meeting with lawmakers and when.
The new rules have sparked criticism from some lobby groups who say the measures impose unnecessary bureaucracy.
The reform is part of a broader effort to restore trust after some EU lawmakers were accused of accepting gifts or cash from foreign governments in exchange for political influence.
In another move, the European Parliament is also considering revoking lobbying access for every interest group tied to e-commerce giant Amazon, Politico reported.
That’s the latest salvo in a standoff between the bloc and Amazon over working conditions in its warehouses that already led parliament to withdraw the entry badges of the firm’s lobbyists early last year.
DISCOVERIES
Neighboring Origins
Archeologists recently sequenced the complete genome of an Ancient Egyptian man, who lived around the time of the first pyramids more than 4,500 years ago.
The man’s remains were originally unearthed in Nuwayrat – a village more than 160 miles from Cairo – in the early 20th century.
Now a new genetic study of the skeleton has revealed a closer connection between ancient Egypt and the eastern Fertile Crescent, which includes present-day Iraq, western Iran, and parts of Syria and Turkey, than initially thought.
“He lived and died during a critical period of change in ancient Egypt,” explained co-senior author Linus Girdland Flink in a statement. “We’ve now been able to tell part of the individual’s story, finding that some of his ancestry came from the Fertile Crescent, highlighting mixture between groups at this time.”
The skeleton was excavated in 1902 and donated to World Museum Liverpool, where it then survived bombings during the Blitz in World War II that destroyed most of the human remains in their collection.
Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton confirmed that it belonged to a middle-aged man who died sometime between 2855 and 2570 BCE. Flink and his colleagues believe the man was in his 60s at the time of his death – an unusually old age for that era.
The man appeared to have lived a physically demanding life. His bones bore signs of extended sitting and reaching forward, leading researchers to suggest he may have worked as a potter.
The research team was also able to extract DNA from the roots of his teeth and sequenced his entire genome. The ability to do this with remains found in Egypt and elsewhere in the region is rare because hot temperatures degrade DNA quickly.
Roughly 80 percent of the man’s genetic ancestry was clearly North African, but it was the remaining 20 percent that caught the researchers’ attention: The findings showed the man’s genome matched populations from the eastern Fertile Crescent, particularly an area called Mesopotamia – roughly modern-day Iraq.
Past archaeological research has already found links between Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, but the recent study provides genetic evidence that people moved into Egypt and mixed with local populations during that time.
The findings may also offer new clues about the development and spread of writing systems.
“The first writing systems emerged almost contemporaneously in the two regions,” first author Adeline Morez Jacobs told New Scientist, referring to cuneiform in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt.
The researchers hope future studies will provide a clearer picture of migration patterns and ancestral links in this historically rich region.