SEOUL: North Korea yesterday restored its official hotline with South Korea and announced it would let the South’s businessmen visit a shuttered joint industrial zone, Seoul officials said. The move came hours after dozens of South Korean firms threatened to withdraw from the zone at Kaesong in the North, complaining they had fallen victim to political bickering between the two rivals. “The hotline was restored this afternoon after North Korea accepted our request to normalise it,” a South Korean unification ministry official said on condition of anonymity. After months of tensions and threats of nuclear war, the North restored the hotline in the border truce village of Panmunjom last month for talks on setting up a rare high-level meeting to discuss the fate of the zone. But it was switched off again after plans for the talks collapsed due to disputes over protocol. In an unexpected reversal yesterday, the North sent a message to the South through Panmunjom saying South Korean businessmen and managers would be allowed to visit the industrial complex.
3 workers killed in Malaysia
KUALA LUMPUR: Three Myanmar construction workers were killed while another sustained a broken leg following a landslide at a construction site in Taman Sierra, Ukay Perdana Malaysia yesterday. Assistant Operations Director of the Selangor Fire and Rescue Department Mohd Sani Harul said the incident occurred at 11.29 yesterday morning when eight workers were working on the drainage system. “The collapsed wall, which was three metres high, had crashed on four workers but one of them sustained a broken leg and firemen rescued him together with four other workers, who were working near the landslide area.
Teacher tapes up pupil’s mouth
TOKYO: Japanese schoolteacher put duct tape over the mouth of a seven-year-old girl to stop her spreading germs to other pupils, a report said yesterday. The male teacher taped up the girl’s mouth as she readied to serve lunch to others in her class in Tochigi, north of Tokyo, because she had forgotten to bring her own face mask, the Sankei Shimbun reported. Japanese schoolchildren serve and eat their school lunches in their own classrooms. Most schools require them to cover their mouth and nose while they serve. The teacher apologised to the girl and her parents, the paper said, after an anonymous call was made to school authorities.
Anwar rejects cash claims
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim has dismissed as “baseless” that he has cash amounting to millions of dollars in some 20 foreign banks. His remarks came after ruling party lawmaker Liang Teck Meng, citing a Wikileaks report, claimed Anwar had millions stashed away in foreign banks. “First, there is no truth (in the claims). Secondly, there is no reference to Wikileaks,” Anwar was quoted as saying by Star paper. Anwar said he found that the information was not found from Wikileaks but from blogs by ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party members. Liang had claimed that Anwar’s offshore accounts were located in the US, Singapore, China and Israel.
AGENCIES
