SEOUL - The Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Thursday held a working-level talks to discuss security and protocol issues for the upcoming inter-Korean summit later this month, Seoul's presidential office said.The meeting continued for four hours from 10:00 am local time on the ROK side of the border village of Panmunjom, according to the Blue House of the ROK.Nothing was decided at the meeting. The two sides agreed to meet again for the working-level discussion without specifying a date.The five-member ROK delegation was led by Kim Sang-gyun, senior director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS).Four other Blue House officials attending the meeting were Cho Han-ki, protocol secretary to the president, Shin Yong-wook, vice chief of presidential security service, Kwun Hyuk-ki, director of Chunchugwan, Cheong Wa Dae Press Center, and Yun Kun-young, director for government situation room.The DPRK delegation was led by Kim Chang-son, an official from the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK.The working-level dialogue came ahead of the first summit between ROK President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong-un, scheduled for April 27 at Peace House, a Panmunjom building controlled by the ROK.If held, Kim will become the first DPRK leader to step onto ROK soil since the 1950-1953 Korean war ended in armistice. The Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war.During the working-level talks, the two sides discussed issues on security, protocol and media coverage.The ROK and the DPRK also agreed to hold a working-level dialogue Saturday on the installation of a communication hotline between Moon and Kim.The leaders of the two Koreas agreed to set up a direct hotline of dialogue and have the first phone conversation before the agreed summit is held in late April. custom bar braceletcustom sports braceletscustom logo wristbandsde securite pour personne ageeembossed wristbandscolorfilled wristbandsembossed printed wristbandsdual layer wristbands
A watchtower of the Forbidden City is seen under the blue sky in Beijing on Jan 22, 2018. [Photo/VCG] The country's top environmental authority vowed on Friday to curb the falsification of monitoring data and ensure institutes are not interfered with, as it unveiled a three-year campaign on environmental monitoring. The campaign will cover all 31 provincial regions on the Chinese mainland from 2018 to 2020. Key areas for inspections will be the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster, Yangtze River Delta, and Fenhe-Weihe plain in Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, according to the plan released by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. The campaign will also cover service providers to monitoring stations and the monitoring facilities of polluting enterprises, it said. Inspections will be done randomly. The ministry will choose 10 percent of the air or water monitoring stations, 200 environmental monitoring institutes and 100 motor vehicle detecting companies to inspect each year, the ministry said in a statement on Friday. The ministry will strengthen cooperation with the State Administration for Market Regulation and carry out joint action to exploit the two government bodies' advantages to the full. An information sharing mechanism will be established to enhance the efficiency of environmental monitoring institute supervision, it said. The two government bodies will launch a special inspection on environmental monitoring institutes and motor vehicle detection centers after mid-August. The cooperation will be of milestone significance as it could help develop a long-term mechanism for the supervision work, it said. Institutes with violations will be fined or have their monitoring qualifications revoked. Those involved in data falsification will be transferred to judicial bodies and be prosecuted for criminal liability. Officials involved in falsification will also face disciplinary penalties, it said. The ministry vowed to create an atmosphere in which no one dares to falsify data by exposing typical violations via media. The campaign was launched against the backdrop of polluting enterprises being frequently found to have falsified their environmental monitoring data, and some local authorities have also been found to have beautified data. Six air quality monitoring stations in Linfen, Shanxi, for example, were tampered with more than 100 times from April 2017 to March this year. A local court has sentenced 11 people involved in the incident, including the head of Linfen environmental protection, to prison or detention of up to two years in May.
