SEOUL – North Korean propaganda has been found at the South’s presidential compound, officials said Monday, with the discovery of leaflets praising Pyongyang – which once sent commandos to attack the complex.

Authorities in the nuclear-armed North and activists in the South regularly use balloons to carry leaflets across the Demilitarised Zone that has divided the peninsula since the end of the Korean War.

Seoul is only 35 miles from the DMZ, within artillery range, and the leaflets are sometimes found lying on the ground in the capital – although not normally at the presidential Blue House.

“Great leader Kim Jong-Un firmly declared to tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire,” one of the leaflets read, according to the Yonhap news agency – a reference to Kim’s declaration last month regarding US President Donald Trump amid high tensions over Pyongyang’s weapons ambitions.

Another pitied Seoul for relying on the US for its defence and claimed Washington was afraid of Pyongyang, Yonhap said.

“Occasionally, the propaganda leaflets are flown this way by the wind and it’s not clear if there is anything particular about this one,” a presidential spokesman told AFP.

“The leaflets have been gathered by the security team and submitted to the investigative agency.”

North Korean elements penetrated close to the Blue House in 1968, when a 31-strong commando unit infiltrated Seoul in a failed attempt to assassinate then-leader Park Chung-Hee.

Bullet holes from a gunbattle are still visible in a tree on a hillside above the complex.

BEIJING – As Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepares to embark on a second five-year term this week, the impulsive leaders of North Korea and the United States could spoil his party.

The stability-obsessed Chinese Communist Party has left nothing to chance, ramping up security in Beijing ahead of Wednesday’s opening of a congress to re-anoint Xi as general secretary.

Beyond China’s borders, Xi has less control.

There, he is at the mercy of two unpredictable men, US President Donald Trump and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Un – a predicament that points to the limits of China’s bid to project soft power.

Some analysts say Kim could try to cause a stir by testing another missile or nuclear bomb in the middle of China’s most important political event, which is held every five years.

A new test could trigger another 140-character salvo by Trump, who has alternated between prodding and praising Xi’s response to North Korea.

Trump’s mercurial Twitter diplomacy has contrasted with Xi’s unemotional style. The US leader has also pointedly left Xi hanging over whether he will hit China with tariffs over trade grievances.

Despite the mixed messages, Xi has professed his friendship with Trump, confirming an invitation for the US president to come to Beijing next month, when they will discuss trade and North Korea face-to-face.

His relationship with Kim is also complicated.

The North Korean leader has already interfered with two international summits that the Chinese president has hosted this year, by staging headline-grabbing provocations.

In May, as Xi prepared to address world leaders gathered in Beijing on his signature Belt and Road initiative – a Chinese-led trade infrastructure programme – the North successfully launched a new ballistic missile.

Then in September, it conducted its most powerful nuclear test to date, hours before Xi took the stage for a speech before leaders of the developing world at the annual BRICS summit.

The timing was seen as a slight towards Xi and an attempt by Kim to strongarm his Chinese neighbour into convincing Trump to sit down for talks.

A new nuclear test during the party congress “would be more than a loss of face. It will harm the ruling party of China,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.

“It will harm Xi Jinping at this crucial moment.” .

XI IGNORED 

While the congress will help Xi confirm his status as China’s most powerful leader in decades, he has been unable to resolve the biggest international crisis.

His appeals for calm and negotiations to resolve the nuclear row have been ignored by Trump and Kim, who have instead engaged in a worrisome war of words.

And Xi’s proposal for North Korea to halt weapons tests in return for the United States to stop military drills with allies in the region has not gained traction.

After a chiding from Trump for failing to rein in Kim, China has implemented tougher UN sanctions against North Korea, and Xi’s relationship with the US leader appears to be warming up again.

But Xi has never met Kim and Beijing’s relationship with its erstwhile ally appears to be at an all-time low.

Chinese academics have even begun to publicly discuss the previously taboo issue topic of contingencies in case war breaks out across the border.

NO BANDWIDTH

It is “more likely than not that North Korea will conduct another long-range ballistic missile test” around the time of the congress, said Zhao Tong, a specialist in nuclear policy at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing.

Zhao said the timing was right for another test for Pyongyang to work out remaining technical issues and “conclude the strategic nuclear programme as soon as possible”.

“The Chinese leadership would have little extra bandwidth for dealing with North Korea,” Zhao said.

“After the party congress the perception is that China would be in the position to focus on North Korean issues. It is safer for North Korea to do it before.”

MANILA – The Philippine military will liberate southern Marawi City in a matter of days, the country’s armed forces chief said on Monday, after the deaths of two key militant leaders he said would lead to the crumbling of a pro-Islamic state alliance.

The bodies of Omarkhayam Maute and Isnilon Hapilon had been retrieved and identified by authorities, but there were still about 30 fighters in the combat zone who were in disarray, General Eduardo Ano told a televised news conference.

Top Malaysian operative Mahmud Ahmad and foreign fighters were still believed to be in the battle zone, he said, adding that there would be “no letup” in the fight to wipe out groups loyal to Islamic State after Marawi was retaken.

MANILA – Nearly nine out of 10 Filipinos support Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, and almost three quarters believe extrajudicial killings are taking place in the bloody crackdown, an opinion poll showed on Monday.

Duterte’s signature campaign has killed thousands of Filipinos and caused international alarm, amid widespread allegations by activists that police are executing suspected drug users and dealers.

Police reject that and say every one of the more than 3,900 victims in their anti-narcotics operations were killed because they were armed and had violently resisted arrest.

Eighty-eight per cent of the 1,200 Filipinos surveyed by pollster Pulse Asia last month said they support the anti-illegal drugs campaign, with nine per cent undecided and two per cent against it.

But 73 per cent of respondents believed extrajudicial killings were taking place, up from 67 per cent in the June poll.

A fifth of Filipinos felt there were no such killings, as the authorities maintain, down from 29 per cent in June.

The issue of extrajudicial killings is contentious in the Philippines, where definitions of what it means vary from those typically used by international organisations and human rights groups.

Pulse Asia in its survey defined the term as “killings done by people in authority, such as the police or soldiers, that do no follow the rule of law”.

Political analysts Ramon Casiple said the survey showed support for the crackdown from those who felt crime was being tackled, but reservations among those most affected.

“Communities with reported deaths, generally urban poor communities, are getting increasingly concerned of the killings,” he added.

The survey comes amid unprecedented scrutiny on the war on drugs and several opinion surveys by another pollster that indicated dwindling trust of police accounts of operations, and whether victims were indeed all drug dealers as police maintain.

Duterte last week ordered police to withdraw from the anti-narcotics campaign and leave all operations to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) following scrutiny of police conduct.

He noted fewer killings in operations by PDEA, an agency a fraction of the size of the police, and said he hoped critics and “bleeding hearts” would be satisfied by his decision.

BANGLADESH – At least five people were killed and dozens left missing after a boat packed with Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar’s Rakhine state for Bangladesh sank in a river that separates the two nations, a border guard official said.

“The boat was carrying around 50 people when it sank on the estuary of the Naf river in the morning. Five bodies were found including four children, and 21 people survived,” Border Guard Bangladesh area commander Lieutenant Colonel S.M. Ariful Islam told AFP.