COLU @ CONCEPTS

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PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Pyongyang will seek the extradition of anyone involved in what it says was a CIA-backed plot to kill leader Kim Jung Un last month with a biochemical poison, a top North Korean foreign ministry official said Thursday. Han Song Ryol, the vice foreign minister, called a meeting of foreign diplomats in Pyongyang on Thursday to outline the North’s allegation that the CIA and South Korea’s intelligence agency bribed and coerced a North Korean man into joining in the assassination plot, which the North’s Ministry of State Security has suggested was thwarted last month. The North’s state media have been running stories about the plot since last week. The security ministry has vowed to “ferret out” anyone involved in the alleged plot, which it called “state-sponsored terrorism.” Han took that a step further on Thursday with the extradition statement, though the North has yet to name any foreign or North Korean suspects who are abroad. “According to our l...

President Moon speaks at the Blue House. (JungJ Yeon-Je/Pool Photo via AP) SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The new South Korean president is so eager to distance himself from his disgraced, jailed predecessor that he plans to partially abandon one of the job’s major perks: the mountainside presidential palace, the Blue House, from which Park Geun-hye conducted her imperial presidency. Addressing the nation after taking the oath of office Wednesday, Moon vowed to eventually move out of the palace that dominates downtown Seoul, where every modern South Korean president has lived and worked since the end of World War II. It is also closely associated with Park, who grew up there as the daughter of a dictator. Moon instead plans to commute to an office in the nearby streets of Gwanghwamun, near the square where millions took part in peaceful protests for months before Park was removed from office and arrested in March on corruption charges. “After preparations are finished, I wi...

QARAQOSH, Iraq (AP) — The young Iraqi woman remembers the night she lost her leg. Wihad Ahmed and her family had hunkered down in their house in western Mosul, hoping to wait out the nearly constant shelling as fighting raged between Islamic State militants and advancing Iraqi government forces. But after mortar shells destroyed the homes of their next-door neighbors, the 27-year-old and her relatives decided to flee. With four other families, they left in the middle of the night on April 1. Before they reached Iraqi lines, a bomb went off, wounding Ahmed’s right leg so badly that it had to be amputated above the knee. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, she is one of at least 625 people from Mosul who have lost an arm or a leg as the nearly seven-month-old battle for the city. Like others, she is struggling to come to terms with her injuries and the future she faces as an amputee. The United Nations says more than 12,000 Mosul civilians have been wou...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — After Congress passed a new law allowing Sept. 11 victims’ families to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts, opponents mounted an expensive political campaign, including paying American military veterans to visit Capitol Hill and warn lawmakers about what they said could be unintended consequences. What few people knew, including some of the recruited veterans themselves, was that Saudi Arabia’s government was largely paying for the effort, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite a World War II-era U.S. law requiring lobbyists to immediately reveal payments from foreign governments or political parties, some of the campaign’s organizers failed to notify the Justice Department about the Saudi kingdom’s role until months afterward, with no legal consequences. Even now, some opponents of the law, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, still won’t say to whom or how many exactly they paid thousands of dollars each to influence state a...