sydney's asx 200 closed up a quarter of a pr sent and zhang a "amount" shares pulling down almost 2% bucking the trend. >>> the dow jones reached a new high on tuesday hitting the 18,000 mark for the first time. cnn's richard quest explains how this index managed to get there. >> reporter: consider it an early christmas present for the markets. the dow jones has crossed the 18,000 for the first time. this is the number. this is how it got there, up 18 -- a third of 1% up to -- up 66 points to 18,025. look at the whole session. investors are cheering the crucial milestone and it saw 35 record closes for the dow. it came out of the gate higher and, in fact, it did get high after lunch and gave back some of the gains but by the close of play it was up some 64 points. it came 50 points with an 18,000 at the beginning of december. but as you will have seen let's look at how the last, say, three months have traded this. is fascinating. 18,000 was tantalizingly close but then we had this dramatic drop in the market in the middle of december and at that point just about there it was at 17,00

my next speaker is qingming zhang. he founded human liberty center deal with human rights issues with special reference to north korean human rights issues. he's very famous political commentators. >> thank you, president park. let me first say i greatly appreciate the korea foundation for advanced studies, the brookings institution as well as peking university for this great opportunity to exchange very frank dialogue. it's been a revelation and very helpful helpful process. the panel he's title is major powers. as far as i know, there are four major powers but i was made aware of the fact that we have ten minutes to discuss korea's relations with these major powers. that gives me after this introduction about less than two minutes per major power, which is a mission impossible, so i've taken the liberty to eliminate two of the four major power statuses, russia and japan, for no better reason than, well, i don't particularly like mr. putin because i think he's a -- he's a bully. i'm not particularly fond of -- sorry i