SEOUL, South Korea — Dozens of lawmakers split from South Korea’s ruling party Tuesday over the corruption scandal involving impeached President Park Geun-hye in a move that could shape presidential elections that might take place in just months.

The 29 anti-Park lawmakers who left the Saenuri Party planned to create a new conservative party that will likely try to lure outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as its presidential candidate. There’s a possibility of more lawmakers leaving Saenuri in coming weeks over rifts with Park loyalists who continue to occupy the party’s leadership.

Choung Byoung-gug, one of the lawmakers who left Saenuri, accused the loyalists of “neglecting the values of real conservatism” and “shamelessly defending the infringement of constitutional values” as they continued to support the scandal-hit president.

The split came as investigators widened their inquiry into the scandal surrounding Park, who has been accused of colluding with a longtime confidante to extort money and favors from the country’s biggest companies, and to allow the friend to manipulate government affairs.

The team led by special prosecutor Park Young-soo was planning to summon the president’s jailed friend, Choi Soon-sil, on Tuesday afternoon, following their first interrogation of her on Saturday.

Ban is seen as the best hope for conservatives to win back the Blue House after Park’s collapse complicated politics for her party. Recent opinion polls put Ban slightly ahead of liberal politician Moon Jae-in, who conceded the presidential race to Park four years ago, as the favorite to win a presidential vote.

In a recent meeting with South Korean reporters in New York, Ban said he was ready to “burn” his body in devotion for South Korea, his strongest hint yet that he would run for president.

South Korea’s opposition-controlled parliament voted on Dec. 9 to impeach Park over the scandal that saw millions of people protest in recent weeks.

Story: Kim Tong-hyung

PYONGYANG, North Korea — With somewhere around 4,000 artists and staff, the Mansudae Art Studio, a huge complex of nondescript concrete buildings on a sprawling, walled-off campus with armed guards in the heart of Pyongyang, churns out everything from watercolor tigers to mosaics so large they seem to depict a race from another, taller planet.

But its statues — the really big, bronze, monumental ones on foreign shores — are what appear to have caught the attention of the U.N. Security Council.

In one of the odder items on the list of things North Korea can’t export under United Nations’ sanctions, statues were explicitly listed for the first time last month when the Security Council approved a raft of punishments in response to Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, which it conducted in September.

To those familiar with the North’s exports, the move to ban statue sales wasn’t entirely a surprise. It’s one of the few things other than coal and natural resources, exports of which were also heavily restricted under the new sanctions, that North Korea can still find a market for abroad.

Moreover, sanctions advocates and proponents of isolating Pyongyang for its nuclear program believe Mansudae, and particularly its export arm, Mansudae Overseas Projects, is being used to quietly maintain, expand or obfuscate the nature of its relations with other countries.

Africa has traditionally been Mansudae’s prime export market — it’s sold to 17 African countries, ranging from Angola to Zimbabwe.

Pyongyang began exporting statues to Africa in the late 1960s, when a wave of independence movements created a new market of ideologically friendly leaders in search of grand symbols to bolster national identity and claims of political legitimacy. North Korea, looking to expand its diplomatic ties vis a vis rival Seoul, initially provided the works for free. It only started selling them from about 2000.

Business hasn’t exactly been booming.

In July, Namibia terminated the services of Mansudae Overseas Projects after U.N. monitors claimed it was involved in several military construction projects. Namibia had been a regular Mansudae customer, including the project to build its State House, which was completed in 2008.

But, on the bright side for Pyongyang, last December a $24 million museum with a huge indoor historical panorama built, designed and largely funded by Mansudae was opened near Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Wat temple complex. Unlike other projects by Mansudae abroad, it will collect proceeds from entry fees for the museum’s first 10 years of operations, or until it has recouped its investment. The museum hasn’t drawn many tourists.

The U.N. statue sanctions won’t likely hurt North Korea’s coffers much.

The North’s total income from selling statues abroad has been estimated at about $160 million, or only about $10 million a year. That’s compared with the estimated impact of the new restrictions on coal exports, which the U.S. has said could cost Pyongyang as much as $700 million.

Even so, it’s a slap at one of North Korea’s most venerable cultural institutions.

Mansudae was created in 1959 by Kim Il Sung himself. It has generated an estimated 38,000 statues and 170,000 other monuments for domestic use and, according to the website of its overseas representative office, it is divided in 13 creative groups, seven manufacturing plants and has more than 50 supply departments.

“The vast majority of the major art works of the country have been realized by Mansudae Art Studio artists,” the website says. “Their ages go from mid 20s to mid-60s and almost all are graduates of the very demanding Pyongyang University. Over half of the Merit Artists and of the People’s Artists, the two highest awards an artist can receive in DPRK, are or have been associated with the Mansudae Art Studio.”

And, sanctions notwithstanding, they appear to be as busy as ever.

Statues, mosaics or paintings of “eternal president” Kim Il Sung and his son, “dear leader” Kim Jong Il, grace virtually every large plaza, village center, significant factory and meaningful nook or cranny in the country.

At the order of North Korea’s third leader in the Kim dynasty, Kim Jong Un, the studio rushed this year to make sure every province had a Kim Jong Il statue to stand beside his father.

Kim Jong Un is not yet the object of similar immortalizations or of the pins that all adult North Koreans wear over their hearts.

Mansudae officials say the young Kim is “much too humble of personality for that.”

Story: Eric Talmadge

JERUSALEM — A fake news story has touched off a tense Twitter confrontation between nuclear power Pakistan and Israel, widely believed to have a nuclear arsenal of its own, in an episode that underlines the potentially harmful impact of such stories in sensitive global affairs

In an apparent response to a fake story claiming Israel’s former defense minister threatened a nuclear attack against Pakistan if it sends troops to Syria, Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif reminded Israel that “Pakistan is a nuclear state too.”

Israel’s Defense Ministry tweeted back Saturday, saying the original story on the site AWD News was “totally fictitious.”

AWD has been identified by fact-checking organizations as a fake news site.

Israel maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying the existence of an arsenal. Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998. The countries have no diplomatic ties.

There was no immediate reaction from Pakistan to Israel’s response.