Free Republic

SEOUL — North Korea Monday warned South Korean ships to avoid the disputed Yellow Sea border area where a clash broke out last month, saying its coastal artillery would target the area in firing exercises. The communist state's naval command, in a statement on official media, said the move came in response to "reckless military provocations" from the South. Tensions have remained high off the west coast since a brief but intense gunfight on November 10 left a North Korean patrol boat in flames. There were deadly naval gunbattles there in 1999 and 2002. The North refuses to accept the...

Caveats:1) The streaming video, located on THIS Japanese news web page, may only be up for a half day or so. The link could go dead, or could link to another, new story.2) Not all computer systems might be able to play the video. You might need Microsoft Silverlight installed, but probably most can see the short stream.3) Go to the link and hit the photo with the white triangle and stream. Now for the explanation of this important video taken today of photos of the cargo of an aircraft seized in Bangkok which was heading from North Korea...

Nuclear Diplomacy: President Obama has sent a "personal" letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, hoping to coax him back to the table to talk about cutting his nation's nuclear program. Good luck with that. Repeated U.S. entreaties to the hermit state to cut its nuclear arsenal have availed us nothing. Just this month, U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth traveled to North Korea with a bunch of new diplomatic carrots for the regime. The result? Bosworth put it this way, in classic diplomatese: "We identified some common understanding on the need for and a role of six-party talks and the...

YONGSAN GARRISON, South Korea — Jeff and Patty Guerrero held their son close as a sense of joy — and relief — washed over them. “We endured a long, lengthy adoption process, and it took two years for my son to pass the naturalization process,” Jeff said minutes before 3-year-old Ethan, who was adopted from Japan, was sworn in as a U.S. citizen Tuesday at Yongsan Theater. It may have been a long journey for the Ethan and the 54 other immigrants who became Americans during the naturalization ceremony, but it was one they were all happy to take. “This...

South Korea has one of the highest rates of abortion in the world, even though abortion is technically illegal there except in a few rare circumstances. According to official government figures, there are 340,000 abortions each year, although one parliamentarian has estimated that there may be as many as 1.5 million. At the same time, Korea's birth rate is the second-lowest in the world – 1.19 births per woman -- and some Koreans fear that their very survival as a nation is in doubt. That is the background for a courageous decision by a 50-year-old Seoul obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr...

Five Eastern European men were detained and their plane was impounded and grounded at Don Muang Airport on Saturday after it was found loaded with tons of war weapons. Government Spokesman Panithan Wattanayakorn declined to reveal where the plane was from and its its destination, saying Thai authorities are investigating the five men reportedly from Belarus and Kazakhstan. A TV footage showed military trucks believed to be loaded with the confiscated weapons left Don Muang Airport. The footage also showed the grounded plane. Thai TV reported that the weapons were transferred in the military trucks to a depot in Nakhon...

The visiting head of Japan's ruling party apologized Saturday for wrongdoings his country committed during its colonization of Korea in the early half of last century. Speaking at a South Korean university ahead of his dinner meeting with President Lee Myung-bak later in the day, Ichiro Ozawa also called for increased cooperation among his country, China and South Korea in dealing with regional instabilities.

Thai security forces seized more than 35 tonnes of arms from a cargo plane and arrested five crew members after the aircraft made an emergency landing to refuel at a Bangkok airport, officials said on Saturday. Monthon Sutchukorn, a deputy spokesman for the Thai air force, said the plane had departed from North Korea but had no further details. An air force official involved in the inspection, who declined to be named, said the Thai authorities had been asked by the United States to investigate the plane and its cargo. "We were approached by the United States, seeking our cooperation...

Bae Yong Joon may be one of the few oenophiles still living in Korea based on wine's dropping popularity on the peninsula. (Photo courtesy of Arnaldo Bassini) Wine sales in Korea are continuing to decline according to a Dec. 8 Korea Times article. The Korea Customs Service told the Times that 2009 (at least the first 10 months) was the first year they noticed a decline in wine sales in Korea since the Asian financial crisis reached its zenith in 1998. However, the South Korean government expect wine imports from Europe and South America to improve after recently signed free-trade...

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea said Friday that it understands the need to resume the stalled international talks on ending its nuclear programs, and that it agrees to work with the United States to narrow unspecified "remaining differences." The statement from North Korea's Foreign Ministry was the first reaction from the communist nation to three days of high-level talks with President Barack Obama's special envoy. Upon returning from North Korea on Thursday, envoy Stephen Bosworth made similar remarks in Seoul that the two sides reached common understandings on the need to restart the nuclear talks. Though the North stopped...

A visit to North Korea by U.S. envoy Stephen Bosworth ended in failure Thursday to convince the North to return to multilateral nuclear disarmament talks. "We identified some common understandings on the need for and the role of the six-party talks and the importance of the implementation of the 2005 Joint Statement," Bosworth told reporters. "It remains to be seen when and how [North Korea] will return to the six-party talks." He added, "This is something that requires further consultations among all six of us." But Bosworth claimed he had "very useful" meetings with senior North Korean officials. Further bilateral...

North Korean Money Shift Sparks Violence By EVAN RAMSTAD SEOUL -- New reports emerged Tuesday of protests and deadly violence in North Korea as the country's authoritarian regime over the past week seized most of its citizens' money and savings via a new-currency issue. Open Radio for North Korea, a Seoul-based shortwave radio station that broadcasts news to the North, said police killed two men in Pyongsong, a market center outside of Pyongyang, on Friday after they divided their savings among a large group of people and urged them to exchange the money for them, attempting to get around the...

U.S. envoy Bosworth arrives in Pyongyang: N. Korean media SEOUL, Dec. 8 (Yonhap) -- A U.S. envoy on North Korea arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday, the North's media said, in the highest-level visit to the communist nation since the Barack Obama administration took power in Washington early this year. Stephen Bosworth and his entourage "arrived in Sunan Airport" just outside the capital, the Korean Central News Agency said. Bosworth departed from the U.S. Osan air base in South Korea at around 2 p.m. on a three-day mission to bring the North back to a multilateral forum on its nuclear program

N. Korea's Currency Reform Could End in Chaos The North Korean military is on alert for a possible civil uprising following last week's sudden currency reform, according to a Russian business newspaper citing foreign diplomats in the communist country. The currency reform involved the exchange of only limited amounts of old bills at a rate of 100:1, with the state confiscating the remainder. People who are afraid of exposing the size of their wealth have no choice but to hide their old bills. It is difficult to ascertain the actual circumstances, but it is apparent the North Korean regime is...

The North Korean military has seized charge of the economy, elbowing out other ministries and the Workers' Party, the Washington Post said Tuesday. According to the daily, North Korea's military has "grabbed nearly complete command of the nation's state-run economy and staked out a lucrative new trade in mineral sales to China to make money for its supreme commander, Kim Jong-il." "The army has earned hundreds of millions of dollars selling missiles and weapons to Iran, Pakistan, Syria and other nations." But its two nuclear tests in October 2006 and in May 2009 "have triggered UN sanctions that are now...

OK, this is confusing: but this is the LINK to the original Japanese language article from the conservative/trustworthy South Korean "Chonsun Ilbo" daily newspaper website in Korean which reported from a Russian news agency just a little while ago.The headline is 北�鮮デノミ：「�民騒乱を懸念���戦闘準備� ("North Korean Currency Devaluation: Worries Over Uprising By North Korean People; North Korean Army Goes on Sub-War Status")

Why Bosworth Should Not Go to Pyongyang By Chris Green [2009-12-04 16:48 ] Author of, among other things, “Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World,” Gordon Chang has today called for Stephen Bosworth, the U.S. chief nuclear negotiator, not to make the trip to Pyongyang for bilateral talks that he is scheduled to make on December 8th. Writing for Forbes, Chang asserts that for Bosworth to go to Pyongyang at this time is both playing into North Korean hands and completely undermining the policy which Washington had appeared to be adhering to since Barack Obama came to office, namely...

This is a short video clip of the top news from the major Japanese JNN Network today. The link is to a Japanese news page on Yahoo!Japan; one just needs to click the arrow to stream the report.Before streaming, please note:-Not all PC/Mac systems can stream the video but most can.-The video may be up for only a few more hours. Then (usually) the links go down. Please see while you can.-You may need to have Microsoft Silverlight installed on your machine.The horrid news report about North Korea, in Japanese, is HERE.And HERE is a clip of what the...

The South Korean economy grew 3.2 percent in the third quarter from three months earlier, the fastest growth in over seven years, thanks to improving domestic demand and brisk exports, the central bank said Friday. The country's gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of economic performance, was revised up from an earlier prediction of a 2.9 percent on-quarter expansion for the July-September period, according to the Bank of Korea (BOK). It marked the fastest quarterly growth since a 3.8 percent advance in the first quarter of 2002. Compared with a year earlier, Asia's fourth-largest economy expanded 0.9 percent last...

She was probably 16 years old and had a wide, flat Asian face, a long neck and a slim figure. The girl died 1,500 years ago. But now she's reborn -- well, partially, at least. The restoration is the result of two years of interdisciplinary work that brought together experts in archaeology, forensic medicine, anatomy, genetics, chemistry and other fields -- a notable step forward in Korean archaeology. In December 2007, archaeologists discovered the complete remains of the girl and partial remains of three others in a tomb in Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang... The work revealed that the four...

In 1965, a mural was discovered in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, when local authorities decided to build a road in the middle of the Afrasiab tepe. A tepe is a mound marking an ancient site, in this case pre-Mongol Samarkand. When it was found, the mural was weathered and its images obscured. But those who discovered it had the foresight to make a drawing of it, from which replicas have been made. A replica of this mural is now being shown as part of the exhibit "The Crossroads of Civilizations: The Asian Culture of Uzbekistan" until September of next year at the...

A joint expedition of Russian and Korean archeologists studying a site of Balhae Era resulted in finding evidences that prove existence of a big administrative centre in the Primorye Territory in the 9th-11th centuries. "We have found a building in the shape of a palace, well-known to us from diggings of capital cities of Balhae in China. Nothing of the kind had been found in the Primorye before. The discovery confirms the supposition that Primorye was not just a periphery of the Balhae state, but an administrative centre once existed there. We are going to find out what it was...

Pyongyang, November 23 (KCNA) -- In order to put an end to confrontation and conflict in the Korean Peninsula and ensure its lasting peace and stability it is indispensable to terminate the state of ceasefire between the DPRK and the U.S. and establish a peacekeeping mechanism. Rodong Sinmun Monday says this in a signed commentary. Recalling that recently a group of warships of the south Korean forces perpetrated such unpardonable criminal act as opening fire on a patrol boat of the Navy of the Korean People's Army on routine guard duty in the waters of the north side in the...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20, 2009 – Retired Army Col. Lewis L. Millett, who earned the Medal of Honor during the Korean War for leading what reportedly was the last major American bayonet charge, died Nov 14. Retired Army Col. Lewis L. Millet wears his Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star and other medals earned in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He served as honorary colonel of the 27th Infantry Regiment Association, and was active in veterans events almost to his death Nov. 14, 2009. U.S. Army photo  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Millett, 88, died in Loma...

South Korea is emerging as an unexpected contender in the global race to build nuclear-power plants, turning up as a finalist for one of the industry's most-coveted projects. The Korean bid has surprised more-established competitors—including industry leader Areva SA of France—as well as officials in the United Arab Emirates, who are examining bids for a contract that could be worth as much as $40 billion to build and run the Arab world's first nuclear-power plants. U.A.E. officials could award the contract as early as the next few weeks. Early in the bidding process, many observers expected a two-horse race between...

You stand atop an elevated tee box on the first and only hole of the world's most dangerous golf course. And you consider your chances. This deadly little par 3 measures 192 yards but plays more like 250 in the face of the vicious winds that often blow out of North Korea across an exclusive piece of real estate called the DMZ just a few yards away. Underneath your feet and off to the right are bunkers. The military kind. To the left, over an 18-foot-high security fence topped by concertina wire, are hazards that make high rough, deep water...

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea said the South will pay "an expensive price" for firing at Pyongyang's retreating patrol boat on Tuesday, keeping up its saber rattling two days after a naval gunfight raised tension between the rivals. The threat, published in the North's official Rodong Sinmun daily, comes amid reports officials from the two Koreas met recently to discuss a possible summit between their leaders but failed to reach agreement. The navies from the two sides exchanged gunfire on Tuesday for the first time in seven years, reminding financial market players of the security threat the North poses to...

DEMILITARIZED ZONE, Korea — The water deer nibbled away on the vegetation on the gently sloping bend along the Imjin River, seemingly unaware of the dozen people pointing and staring at it through a field scope from the opposite shoreline. Nearby, the group observed a family of white-naped cranes feeding, something the endangered species does when wintering in the relative solitude of the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea. While mention of the DMZ conjures images of stone-faced soldiers, barbed-wire fences, guns and guard towers, the area between North and South Korea has remained virtually untouched by humans...

SEOUL, South Korea – The two Koreas briefly exchanged naval fire Tuesday along their disputed western sea border, with a North Korean ship suffering heavy damage before retreating, South Korean military officials said. There were no South Korean casualties, the country's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, and it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties on the North Korean side. Each side blamed the other for violating the sea border. The clash — the first of its in kind in seven years — occurred as U.S. officials said President Barack Obama has decided to send...

Firefight Between North and South Korean Navy This Morning: Causualty Unknown Happened on the morning of Nov. 10 at NLL. N. Korean patrol boats went over NLL to the south. Warning shots fired, but ignored. S. Korean navy fired at N. Korean ship. N. Koreans returned fire.

No other information yet.

We hail those that wore the uniform of the US Armed Forces every November 11. We honor the Greatest Generation, we finally honor those that fought the Cong, we honor those that have fought in the Middle East. But more times than not, we as a people, tend to forget those of another conflict. Korean War Vets, it seems, get lost in the shuffling of history.

SEOUL, South Korea – A woman in South Korea who tried to pass the written exam for a driver's license with near-daily attempts since April 2005 has finally succeeded on her 950th time. The aspiring driver spent more than 5 million won ($4,200) in application fees, but until now had failed to score the minimum 60 out of a possible 100 points needed to get behind the wheel for a driving test. Cha Sa-soon, 68, finally passed the written exam with a score of 60 on Wednesday, said Choi Young-chul, a police official at the drivers' license agency in Jeonju,...

The point of this posting is to continue to systematically attack the notion that it is natural for two Koreas to exist and to continually eat away at all the justifications that South Koreans make in order to some how to ease their collective guilt as they lead their moderately wealthty lives as the other half of the nation continues to suffer (For more on how North Koreans continue to suffer see last week's issue of the New Yorker or what Professor Brad DeLong at UC Berkeley has noted to be last weeks "must read.") I do this under the...

North Korea launched the cyber attack against South Korea and the United States The South Korean government is now blaming North Korea of launching organized cyber attacks against websites belonging to South Korea and the U.S. earlier in the year.Due to malicious software, numerous U.S. and S.K. Web sites were slowed or ground to a complete stop during the attack, as cyber experts scrambled to pinpoint the source of the problem. According to experts, the IP address traced to the attacks was leased from China, the South Korean National Intelligence Service noted in its report. “The attacks on Korean and...

Today we will have a presentation on how North Korean institutions have changed since the death of Kim Il Sung. One particular item, the presenting group this week has looked at is the new North Korean constitution, adopted in late September of this year stands out to highlight how much North Korea has fallen. Below is a rough draft of a translation of the North Korean constitution. There is a section missing on the draft copy of the translation, but I hope to have that updated shortly. But, what is fascinating about looking at the constitution is how far North...

Japan and the United States have tentatively agreed to expand co-operation in the missile defence field.. a [Japanese] spokesman said its scope is not expected to include Japan allowing the export of the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IIA, which is currently being jointly developed....both sides said they wanted to further co-operation in jointly developing missile defence systems..[the US asked Japan to consider permitting export of jointly-developed missiles, most likely to Europe].

Harry Stein What Mad Men Gets Wrong The fifties, a decade of forgotten loyalty, honor, and patriotism The ongoing frenzy over Mad Men, which recently landed the Emmy for best drama series for the second straight year, has me thinking about my father-in-law and his group of cronies in Monterey, California. I wrote a book about these guys some years back, called The Girl Watchers Club. For over 30 years, they got together every week to shoot the breeze about their jobs, their families, and the world at large and, invariably, to reminisce about the war in which they’d all...

  Japan Achieves Second Ballistic Missile Intercept Using Raytheon Standard Missile-3 KAUAI, Hawaii, Oct. 28, 2009 /PRNewswire/ -- PACIFIC MISSILE RANGE FACILITY -- The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force achieved another ballistic missile intercept in space using a Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN)-built Standard Missile-3. During the Oct. 27 test, the SM-3 Block IA missile engaged and destroyed a medium-range ballistic missile target more than 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Personnel at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai launched the ballistic missile target. The crew of the Japanese destroyer JS Myoko (DDG-175) detected and tracked the target before...

DEMILITARIZED ZONE, Korea — You might call it a case of keeping up with the Joneses, or in this case the Kims. Work is under way on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone to renovate three guard posts and two checkpoint buildings into bigger, more modern structures. The construction comes a year after North Korea finished work on the replacement of four guard posts on its side of the DMZ, and a decade after the two sides engaged in a tit-for-tat battle to see who could build the more impressive reception centers in the Joint Security Area —...

Free Trade: Europe just walked off with the second-biggest trade deal in history with South Korea, bringing a fresh $26 billion to both economies and extending their clout globally. It's a prize that could have been ours. Welcome to the new America, the land of the left behind. As the Obama administration dithers for the eighth straight month about three pending free-trade treaties, those dust clouds you see are Europe taking off and running with the big one — South Korea. Late Thursday, Europe completed a free-trade pact with Korea in which 99% of all tariffs will be scrapped within...

The United States said on Friday it would allow a senior North Korean official to visit this month, a move analysts said could be a first step toward talks between the two on ending Pyongyang's nuclear programs. The State Department said it had decided to grant a visa to Ri Gun, North Korea's No. 2 official at multilateral talks on its nuclear programs, to attend meetings in New York and San Diego with private scholars and experts who study North Korea. The department said nothing about the possibility of talks between U.S. and North Korean officials, but a source familiar...

orth Korea may be preparing to launch more short-range missiles a day after the communist state fired a barrage of missiles, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said on Tuesday, quoting a government source. Indications of additional launches are coming from the western part of the Korean peninsula, the source was quoted as saying. North Korea has issued a warning for vessels to stay out of waters off its coasts

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has fired five short-range missiles off its east coast and declared a "no sail" zone in the area from October 10-20, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a government source as saying on Monday. South Korean government officials were not immediately available for comment. (snip) It was not clear whether these were routine military exercises. But they coincided with local media reports that the United States is planning to send its aircraft carrier USS George Washington to the South Korean port of Busan on Tuesday.

My claim is that Koreans are still unable to acknowledge that it was natural for some people to have benefitted under Japanese rule and that these people still loved Korea and the like (I'm thinking more along the lines of a Park Chung Hee than the founders of either Dong-a-Ilbo or Samsung), but the opportunities they had in life only existed if they accepted that Korea was for the time being a Japanese colony and that they realistically couldn't do a single thing about it. And, more so, and this is a claim purely along the lines of the early...

North Korea drops communism, boosts "Dear Leader" Mon Sep 28, 2009 4:21am EDT (For full coverage of North Korea, click [ID:nNORKOR]) By Jon Herskovitz and Christine Kim SEOUL, Sept 28 (Reuters) - North Korea has revised its constitution to give even more power to leader Kim Jong-il, ditch communism and elevate his "military first" ideology, South Korea's Unification Ministry said on Monday. Though there is little doubt over the 67-year-old Kim's power, secured by his role as chairman of the National Defence Commission, the new constitution removes any risk of ambiguity. "The chairman is the highest general of the entire...

You could also look at what South Korean historians are doing. Historians in South Korea put weight, as I've pointed out earlier (in Part I), on theories now that would otherwise be of little relevance were it to not the case that Korea still remains divided today. Specifically, the North-South States Period (남�국시대) serves mainly to justify the division of the peninsula in the mind of Koreans and to make it seem as if the division is entirely natural (since it happened before and the country eventually unified) and that it's perfectly alright to think of other things for the...

The Ministry of National Defense plans to sell more than 100,000 aging U.S. combat rifles to American gun enthusiasts, ministry officials said Thursday. The plan is part of the ministry's programs to boost its defense budget, they said. About 86,000 M1 Garand rifles and 22,000 M1 carbine rifles will be sold to gun collectors in the United States, as the U.S. government has approved the sale. The rifles were originally given to South Korea as part of a U.S. aid program in the 1950s, according to officials. The total value of the firearms for sale exceeds $120 million. The rifles...

SEOUL -- A united South and North Korea could boast an economy larger than France, Germany and possibly Japan by the middle of the century, according to a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. study that challenges conventional wisdom about unification. Since the reunification of West and East Germany 20 years ago, South Korean leaders and economists have convinced many people here that reuniting with North Korea would be costly and disruptive. In the latest gloomy forecast, a government think tank last month said the tax-burden ratio, or proportion of tax revenue to gross domestic product, would need to rise by two...

United States President Barack Obama and members of his administration are going to great lengths to explain the reasons why the US abruptly changed course with respect to its anti-missile strategy for Europe. In the process, little or nothing has been said about the impact of this new plan on Asia. Silence or not, both China and Japan must assess the consequences of this activity because what the US is now proposing for Europe in terms of missile defense is right in line with what has been unfolding all along in East Asia, where the US Navy forms the front...