Yeah, turns out they don't want another war.
"South Korea, Japan to sign data treaty" June 29, 2012
SEOUL — In a significant step toward overcoming lingering historical animosities with its former colonial master, the South Korean government has unexpectedly announced that it will sign a treaty with Japan on Friday to increase the sharing of sensitive military data on two major common concerns: North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats and China’s growing military might.
Someone wants to get its forces positioned for WWIII.
The announcement triggered a political firestorm in South Korea, where resentment of Japan’s early 20th-century colonization remains entrenched and any sign of Japan’s growing military role around Korea is met with deep suspicion.
The opposition accused President Lee Myung-bak of ignoring popular anti-Japanese sentiments in pressing ahead with the treaty, the first military pact between the two nations since the end of colonization in 1945.
What is it with politicians in "democracies," anyway?
North Korea accused Lee’s government of ‘‘selling the nation out.’’
Wow, North AND South agree.
***************************
The United States has been urging the two to put their historical hostilities behind them and strengthen military ties, so the trilateral alliance of the nations can deal more efficiently with the threats from North Korea.
The North Koreans can't even feed themselves fer Christ sake, and they can't even get a missile across the Sea of Japan. How big a threat could they really be (blog editor's shoulders hunch and his palms face skyward)?
Until now, the governments in Seoul and Tokyo often shared each other’s information on North Korea indirectly, through Washington.
I suppose the U.S. is issuing a warning to both that, you know, WWIII is officially going to be starting soon because Israel demands it.
--more--"
And what's this, popular will made a politician reverse course?
"S. Korea delays pact with Japan; Opposition sidelines plan for military alliance" by Choe Sang-Hun | New York Times, June 30, 2012
SEOUL — Faced with mounting political pressure at home, the South Korean government Friday abruptly postponed the signing of its first military cooperation pact with Japan since World War II.
Now the fate of the agreement has become uncertain as South Korea’s politicians look ahead to a presidential election this year....
The deal had been hailed as a significant step by the two governments. Both countries have been struggling to overcome the lingering historical bitterness between their peoples and cooperate more closely over mutual security concerns in the region.
Hailed by who?
The pact provides a legal framework for South Korea and Japan to share and protect classified military data so they can deal more effectively with the threats posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and China’s growing military influence.
Yuh-huh.
The United States has urged the governments in Tokyo and Seoul to increase cooperation.
But the pact triggered an uproar in South Korea, where resentment of Japan’s early 20th-century colonization remains raw and the public regards any sign of Japan’s growing military role with deep suspicion.
The opposition accused President Lee Myung Bak of succumbing to US pressure and called him ‘‘pro-Japanese,’’ the worst accusation a South Korean politician or political party could face, especially in an election year.
Friday’s postponement provided Washington with yet another reminder of how sensitive and unpredictable the relations between its two main Asian allies can be and how difficult it is to persuade them to cooperate more closely within what the United States envisions as a trilateral alliance....
Translation: We pressured our puppet to do this and now he looks bad! We've probably cost him the election.
World, is there ANYTHING MY STINK GOVERNMENT does not do that doesn't end up with them stepping in shit? All their manipulations and agendas being advanced around the globe, and EACH TIME NOW the plan BACKFIRES and AmeriKa comes away from the event with a mess stuck in the treads of its boots.
--more--"
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"S. Korea fires security aide over Japan deal" by Choe Sang-Hun | New York Times, July 06, 2012
SEOUL — President Lee Myung Bak, struggling to extricate itself from the political debacle it created by attempting to enhance military cooperation with Japan, fired a top national security aide Thursday.
The aide, Kim Tae Hyo, widely considered a key architect of Lee’s foreign policy [and] a professor of political science at Sungkyunkwan University, followed Lee into the Blue House after his election in 2007 and helped shape a foreign policy that emphasized the alliance with the United States and took a hard line on the North. Aid was cut off, and the South demanded that the North renounce its nuclear weapons program.
As inter-Korean relations deteriorated, the political opposition accused Lee of mishandling North Korea. But Kim, dubbed ‘‘South Korea’s neocon’’ by his critics, had survived reshuffles of top presidential aides, and Seoul’s tough stance on North Korea continued....
(Blog editor incredulously shakes his head)
The government underestimated South Koreans’ misgivings about cooperating militarily with Japan. Lee’s political opponents quickly seized on that disquiet to launch an election-year offensive, accusing Lee of kowtowing to Washington and, with various civic groups, likening the conservative governing camp to the past Korean ‘‘traitors’’ who secretly cooperated with Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910.
I would zay we have found zome collaboratorz, 'eh?
History is never as clear cut as what the Zionist prism of AmeriKan education and media portrays and presents.
The military pact was not signed, and its fate is now mired in South Korea’s fractious election-year politics. The government said it would push for the signing, but the opposition has vowed to resist it and even some governing-party members voiced skepticism.
The new crisis is one that Lee and his New Frontier Party can hardly afford.
All because the U.S. pushed him into it -- something strangely omitted from this piece.
A lame duck, with just 10 months left in his single five-year term, he was already grappling with political pressure resulting from a criminal investigation of his elder brother, a retired six-term national legislator, on allegations of corruption. His declining political leverage was dramatically demonstrated Monday, when he gave a speech before the National Assembly during which no lawmakers interrupted him with the customary applause. Many opposition legislators refused to stand when he entered and exited the chamber....
Prime Minister Kim Hwang Sik apologized for not disclosing the negotiations. The opposition demanded that the president apologize, too, and fire those responsible for the secret talks. Lee’s office began an internal inquiry this week.
--more--"
Seeing as we have crossed the Sea of Japan:
"Japan’s nuclear crisis victims left few options for compensation" by Chico Harlan | Washington Post, July 01, 2012
TOKYO — It was 15 months ago that a massive nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant contaminated a circle of Japan’s countryside and left hundreds of thousands of people with no homes, jobs, or both.
Yeah, the thing is also still leaking radiation (and maybe worse).
But for all the damages and despair it wrought, the disaster so far has unfolded without one conventional element: a widespread and contentious legal fight by those who say they should be compensated for their losses.
Victims of the worst nuclear crisis in a quarter-century have filed roughly 20 lawsuits against plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., according to the company. That compares with the several hundred lawsuits filed against BP within weeks of the 2010 Gulf oil spill, including the near-finalized settlement of a class action lawsuit that will pay 120,000 plaintiffs upward of $7.8 billion. BP also paid some $6.2 billion to victims via a neutral claims settlement process, administered by a lawyer appointed by the Obama administration.
Victims and lawyers here say the dearth of nuclear-related suits reflects both a national mind-set — a distaste for confrontation — and a stunted judicial system that doesn’t allow for class-action cases or punitive damages.
If only that applied to WARS BASED ON LIES, 'eh????!!!!
Japanese people speak of the court system as more likely to deliver frustration than vengeance, and jobless evacuees who urgently need money have little appetite for long trials with uncertain outcomes.
Who does even under the best circumstances?
Instead, the vast majority of victims of the Fukushima accident turn to one of two other options, one led by Tepco, the other by the central government — the two institutions most often blamed for the nuclear accident....
And for good reason.
--more--"
And is the voice of the people heeded in Japan?
"Japan restarts reactor for first time since disaster" July 02, 2012
TOKYO — A two-month shutdown of Japan’s nuclear power plants ended Sunday when officials at a western plant reactivated a reactor for the first time since last year’s disaster in Fukushima.
The restarting of reactor No. 3 at the Ohi nuclear plant was ordered two weeks ago by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, in a decision that has spurred growing public protests....
Nope.
Noda's decision has drawn unusually vocal public opposition in normally compliant Japan, with many Japanese saying that he ignored safety concerns to protect the powerful nuclear industry.
Quit stereotyping the Japanese, will ya'?! It's obvious everyone has their breaking point; I'm waiting for Americans to hit theirs, and am wondering what is taking them so f***ing long.
Over the weekend, about 200 protesters blocked the road to the Ohi plant. Kansai Electric said it had enough staff members in the plant to restart the reactor, but a senior vice minister from the ministry in charge of nuclear power had to be ferried to the plant by boat.
‘‘I’m watching this with a tense feeling,’’ the official, Seishu Makino of the Trade Ministry, said of the restart, according to Japanese news reports. ‘‘The government has taken a necessary step forward despite controversy that has divided the nation.’’
Actually, they SEEM UNITED on the ANTI-NUKE thing!!!
About 1,000 protesters marched Sunday in central Tokyo, just two days after tens of thousands of chanting antinuclear demonstrators filled streets in front of the prime minister’s residence.
I gue$$ he couldn't hear them, although I can not imagine why.
Despite the protests, Kansai Electric said it had pulled out the control rods in the reactor core on Sunday evening local time, allowing nuclear fission to resume....
Does flipping you the finger mean the same thing in Japan?
--more--"
Related: Japanese Power Plant Post Out of Order
"Largest faction of Japan’s ruling party quits" July 03, 2012
TOKYO — The unpopular government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda suffered another setback Monday when the largest faction of his Democratic Party quit over a proposed tax increase, leaving the party barely in control of Parliament’s lower house.
Ichiro Ozawa, a former party head and its onetime power broker, led 49 other lawmakers in resigning from the party to oppose a bill backed by Noda to double the national sales tax to 10 percent by 2015.
Related: Japanese politician charged in scandal
Also see: Japan's Wizard of Oz
Never mind that man behind the curtain!
While the prime minister said the increase was needed to defray the costs of Japan’s rapidly aging population, Ozawa called it a betrayal of the party’s pledge not to raise taxes, made before a historic election swept it to power three years ago.
The defection left the Democrats with only 251 of the 480 seats in the lower house, the more powerful of Parliament’s two chambers because it selects the prime minister.
This could worsen Japan’s chronic political paralysis by weakening the Democrats’ grip on Parliament, when the opposition already controls the upper house.
It also appears likely to further erode the already lagging popularity of Noda’s Democrats.
Noda joined forces with the Liberal Democrats, Japan’s largest opposition party, to win passage of the tax increase in the lower house last week.
Approval in the upper house is expected soon.
--more--"
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Panel blames Japan nuclear disaster on errors; Faults regulatory failures, culture of conformity" by Hiroko Tabuchi | New York Times, July 06, 2012
TOKYO — The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a parliamentary inquiry concluded Thursday.
The report, released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, also warned that the plant may have been damaged by the earthquake March 11, 2011, even before the tsunami struck — a worrying assertion as the quake-prone country starts to bring its reactor fleet back online.
The commission challenged some of the primary story lines that the government and the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant have used to explain what went wrong in the early days of the crisis.
Translation: the authorities lied. They always do.
Despite assigning widespread blame, the report also avoids calling for censure of specific executives or officials. Some citizens’ groups have demanded that executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. face charges of criminal negligence — a step that Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the panel’s chairman, said Thursday was out of its purview. Criminal prosecution ‘‘is a matter for others to pursue,’’ Kurokawa said at a news conference after the report’s release.
“It was a profoundly manmade disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response,’’ said Kurokawa, a medical doctor and an academic fellow at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, in the report’s introduction.
The 641-page report criticized plant operator Tokyo Electric for being too quick to dismiss earthquake damage as a cause of the fuel meltdowns at three of the plant’s six reactors, which overheated when the site lost power. Tokyo Electric has said that the plant withstood the earthquake that rocked eastern Japan, instead blaming the disaster on what some experts have called a ‘‘once-in-a-millennium’’ tsunami that ensued. Such a rare calamity was beyond the scope of contingency planning, Tokyo Electric executives have suggested, and was unlikely to pose a threat to Japan’s other nuclear reactors in the foreseeable future.
But by suggesting that the plant may have sustained extensive damage from the earthquake — a far more frequent occurrence in Japan — the report in effect casts doubts on the safety of all of Japan’s nuclear plants. The report came just as a nuclear reactor in western Japan came back online Thursday, the first to restart since the Fukushima crisis.
The parliamentary report, based on more than 900 hours of hearings and interviews with 1,167 people, suggests that reactor No. 1, in particular, may have had earthquake damage — including the possibility that pipes burst in the shaking, leading to a loss of cooling even before the tsunami struck the plant about 30 minutes after the initial earthquake.
The report emphasized that a full assessment would be needed to review the inner workings of the reactors, which could take years.
It's still leaking radiation, and who knows what is going on with building 4.
Of course, some say I'm an alarmist which is why I am returning to my corporate paper and starting to believe.
‘‘However, it is impossible to limit the direct cause of the accident to the tsunami without substantive evidence. The commission believes that this is an attempt to avoid responsibility by putting all the blame on the unexpected [the tsunami],’’ the report said, ‘‘and not on the more foreseeable quake.’’
The commission charged that the government, Tokyo Electric, and nuclear regulators failed to implement basic safety measures despite being aware of risks posed by earthquakes, tsunamis, and other events that might disable power systems and put nuclear plants at risk.
Nothing about the possible impact of the USraeli-created Stuxnet virus.
Even though the government-appointed Nuclear Safety Commission revised earthquake resistance standards in 2006 and ordered nuclear operators across the country to inspect their reactors, for example, Tokyo Electric did not carry out any checks, and regulators did not follow up, the report said.
The report blamed the tepid response on collusion between the company, the government, and regulators — all of which had ‘‘betrayed the nation’s right to safety from nuclear accidents.’’
It's the same in every country no matter what you call their political or economic system!
Tokyo Electric ‘‘manipulated its cozy relationship with regulators to take the teeth out of regulations,’’ the report said. ‘‘There were many opportunities for taking preventive measures before March 11. The accident occurred because Tokyo Electric did not take these measures.’’
Sound FAMILIAR, Americans?
Regulators went along, said the report, which reserved its most condemning language for criticism of a culture in Japan that suppresses dissent and outside opinion, which might have prompted changes to the country’s lax nuclear controls.
Reminds me of an AmeriKan newspaper.
--more--"
Also see: Japanese zoo has rare panda birth
Back across the sea we go:
"Both Koreas suffering worst drought in a century" June 27, 2012
KOHYON-RI, North Korea — North Korea dispatched soldiers to pour buckets of water on parched fields and South Korean officials scrambled to save a rare mollusk threatened by the heat as the worst dry spell in a century gripped the Korean peninsula.
Parts of North Korea are experiencing the most severe drought since record keeping began nearly 105 years ago, meteorological officials in Pyongyang and Seoul said Tuesday.
The protracted drought is heightening worries about North Korea’s ability to feed its people. Two-thirds of North Korea’s 24 million people faced chronic food shortages, the United Nations said earlier this month while asking donors for $198 million in humanitarian aid for the country.
Even in South Phyongan and North and South Hwanghae provinces, which are traditionally North Korea’s ‘‘breadbasket,’’ thousands of acres of crops are withering away despite good irrigation systems, local officials said.
You mean the North Koreans DID NOT spend all their money on the military?
Related(?): Heat and drought threaten some states’ corn crop
I guess that's what happens to those that do.
Reservoirs are drying up, creating irrigation problems for farmers, said Ri Sun Pom, chairman of the Rural Economy Committee of Hwangju County.
A group of female soldiers with yellow towels tied around their heads fanned out across a farm in Kohyon-ri, Hwangju county, North Hwanghae province, with buckets to help water the fields.
An ox pulled a cart loaded with a barrel of water while fire engines and oil tankers were mobilized to help transport water.
The North Korean villages of Kohyon-ri and Ryongchon-ri were among several areas that journalists from the Associated Press visited in recent days.
Pak Tok Gwan, management board chairman of the Ryongchon Cooperative Farm in North Korea, said late last week that the farm could lose half its corn without early rain.
Mountainous North Korea, where less than 20 percent of the land is arable, has relied on outside food aid to help make up for a chronic shortage since a series of natural disasters and outmoded agricultural practices led to a famine in the 1990s.
:-(
--more--"
Related: Cutting Korea Post Short
I didn't this time; I gave you all the Glob gave me.
