"S. Korean official fired in groping case" by Choe Sang-Hun | New York Times, May 11, 2013
SEOUL, South Korea — President Park Geun-hye of South Korea has fired her spokesman for committing an ‘‘unsavory’’ act while he was traveling with her on her state visit to Washington, her office announced Friday, after South Korean media reported an allegation that the official sexually groped a young woman.
The firing of the spokesman, Yoon Chang-jung, was announced after Yoon abruptly broke off from the presidential delegation visiting Washington and returned home earlier this week.
The whereabouts of Yoon, 56, have not been known since his return. Lee Nam-ki, Park’s senior presidential press secretary and Yoon’s immediate supervisor, said that the spokesman was fired for an ‘‘unsavory act that was inappropriate for a high-ranking government official and damaged the national prestige.’’
South Korean journalists reported that Yoon was accused of unwanted sexual contact of a woman hired as an intern at the South Korean Embassy in Washington.
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What she was doing while here:
"South Korean leader voices concerns on Pyongyang" by Julie Pace | Associated Press, May 08, 2013
WASHINGTON — Projecting a united front, President Obama and South Korea’s new leader warned North Korea on Tuesday against further nuclear provocations, with Obama declaring that the days when Pyongyang could “create a crisis and elicit concessions” were over.
Obama also disputed the notion that his cautious response to reported chemical weapons use in Syria — a move he had said would cross a “red line” — could embolden North Korea’s unpredictable young leader and other US foes.
“Whether it’s bin Laden or Khadafy, if we say we’re taking a position, I would think at this point the international community has a pretty good sense that we typically follow through on our commitments,” Obama said, referring to the Al Qaeda commander Osama bin Laden and former Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy, both of whom were killed during Obama’s watch.
Tuesday’s meetings between Obama and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea followed months of increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea conducted an underground atomic test in February and had appeared ready for another. New US intelligence assessments also showed for the first time that North Korea might have the know-how to launch a nuclear-armed missile.
Ahead of Tuesday’s talks, the North appeared to send mixed messages.
I get them in my newspaper every day.
US officials said Pyongyang removed from a launch pad a set of medium-range ballistic missiles that had been readied for possible test-firing. But North Korea also warned the United States and South Korea that it would retaliate if joint military exercise between the two allies resulted in any shells landing on its territory.
Speaking at the White House, Obama and Park warned Pyongyang of unspecified consequences if it pressed ahead with provocative actions, with Obama vowing to protect the United States and its allies using both “conventional and nuclear forces.”
(Blog editor sick of his saber-rattling, war-mongering president)
Still, in keeping with their countries’ longstanding policies, the two leaders left open the possibility of direct negotiations should the North signal its readiness to end its nuclear pursuits or take other meaningful actions.
“Should North Korea choose the path to becoming a responsible member of the community of nations, we are willing to provide assistance, together with the international community,” Park said.
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Related: Parking This Post About Korea
Can't put in the bank:
"Chinese institution severs ties with North Korean bank; Another step in global push to isolate country" by Keith Bradsher and Nick Cumming-Bruce | New York Times, May 08, 2013
HONG KONG — The state-controlled Bank of China said Tuesday that it had ended all dealings with a key North Korean bank in what appeared to be the strongest public Chinese response yet to North Korea’s willingness to brush aside warnings from Beijing and push ahead with its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
Chinese analysts said the Bank of China’s move carried clear diplomatic significance at a time when the Obama administration has been urging China to limit its longtime support for the North Korean government. The Bank of China’s action also dovetails with a longstanding US effort to target the North Korean government’s access to foreign currency. Most countries’ banks already refuse to have any financial dealings with North Korea, making the Bank of China’s role particularly important.
“I personally don’t believe that this would have been a business decision by the bank alone, and it’s probably a signal from the government to reflect its views on North Korea,” said Cai Jian, a professor and the deputy director of the Center for Korean Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“This appears to be a step by the government to show that it’s willing to cooperate with the international community in strengthening sanctions or perhaps taking steps against illicit North Korean financial transactions,” he said.
And in another sign of international pressure on North Korea, the UN announced Tuesday that it had appointed a prominent Australian jurist to lead a panel tasked with investigating human rights abuses and possible crimes against humanity in North Korea “with a view to ensuring full accountability.”
I can't see that helping matters.
Meanwhile, North Korea on Tuesday threatened the United States and South Korea over joint naval drills taking place this week in tense Yellow Sea waters ahead of a Washington summit by the allies’ leaders.
That's always no big deal; the North Korean leader passes gas and it's called a threat to use chemical weapons.
The warning, however, was softer than North Korea’s recent highly bellicose rhetoric, and followed the North’s removal of two missiles from a launch site where they had been readied for possible test firing, US officials said.
Yeah, yeah, but moves deescalating war are no good!
In the highly conditional threat, the section of the Korean People’s Army responsible for operations in North Korea’s southwest said it would hit back if any shells fall in its territory during the drills, which began Monday and are to end Friday. Should the allies respond to that, it said the North Korean military will strike five South Korean islands along the aquatic frontline between the countries.
Regarding the banking situation, Ruan Zongze, a former Chinese diplomat in Washington who is now a vice president of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, said the Chinese government was responding to a recent UN resolution imposing further sanctions on North Korea after its nuclear and ballistic missile tests and was not responding to US pressure. He noted that the Chinese government had recently encouraged state-controlled enterprises to follow the resolution in their dealings with North Korea.
Michael Kirby, a former Australian high court judge and legal reformer, will lead the human rights panel, a Commission of Inquiry, the UN Human Rights Council said in a statement released in Geneva. Its other members will be a Serbian human rights campaigner, Sonja Biserko, and Marzuki Darusman, who is already serving as a UN investigator monitoring North Korea.
Key issues for the panel include North Korea’s network of political prison camps, believed by human rights organizations to hold up to 200,000 people; the state’s manipulation of access to food as a tool of political repression; and enforced disappearances, including abductions of Japanese. All such abuses may constitute crimes against humanity, Darusman said in a report to the Human Rights Council in March.
So when is the U.N going to investigate the U.S. for such things?
In a single-sentence statement Tuesday afternoon, the Bank of China said it has “already issued a bank account closing notice to North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, and has ceased accepting funds transfer business related to this bank account.”
A spokeswoman for the bank declined to say whether money in the account would be frozen or returned to North Korea. The spokeswoman, who insisted that her name not be used in keeping with bank policy, said the account had been closed by the end of April.
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Well, then where is North Korea going to get money?
"S. Korea to quit joint industrial complex" by Chico Harlan | Washington Post, April 27, 2013
SEOUL — The Kaesong Industrial Complex had stood as the chief symbol of cooperation between the neighbors after opening in 2004 as a capitalist bubble on the northern side of the border where South Korean companies employed cheap North Korean labor....
You would have thought they wouldn't have taken advantage of their own countryman.
Until Friday, South Korea had seemed hopeful that the facility might soon resume normal operations. More than 800 South Koreans had been inside Kaesong when the North’s barricade was put into effect, and 175 of them elected to stay — a grim three-week holdout aimed at saving their businesses. But South Korean officials say the North subsequently blocked shipments of food and medical supplies, creating an ‘‘urgent’’ humanitarian problem....
South Korea’s decision followed a threat issued a day earlier to take unspecified ‘‘significant measures’’ if the North did not accept an offer for working-level talks on Kaesong by noon Friday. Several hours after the deadline, North Korea rejected the talks in a statement released by its state-run news agency. In particular, the North accused South Korea of adopting a hostile policy toward the ruling Kim family and allowing activists to hold recent anti-North protests.
The North’s statement warned vaguely of a ‘‘final decisive and crucial measure’’ if South Korea continued to provoke it, but the statement also offered some assurances, saying that South Korean workers would be allowed to freely leave Kaesong if they chose.
The North will ‘‘responsibly take all the humanitarian measures including the provision of guarantee for their personal safety that may arise in the course of the withdrawal,’’ said the statement, attributed to the National Defense Commission, a top decision-making body.
At Kaesong, 123 small- and medium-size South Korean companies had employed virtually an entire town of North Koreans, paying them between $2 and $3 per day.
When Kaesong was conceived, South Korean officials hoped it would not only spur wider North-South cooperation, but also push the communist government in Pyongyang to accept broader forms of capitalism in its tightly controlled economy. The facility failed to transform the North — but it did generate an estimated $80 million annually for the country’s leaders, who collected the bulk of their workers’ salaries.
So far, neither North nor South Korea has publicly given up hope about reviving Kaesong. The North says its barricade is ‘‘temporary.’’
On Friday, during a meeting with foreign affairs and security ministers, South Korean President Park Geun-hye said she preferred to resume normal operations at the facility. But she also did not want to ‘‘wait endlessly’’ to have talks with the North to resolve the situation, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
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"Last workers start to leave Korea factories
SEOUL — The last groups of South Korean managers began pulling out Saturday from a factory park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong after their government ordered them to leave the last symbol of detente. Officials said 125 South Koreans left Saturday, and the last 50 will leave Monday. Separately, North Korea said Kenneth Bae, an American from Washington state who has been detained since November, has gone on trial on a charge of plotting to overthrow the government (AP)."
About Bae:
North Korea sentences American to 15 years hard labor
US says North Korea should release American citizen
He must be an agent or asset then.
"N. Korea vows no deals on US citizen" by Choe Sang-Hun | New York Times, May 06, 2013
SEOUL — North Korea said Sunday it would not use an imprisoned US citizen as a political bargaining chip, rejecting the possibility of allowing any prominent Americans to visit to request the prisoner’s release, as it had in similar cases in the past.
The United States has called for the immediate release of the man, Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American who was sentenced last week to 15 years of hard labor for committing ‘‘hostile acts’’ against the North.
Bae, 44, was arrested in the northeastern North Korean city of Rason in November after leading a group of businessmen there from Yanji, China. The North’s refusal to release him adds a new source of tension in the relationship between the United States and North Korea as Washington tries to hold a tough line with the North over its nuclear program.
The war makers are trying to use anything they can, even a provocation by one of their own.
Bae is the sixth American known to have been arrested in the North since 2009. The rest have been released or deported. But two were released in 2009 only after former president Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang, the North’s capital, and met with Kim Jong Il, the North’s leader at the time. Another was released in 2010 after a visit by former president Jimmy Carter.
This time, North Korea ‘‘has no plan to invite anyone of the US as regards the issue,’’ a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying Sunday by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The United States has refused to allow North Korea to use the fate of imprisoned US citizens as leverage to force the opening of official negotiations. It did not officially endorse the previous visits by Clinton and Carter.
But analysts who study North Korea’s behavior said the government, in its internal propaganda, had portrayed the visits as examples of Washington’s capitulation.
Did I mention I'm tired of pot-hollering-kettle crap media?
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Yeah, that's them.
Also see: Korean Hostage Crisis
He's a CIA spy with Christian cover?
"N. Korea gives details of allegations against American; Says man worked to undermine Kim’s regime" by Foster Klug | Associated Press, May 10, 2013
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea delivered its most in-depth account yet of the case against a Korean-American sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor, accusing him late Thursday of smuggling in inflammatory literature and trying to establish a base for anti-Pyongyang activities at a border city hotel.
Still, the long list of allegations included no statement from Kenneth Bae, other than claims that he confessed and did not want an attorney present during his sentencing last week for what Pyongyang called hostile acts against the state.
Since the sentencing came during a period of tentative diplomatic moves following weeks of high tension and North Korean threats of nuclear and missile strikes on Washington and Seoul, outside analysts have said Pyongyang may be using Bae as bait to win diplomatic concessions in the standoff about its nuclear weapons program. North Korea repeated its denial of such speculation in the new statement, but the pattern has occurred repeatedly.
Those threats, btw, we are about as serious as a pea-shooter.
North Korea’s state media described the statement from an unidentified Supreme Court spokesman as a response to US government and media assertions that the legal case against Bae was unreasonable and other claims ‘‘that he was not tried in a transparent manner and [the North] was trying to use this issue as a political bargaining chip.’’ The spokesman said Bae, 44, could have faced death but the court reduced the penalty because he confessed. He was arrested in North Korea in November.
Bae, a Washington state resident described by friends as a devout Christian and a tour operator, is at least the sixth American detained in North Korea since 2009.
That is his CIA NOC.
The others eventually were deported or released without serving out their terms, some after trips to Pyongyang by prominent Americans, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. There has been no sign yet of a high-profile American envoy set to make a clemency mission to North Korea, which has only recently eased a near-daily, weekslong torrent of threats that followed greater UN sanctions about Pyongyang’s February nuclear test.
The statement said Bae gave anti-Pyongyang lectures in China and ‘‘infiltrated’’ about 250 students into the city of Rason, a special economic zone in North Korea’s far northeastern region bordering China and Russia. It did not elaborate on the students’ activities, however.
Young leader Kim Jong Un has the power to grant special pardons under the constitution. Earlier this week, former NBA star Dennis Rodman attempted to use his friendship with Kim on Bae’s behalf, asking the leader to ‘‘do me a solid’’ and release the American. Rodman visited North Korea in February and apparently hit it off with Kim, a die-hard basketball fan. Pyongyang hasn’t responded to Rodman’s appeal on Twitter
The United States has called for the North to immediately release Bae. It relies on Swedish diplomats in Pyongyang to deal with Bae’s case because North Korea and the United States have had no formal diplomatic relations since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce instead of a peace treaty.
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I grabbed too much, and I'm sorry.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"On Monday, the United States and South Korea started a two-day joint naval exercise involving a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier."
They just finished drills, so what this is saying is the "military drills" in Korea are ceaseless right now.
