Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines 777 confronts the world with a crisis that’s never going to end. The loss of 239 people is tragic enough, but the implications for air travel are still more frightening. The point, which nobody had believed was possible, is that a plane can […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com MANILA One long-running story forever dominates the front pages here. That’s corruption, bribery and cheating on a mass scale — so massive as to bear comparisons with that in big bully China. The story now is that of a few senators sending special funds to an agency charged […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The Russian bear is definitely waking up after a long period of hibernation. Russian troops have taken over the Crimean peninsula, and it’s hard to believe they’re about to leave under a blitzkrieg of scolding by President Obama and a phalanx of editorialists and European leaders. The Russian […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The Chinese are wielding a dangerous weapon that may have escaped the notice of military strategists. While everyone worries about China’s territorial claims and growing influence from the Indian subcontinent to the Yellow Sea and North Korea, the more immediate threat posed by Middle Kingdom expansionism is the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The North Korean propaganda machine is nothing if not super-skilled at emitting conflicting signals. One day they’re castigating the U.S. and South Korea for military exercises, and the next they’ve dropped the subject and are entertaining a bunch of elderly South Koreans at a reunion with their long-lost […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The visit of Donald Gregg, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, to Pyongyang has got to be a sign of hope for improving relations between North Korea and its two arch foes, the U.S. and South Korea. As head of a delegation from a little known organization called […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The Japanese don’t take kindly to people telling them what they should and shouldn’t teach. “As a sovereign nation, any country should be responsible for what to teach and how to teach it,” an experienced teacher in Japan told me when asked about this textbook controversy that so […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Nowhere does the phrase, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” apply more precisely than to Ahn Jung-Geun. Whether you call him a “terrorist,” as do the Japanese, or a heroic Korean revolutionary, as he is viewed in Korea and China, Ahn goes down in history for […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com WASHINGTON — Everybody here is talking about cyberspying. The National Security Agency has never had so much publicity. Until Edward Snowden came along, most people had never heard the initials “NSA.” Now President Obama is getting into the act big-time. In the hours after this newspaper comes out […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Why is it every time we get optimistic about North Korea “opening up” or making concessions or engaging in serious reconciliation, we get so disillusioned? Remember Kim Dae-Jung’s “Sunshine Policy?” The North Koreans repaid him for his generosity by cranking up their nuclear program and exploding their first […]