Special to WorldTribune.com By Lee Jong-Heon, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — North Korea has bolstered coastal surveillance as its citizens seek sea routes to South Korea following tightened controls over the land borders with China, a military source here said. The North’s navy has stepped up patrols along the coast to deter people from fleeing the famine-hit […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — Hillary Clinton would like nothing better than to wrap up her tour as one of America’s most successful secretaries of state than by going to North Korea and persuading North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Il to return to six-party talks in return for a serious sign of […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Lee Jong-Heon, East-Asia-Intel.com North Korea, which has never tolerated any unauthorized spread of information, has been tapping such popular social networking services as Facebook and Twitter to wage a new type of propaganda offensive. The secretive country’s main government-run Web site recently added icons for Internet users to post contents on […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com WASHINGTON — Call it a matter of conflicting — or colliding — messages. South Korean conservatives have forced a free-trade agreement with the United States through a fractious National Assembly. A U.S. Congress “supercommittee” has demonstrated the weakness of the American system of governance by abject, humiliating failure […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com WASHINGTON — The FTA (free-trade agreement) with the United States is an obscenity in the eyes of leftists in South Korea who believe their conservative government is foisting it on them. Hostility toward the KORUS FTA, as it is known, is such that the political and ideological foes […]
Special to WorldTribune.com LONDON — More details on North Korea’s presence in Iran’s missile and nuclear program have come to light, according to news reports from Seoul, South Korea. A diplomatic source said Pyongyang has deployed hundreds of specialists in nuclear weapons and missile facilities in Iran. The source, believed to be an intelligence official, […]
By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The image of South Korea’s highly conservative, arch-capitalist President Lee Myung-Bak waving happily in a sea of little paper flags featuring a gold star in a red field was just another ceremonial photo for the Seoul media. The picture, Lee smiling as he and Vietnam’s President Truong Tan Sang and wife […]
By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — The timing of the annual descent on South Korea of the United States defense chief was uncanny. Here the people of the South Korean capital had just elected an anti-American, anti-bases, anti-everything protester as their mayor, and here was Leon Panetta, the defense secretary, talking about the North Koreans’ non-stop “threat” […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — Yogi Berra may not have had United States-North Korean talks in mind when he remarked, “This is like deja vu all over again,” but the phrase would seem to catch the spirit of the dialogue coming up Monday and Tuesday in Geneva. While North Korea evinces […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — The United States and South Korea stood on the brink of a brave new world on Friday with a triumphant state visit to Washington by South Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak marking the passage by both houses of the U.S. Congress of the much-delayed Korea-U.S. Free Trade […]