Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas ― North Korea’s top gun will have to try harder if he expects his threats of another nuclear test will win serious consideration in a U.S. presidential election year. Driving through the American heartland, you hear hardly a thing about the latest threats from Pyongyang. […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com Ho hum, here we go again. That seems to be the response to the latest rhetorical blasts from Pyongyang as U.S. and South Korean forces dive into their annual war games. A “preemptive nuclear strike”? Destruction of “bases of aggression”? Incineration of Seoul in “a sea of fire […]
Special to WorldTribune.com In a show of force aimed squarely at North Korea, four U.S. F-22 stealth fighters flew low over South Korea on Feb. 17. The F-22 Raptors flew alongside Korea’s F-15K Slam Eagle aircraft and U.S. F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets in a joint exercise out of Osan Air Base. “The F-22 Raptor […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com North Korean rocket launches and nuclear tests risk getting boring. The pattern is familiar: expressions of outrage, loud condemnation ― then nothing. Has the latest one-two punch of nuclear test and rocket launch changed a thing? The easy answer is not really ― but think again. The lines […]
Special to WorldTribune.com North Korea’s recently-launched satellite is “tumbling in orbit,” rendering it virtually “useless,” a U.S. official said. If the description is accurate, the satellite launched by Pyongyang on Feb. 7 would be incapable of functioning in any useful way, a senior U.S. defense official told CNN. Kwon Ki-hyun, a spokesperson for South Korea’s […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com MANILA ― No city suffered more in World War II than this sprawling metropolis of more than 10 million people. No enemy was more cruel, more hostile, more destructive than the Japanese after defeating U.S. forces in the Philippines at the outset of the war in the Pacific. […]
Special to WorldTribune.com Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Iran says it now has access to more than $100 billion worth of overseas assets that were unfrozen as a result of a landmark nuclear deal with world powers. Government spokesman Mohammad Bagher Nobakht said much of the money was stored in banks in China, India, […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com Donald Gregg, U.S. ambassador to Korea as the country was making the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, did not take kindly to my column [A former U.S. diplomat’s inexplicable defense of Kim Jong-Un] in which I quoted him, accurately, as praising Kim Jong-Un “for improving the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com Donald Gregg, former U.S. ambassador to Korea, makes an astounding statement in a piece published after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test. Striking “a very positive note,” he praises “the performance of Kim Jong-Un in improving the North Korean economy and downplaying nuclear threats and nuclear weapons development.” It […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, EastAsiaIntel.com WASHINGTON ― Park Yu-Ha, under fire in Korea for writing “Comfort Women of the Empire,” offers what she believes may be a way to reach an understanding with Japan on the whole controversy. Why not, she suggested in a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center, form a […]