Salon.com > Foster Klug

South Korea, U.S. prepare for possible attack from North Korea

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:28:00 +0000

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North and South Korea staged dueling war games Monday as threatening rhetoric from the rivals rose to the highest level since North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island in 2010.

Enraged over the South's joint military drills with the United States and recent U.N. sanctions, Pyongyang has piled threat on top of threat, including vows to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. and to scrap the nearly 60-year-old armistice that ended the Korean War. Seoul has responded with tough talk of its own and has placed its troops on high alert.

North Korea's main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, reported that the armistice was nullified Monday as Pyongyang had earlier announced. The North followed through on another promise Monday, shutting down a Red Cross hotline that the North and South used for general communication and to discuss aid shipments and separated families' reunions.

The 11-day military drills that started Monday involve 10,000 South Korean and about 3,000 American troops. Those coincide with two months of separate U.S.-South Korean field exercises that began March 1.

U.N. could fuel North Korea’s propaganda machine

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:18:00 +0000

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Seven years of U.N. sanctions against North Korea have done nothing to derail Pyongyang's drive for a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the United States. They may have even bolstered the Kim family by giving their propaganda maestros ammunition to whip up anti-U.S. sentiment and direct attention away from government failures.

In the wake of fresh U.N. sanctions leveled at North Korea on Thursday for its latest nuclear test, the question is: Will this time be different?

Since 2006, North Korea has launched long-range rockets, tested a variety of missiles and conducted three underground nuclear explosions, the most recent on Feb. 12. Through it all, Pyongyang was undeterred by a raft of sanctions — both multilateral penalties from the United Nations and national sanctions from Washington, Tokyo and others — meant to punish the government and sidetrack its nuclear ambitions.

A problem with the approach, analysts said, is that outsiders routinely underestimate North Korea's knack for survival. The sanctions are intended to make life more difficult for a country that has crushing poverty, once suffered through a devastating famine and lost its Soviet backers long ago, but Pyongyang often manages to find some advantage.

Japanese fend for themselves as aid slowly trickles in

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:01:00 +0000

There may be no water, no power and no cell phone reception in this tsunami-struck town, but in the school that serves as a shelter, there are sizzling pans of fat, pink shrimp.

Relief supplies have only trickled into the long strip of northeast Japan demolished by a powerful earthquake and the wave it unleashed a week ago, leaving affected communities to fend for themselves.

Many have risen to the occasion.

No water for the toilets? No problem. Students in Karakuwa bring buckets of water from the school swimming pool to give survivors the dignity of a proper flush. In the kitchen, a giant rice cooker given to the school by a resident sits on a table, steam rising from the heaping mounds of rice inside.

"For a long time, in the countryside, even if you didn't have enough for yourself, you shared with others," said Noriko Sasaki, 63, as she sat on the ground outside another relief center in the town. "That is our culture. Even if they're not relatives, we feel as if they're sisters or brothers."

There are hardships -- a junior high hardly offers the comforts of home -- and while the sense of community runs all along the coast, not all survivors are as well off.

Hope and loss in Japan’s search for 8,000 missing

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:38:00 +0000

Line after line, a list on the wall of city hall reveals the dead. Some are named. Others are identified only by a short description.

Female. About 50. Peanuts in left chest pocket. Large mole. Seiko watch.

Male. 70-80 years old. Wearing an apron that says "Rentacom."

One set catches the eye of Hideki Kano, a man who appears to be in his 30s.

"I think that's my mom!" he says. He rushes out into the snow, headed for a makeshift morgue.

The list in Natori, and others along Japan's northeast coast, will only get longer.

Five days after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, the official death toll is more than 4,300. More than 8,000 people are still missing, and hundreds of national and international rescue teams are looking for them.

In the industrial town of Kamaishi, 70 British firefighters in bright orange uniforms clamber over piles of upturned cars to search a narrow row of pulverized homes. They wear personal radiation detectors amid fears of leaks from damaged nuclear plants far to the south.

One woman's body is found wedged beneath a refrigerator in a two-story home pushed onto its side.

"Today and tomorrow there is still hope that we will find survivors," says Pete Stevenson, head of the British rescue crews. "We'll just keep on carrying out the searches."