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criscimagnael

North Korea Launches Suspected ICBM and Two Other Ballistic Missiles - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-korea-ballistic-missiles.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • North Korea launched three ballistic missiles, including a possible intercontinental ballistic missile, toward the waters off its east coast on Wednesday, South Korea’s military said. The launches came just after President Biden wrapped up a trip to the region, where he vowed to strengthen deterrence against the North’s growing nuclear threat.
  • It was North Korea’s 17th missile test this year.
  • Shortly after the North’s tests, the South Korean and United States militaries each launched a land-to-land missile off the east coast of South Korea to demonstrate what Seoul called the allies’ “swift striking capability to deter further provocations from North Korea,” as well as the South Korean military’s “overwhelming” ability to launch “precision strikes at the origin of North Korean provocation.”
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  • The first missile launched on Wednesday by North Korea appeared to have been an ICBM, South Korean defense officials said. But it flew only 224 miles, the officials said, indicating that North Korea did not want to launch the missile on a full ICBM trajectory over the Pacific while Mr. Biden was in the air on his way back to Washington after a visit to Seoul and Tokyo.
  • The second missile launched on Wednesday apparently failed because it “disintegrated” after reaching an altitude of 12 miles, the South Korean officials said. The third projectile was a short-range ballistic missile.
  • The missile launches on Wednesday were a strong signal that North Korea was embarking on a new cycle of tensions in the Korean Peninsula despite the country’s first reported outbreak of the coronavirus. It also constituted North Korea’s public reaction to Mr. Biden’s trip to the region, where he met with the leaders of South Korea and Japan and vowed to step up measures, including joint military exercises, to help deter the growing nuclear and missile threat from the North.
  • But like his conservative predecessors, he attached an important caveat: Such economic largess would be possible only “if North Korea genuinely embarks on a process to complete denuclearization.”
  • In the same speech, he seemed to take a page from the playbook of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia when he warned that his nuclear arsenal was not just to deter foreign invasion, but also to be used “if any forces try to violate the fundamental interests of our state.”
  • “North Korea continues to improve, expand and diversify its conventional and nuclear missile capabilities, posing an increasing risk to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces, allies, and partners in the region,” John Plumb, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month. “Most of North Korea’s ballistic missiles have an assessed capability to carry nuclear payloads.”
katyshannon

U.S. B-52 joins flyover after North Korea's bomb claim - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...b-52-south-korea

u s joins flyover north korea bomb claim cnn politics history US crisis

shared by katyshannon on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Days after North Korea claimed it tested a hydrogen bomb, the United States responded with a display of military might on the Korean Peninsula.
  • A B-52 bomber jet from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam flew over Osan, South Korea, on Sunday "in response to a recent nuclear test by North Korea," United States Pacific Command said.
  • "This was a demonstration of the ironclad U.S. commitment to our allies in South Korea, in Japan, and to the defense of the American homeland," said PACOM Commander Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr.
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  • The B-52 was flanked by South Korean F-15 fighter jets and U.S. F-16 fighter jets.
  • The show of solidarity has caught the attention -- and likely the ire -- of North Korea.
  • "They absolutely took notice," CNN's Will Ripley reported from the North Korean capital. "A lot of North Korean military commanders find U.S. bombers especially threatening, given the destruction here in Pyongyang during the Korean War, when much of the city was flattened," Ripley said.
  • The show of solidarity between the U.S. and South Korea came after Seoul reactivated loudspeakers broadcasting propaganda into North Korea near the heavily fortified border between the countries.Pyongyang considers the broadcasts tantamount to an act of war, and in the past has responded to them with artillery fire.
  • North Korea bragged about the "spectacular success" of its first hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday. But outside the hermit kingdom, the claims have been met with skepticism.
  • The United States, South Korea, Japan and China have been testing for airborne or ground radiation in the region, but say they haven't found any evidence supporting the claim of an H-bomb test.Wednesday's test yielded a blast of a similar magnitude to a previous North Korean test in 2013, said Martin Navias, a military expert at King's College London.
  • "We won't know for another few days or weeks whether this was (a hydrogen bomb)," he said. "It doesn't look like one. ... One would have expected [the power] to be greater if it was an H-bomb."One analyst in Seoul cast doubt on whether enough material could be collected to ever find out definitively what Pyongyang has tested.
Javier E

'Parasite' paints a nightmarish picture of Korean inequality. The reality in America is... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-reality-america-is-even-worse

korea inequality us parasite movie

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is a dark parable about the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor in South Korea. It’s a story of a society where the working class have no hope of attaining a better life, and instead squabble among themselves for the literal scraps of prosperity cast off by the wealthy as they move serenely through their charmed lives.
  • By any number of measures, inequality here in the States is much, much worse than in Bong’s South Korea.
  • Returning to the pie analogy, the richest American gets a whopping 39 slices, while the bottom 50 don’t have any. In fact, they are actually in pie debt, collectively owing a tenth of a slice to their creditors (most of whom, incidentally, are probably in that top 1 percent).
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  • Think of it this way: If South Korea were a country of 100 people and the nation’s wealth were a pie with 100 slices, the richest person would get 25 slices of that pie all to himself, while the poorest 50 would have to split two slices between them all. That disparity is at the heart of “Parasite.”
  • t the bottom half owns something of value. In America, the bottom 50 percent have literally none of the nation’s wealth and, in fact, have a negative net worth. That’s a relatively new phenomenon: As recently as the late 1980s, the bottom half of Americans could claim several percent of the country’s wealth as their own.
  • As many economists have noted, growing inequality in the United States is no accident, but rather the direct result of policy decisions made by lawmakers and their wealthy allies in the business community.
  • “People in positions of power tend to capture political processes.” The wealthy use their power to write rules that allow them to accrue more wealth.
  • there are some big differences. South Korea provides universal health care, for starters — something many economists and public health experts have identified as a key tool in the fight against poverty. The country also provides much more support for working families: New parents can claim up to 40 weeks of paid leave (American parents, by contrast, are guaranteed nothing). The country also provides universal early-childhood education, something lacking in the United States, and subsidizes child care for children under age 3.
  • On the revenue side, South Korea collects bigger taxes on corporate profits than the United States does. South Korea also collects four times as much revenue (as a share of GDP) from estate, gift and inheritance taxes as the United States does. Those taxes, if used correctly, have the potential to be a powerful corrective of runaway inequality.
  • it’s not difficult to imagine that if the United States had similar social programs and collected a similar level of corporate and estate taxes, the distribution of wealth here would be similar to that in South Korea.
  • The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”
zachcutler

North Korea-South Korea tensions: Warning shots fired - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

north korea shots fired Obama

shared by zachcutler on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Tensions between North Korea and South Korea escalated on Wednesday after South Korea said an unidentified aircraft approached the demilitarized zone.
  • It was not immediately clear whether the drone was armed or what its mission was.
  • However, a former U.S. Army senior intelligence officer who served there suggested the purpose was either surveillance or instigation by North Korea.
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  • "We are concerned that additional North Korean provocations could heighten tensions, lead to a cycle of escalation," he said
  • There could be firing by the North Koreans, which then could prompt South Koreans to retaliate very quickly," she said
  • In an additional provocation, South Korean soldiers on Wednesday found anti-South Korea and anti-U.S. propaganda leaflets
  • North Korea defends its nuclear ambitions
  • But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday defended his nuclear program, saying his country needs the capability to strike the United States if provoked.
  • Researchers with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury said that the heavily edited film seemed to show black smoke, several fireballs and even possibly falling debris
julia rhodes

South Korea Proposes Resuming Reunions of War-Divided Families - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-of-war-divided-families.html

culture crisis policy south korea north war

shared by julia rhodes on 06 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • South Korea’s president proposed Monday that the two Koreas improve their tense relations by resuming the reunions of families separated since the Korean War, a humanitarian program that seemed close to being renewed last year but was scuttled as negotiations soured.
  • President Park Geun-hye’s overture came five days after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, urged that Seoul and Pyongyang create “a favorable climate for improved relations” in a New Year’s Day speech.
  • Ms. Park, a conservative, made two other conciliatory gestures toward the North, offering to increase humanitarian aid to the impoverished country and to let South Korean civic groups provide assistance to its farmers and ranchers. But she expressed skepticism about the prospect of meeting with Mr. Kim, whose government has until recently exhorted South Koreans to overthrow her “fascist dictatorship.”
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  • She also said it had become “impossible” to predict “what will happen to the North and what actions it will take” since the purge and execution last month of Mr. Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, who was long considered Mr. Kim’s mentor and the second-highest-ranking figure in his secretive government.
  • The Korean War, which began in 1950, was fought to a stalemate and an ultimate cease-fire in 1953. Since then, no exchanges of letters, telephone calls or emails have been allowed between North and South Koreans, and family reunions remain a highly emotional issue and an indicator of the state of relations on the peninsula.
  • After months of harsh rhetoric following the North’s nuclear test last February, North and South Korea reached an agreement last August to revive the reunions. But the North later ended the talks, blaming the South for refusing to resume an inter-Korean tourism program at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, which had been highly lucrative for Pyongyang until it was shut down in 2008.
  • South Korea halted the flow of aid and investment to the North in 2008, demanding that Pyongyang give up its nuclear weapons. It also curtailed inter-Korean trade following the sinking of a South Korean naval ship in 2010, which Seoul says was caused by a North Korean torpedo attack.
  • Mr. Kim made similarly conciliatory comments toward the South during his New Year’s Day speech in 2013, but they were followed by a series of provocative acts, including its February nuclear test. Just last month, Pyongyang sent a letter to Ms. Park’s office threatening “strikes without warning.”
julia rhodes

China Looms Over Response to Blast Test by North Korea - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...north-korea-nuclear-test.html

china response politics crisis policy obama north korea nytimes test nuclear

shared by julia rhodes on 14 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • At the United Nations, the desire to impose ever harsher sanctions on North Korea to try to curb its development of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles has long stalled in the face of Chinese opposition
  • They include banning specific, high-tech items used in the nuclear program, like epoxy paste for centrifuges; limiting or outlawing some banking transactions; and a far more stringent inspection of ships bound to and from North Korea.
  • “If we had the kind of product listing and focus on financial flows and interdiction on North Korea that we placed on Iran, we would not be in this spot,”
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  • But the sanctions in place are almost exclusively focused on nuclear and ballistic missile activity.
  • One nuclear test will not make China’s new administration decide to ‘abandon North Korea,’ but it will definitely worsen China-North Korea relations
  • there is little chance that the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, will move quickly to change the nation’s long-held policy of propping up the walled-off government that has long served as a buffer against closer intrusion by the United States on the Korean Peninsula.
  • Chinese military strategists adhere to the doctrine that they cannot afford to abandon their ally, no matter how bad its behavior, analysts here say.
  • Indeed, relations between the two countries are conducted largely between the two parties rather than between the two foreign ministries, the more normal diplomatic channel.
  • China will almost certainly join the United States in supporting tougher sanctions over Tuesday’s test, accompanied by sterner reprimands from Beijing against its recalcitrant ally in Pyongyang, which ignored Chinese entreaties not to take provocative actions.
  • With Hu out of the picture, the administration is intent on determining whether Xi Jinping will prove more attentive to U.S. security concerns
  • China’s calculations will be crucial to what happens at the Security Council, where the policy has always been to pursue unanimity over toughness; it is considered far better to get all members on board to send a message to North Korea rather than have China abstain or worse, veto.
  • “Threatening a missile-capable warhead with a successful third nuclear test gives the United States, South Korea and Japan good reason to step up their regional ballistic missile defense capabilities,” said Siegfried S. Hecker,
  • Some experts say it needs to keep up the tough talk, even if it understands that its efforts at the Security Council may not do much to limit the North’s capabilities.
  • Now experts say the North may be simply trying to wait the United States out, hoping it will eventually recognize its program as it did Pakistan’s.
  • As the world’s powers struggle to refine their policies, North Korea continues to make technological advances. A long-range rocket test in December has been judged by outside experts to have been a success after many failures.
  • “It moves the question of North Korea as a nuclear contender from ‘if’ to ‘when,’ ” said one senior Obama administration official. “The ‘when’ may still be years away, but at least now it is in sight.”
runlai_jiang

North Korea: South proposes Olympics delegation talks - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-42538323

shared by runlai_jiang on 03 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • South Korea has offered high-level talks with North Korea next Tuesday to discuss its possible participation in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.
  • Kim Jong-un, said earlier he was considering sending a team to Pyeongchang in South Korea for the Games in February.
  • South Korea's president said he saw the offer as a "groundbreaking chance" to improve relations.
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  • Referring to the possible North-South dialogue he tweeted: "Perhaps that is good news, perhaps not - we will see."
  • If the two countries do meet, Hyung Eun Kim from the BBC's Korean service says, they are expected to talk logistics:What route the North might take into the host countryWhether the athletes would come with a cheer-leading squadWhether the two countries would issue a joint declaration
  • in December 2015 in the Kaesong joint industrial zone, ended without any agreement and the agenda was not made public.
  • South Korea proposed two bilateral meetings: one focusing on military talks and another that would reunite families separated by the war. Neither happened and instead the North continued to test-fire missiles.
  • It raises intriguing possibilities in the wake of a year where the drift has been entirely negative: Pyongyang making significant strides in its nuclear and missile programmes Growing external pressure to isolate North Korea Genuine fears that the Trump administration might be on the path to a new conflict on the Korean peninsula
  • North Korea has participated in the Olympics before, but not in South Korea. It boycotted the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.
  • Korean Air Flight 858 exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing more than 100 people. A North Korean spy later said Pyongyang had ordered her to plant it to create chaos in South Korea.
  • Pyeongchang, approximately 180km (110 miles) east of Seoul, will host both the Winter Olympics in February and the Winter Paralympics in March.
malonema1

The key players attending North Korea-South Korea summit - 0 views

beta.nbcnews.com/...rea-south-korea-summit-n868891

culture policy politics

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met for the first time at a historic summit Friday.The neighbors technically remain at war.
  • One of the key issues to be addressed is North Korea’s nuclear program, which has been at the center of tensions between Seoul and Pyongyang, as well alarming China and the United States.The inter-Korean meeting precedes an equally high-stakes diplomatic gambit involving President Donald Trump and Kim. However, the date and location for that summit remains uncle
  • If the current overture bears fruit, it will be one of the ironies of history that Kim Jong Un’s bloody consolidation of power provided him with the impunity to pursue peace with his nation’s mortal enemy, the United States. Believed to have ordered the deaths of anyone viewed as a potential threat to his rule, Kim also personally oversaw the acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile programs. The biggest question now is whether he is actually willing to cede ground on what has been North Korea’s long-held ambition to be a nuclear power.
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  • diplomat with a 30-year career behind him, Ri Yong Ho is a former ambassador to the United Kingdom. Fluent in English, only last year Ri stood in front of the U.N. General Assembly and called Trump “President Evil” and “Commander-in-Grief.”
  • The liberal Moon swept into power after the divisive impeachment of his predecessor, and promised to pursue better relations with his northern neighbor. A human rights lawyer by trade, Moon was imprisoned as a student for his role in protesting against military strongman Park Chung-hee. Moon also served in South Korea’s special forces in the DMZ during a period of exceptionally high tensions. He promised to pursue a policy toward North Korea following in the pattern of the “Sunshine Policy” of his liberal predecessors. His challenge has been to persuade the Trump administration — and conservatives inside South Korea — of his dedication to the Seoul-Washington alliance.
  • South Korea’s top spy has been the architect of previous summits involving North Korea, and is viewed as an honest broker by Pyongyang. In the 1990s he lived in North Korea for two years, working on an international agreement that would have supplied the country with a non-military nuclear power reactor. Having studied at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, Suh is also comfortable in Washington D.C., where he is well-known and respected.
millerco

North Korea Says It Has the Right to Shoot Down U.S. Warplanes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-north-korea.html

Us history Trump politics north korea kim jong-un

shared by millerco on 25 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • North Korea Says It Has the Right to Shoot Down U.S. Warplanes
  • North Korea’s foreign minister escalated tensions with the United States on Monday, saying that President Trump’s threatening comments about the country and its leadership were “a declaration of war” and that North Korea had the right to shoot down American warplanes, even if they are not in North Korean air space.
  • “The whole world should clearly remember it was the U.S. who first declared war on our country,” the foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, told reporters
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  • “Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country,” he said.
  • The North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said last week: “Now that Trump has denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world and made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history that he would destroy the D.P.R.K. [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”
  • Mr. Ri, speaking two days after American warplanes flew close to the North’s coast, added that “in light of the declaration of war by Trump, all options will be on the operations table of the supreme leadership” of North Korea.
  • While North Korea has reserved the right to take pre-emptive action against the United States and South Korea, Mr. Ri’s threat to shoot down American planes in international airspace was a new element in the standoff.
  • Referring to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the North Korean leadership may not “be around much longer,” Mr. Ri said that the question of “who would be around much longer will be answered” by North Korea.
  • The Pentagon said on Saturday that the Air Force had sent B-1B bombers and F-15C fighters over waters north of the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas, in response to what it called the North Korean government’s “reckless behavior.”
  • It was the farthest north “any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft have flown off North Korea’s coast in the 21st century,”
  • In April 1969, North Korean fighter jets shot down an unarmed United States Lockheed EC-121 spy plane on a North Korean intelligence-gathering mission over the Sea of Japan, with a loss of 31 American lives.
edencottone

North Korea's Kim Yo Jong breaks silence to warn US against 'causing a stink' - CNNPoli... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by edencottone on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea's leader, warned the Biden administration against "causing a stink at its first step" on Monday, hours after the White House said it had not received a response to its outreach to Pyongyang.
  • "If it wants to sleep in peace for (the) coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step," she said. The warning comes as the US and South Korea conduct scaled-down, simulated military exercises and US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have touched down in the region for meetings with their Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
  • On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration had reached out to North Korea, noting they have "a number of channels, as we always have had, that we can reach out through."
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  • "Diplomacy is always our goal. Our goal is to reduce the risk of escalation. But, to date, we have not received any response," Psaki said, noting that the outreach "follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage."
  • However, experts told CNN prior to Kim Yo Jong's message that Pyongyang was likely to rebuff diplomatic efforts for the time-being for a number of reasons including the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden team's ongoing North Korea policy review, the meetings in the region and above all, the administration's rhetoric.
  • "That's just a non-starter for the North Koreans," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • North Koreans see several reasons why they should not denuclearize based on recent history, including situations in Iraq, Libya and more recently Iran. Leaders in Iraq and Libya were toppled after relinquishing their nuclear programs under US pressure, while Iran entered a deal with the US only to have the Trump administration withdraw, impose crippling economic sanctions and then assassinate the country's leading general and nuclear scientist.
  • "It has to be nuanced because you can't just say, you know, we want to have talks, and the talks are going to be about North Korea's complete denuclearization, because that sounds very one sided," he told CNN. "It would have to be long term and not the Libya model of complete denuclearization upfront before we give them anything they want."
  • But after the summit, Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the agreement pledged North Korea to the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program, despite the fact that it said nothing of the sort.
  • Former officials and experts also noted that Biden administration officials' commitments not to lift tariffs on North Korea during confirmation hearings did not go unnoticed, which could be one factor driving Pyongyang's decision not to engage directly with the US.
  • "What if the US and China come out of their meetings this week and make it clear that they are headed for escalating US-China tensions? If you are Kim Jong Un you would read that as meaning that it is less likely that China will put the squeeze on North Korea," said Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council official. "If that happens, maybe Kim now knows he can go to China to buy more pieces for its nuclear programs, or to go to China and sell more coal. That would be a bad sign for the future of any US-North Korea diplomacy."
  • Aum said that he doesn't think they'd "want to do anything to provoke the US prior to some greater signal that the US is going to take a very hostile approach."
Javier E

Chinguamiga Was Born in Korea, but Shines in Mexico - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-chinguamiga-mexico-korea.html

south korea mexico influencer

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • To her mother in South Korea, SuJin Kim is a failure: She’s over 30, single and not working for a big Korean corporation.
  • But to her millions of followers in Latin America, she has become a relatable friend and a teacher of all things Korean. In Mexico, where she lives, they know her, in fact, as “Chinguamiga,” her online nickname, a mash-up of the words for friend in Korean and Spanish.
  • Her success has been propelled not just by her ingenuity and charisma, but also by a wave of South Korean popular culture that has swept the world
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  • In Mexico, the growing interest in all things Korean has made her a social-media sensation with more than 24 million followers on TikTok and over eight million subscribers to her YouTube channel, allowing her to gain popularity, financial stability and a romantic partner — all on her own terms.
  • “She had all this training in Korea, in this new Korea that allows her to land in a place like Mexico and be successful.”
  • A sort of a teacher of comparative pop culture, Ms. Kim offers lessons on popular Korean soap operas, lyrics, fashion standards, traditions and social norms. She once worked as a waitress in Mexico for a day and posted about her confusion with tips. (South Korea is a no-tip country.) She showed followers how Korean students crammed for exams. She started traveling across Mexico tasting regional delicacies.
  • Ms. Kim’s success tracks the growth of Korean influence in Mexico and the region.More than 2,000 Korean companies have a presence in Mexico, part of a so-called near-shoring strategy that has driven larger corporations — Kia, LG, Samsung, Hyundai, among others — to take advantage of a free-trade agreement with Canada and the United States.
  • K-pop, K-beauty and K-dramas have shown Latin Americans a new, different way to be cool.
  • K-pop bands have been performing to increasingly bigger and sold-out venues since 2012. This year, a summer festival will bring 16 Korean groups to Mexico City, with ticket prices starting at around $170.
  • Some newsstands specialize in magazines, posters and merchandise about South Korean celebrities. Netflix offers dubbing in “Latin Spanish” for Korean shows. Movie theaters stream live K-pop concerts performed abroad.
  • After finishing college in South Korea, Ms. Kim said she experienced severe stress. “I wanted to die and I wished to rest,” she said in one of her most popular videos. She has spoken openly about being hospitalized to take care of her mental health.
  • She attributes her exhaustion to Korea’s culture of sacrifice and grind that helped the country become an economic powerhouse after the Korean War.
  • “Everything is quick, quick, now, right this second,” Dr. Balderrama said. “This created a culture where there’s no place for mediocrity, there’s no place for those unwilling to compete.”
  • In Mexico, Ms. Kim hoped to find a more joyous life: “I saw how Latin culture is, how Latin people live and they’re living happily,” she said. “I don’t want to waste a single moment I’m in Latin America because it’s so precious to me.”
  • But if Ms. Kim has found a passion and a business, she has not completely found the peace of mind she was seeking. She’s in therapy to deal with what she described as some depression and anxiety.
  • Her large following and popularity has bred fear: “I feel people will forget me, that nobody will like me,” she said, worried about the toll of having to come up with creative content to remain relevant.
  • She does get criticized online by users who say she should go back to Korea, who ask whether she pays taxes in Mexico (she says she does) and who consider her another foreigner lured by life on the cheap and who contributes to the gentrification of parts of the country at the expense of Mexican residents.
malonema1

North Korea Agrees To Sync Time With South Korea, As Symbolic Move To Unify Nations : T... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-symbolic-move-to-unify-natio

crisis culture

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After creating an exclusive time zone for his country three years ago, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pledged to change his country's clocks so that they're back in sync with South Korea.
  • The changes in time in both directions are mostly metaphorical, Jonathan Cheng, Seoul bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, told NPR. "The move three years ago to change the time zone to what it is now was symbolic back then," he said. "The thing is that Korea is a former colony of Japan, and they share the same time zone. So Pyongyang was trying to say, we're going to move and be the real Korea, we're going to have our own time zone while South Korea shares a time zone with Japan," Cheng said.
  • Meanwhile, South Korea is also extending its own olive branch that will take effect Monday. President Moon said the government will remove loudspeakers that blast a constant stream of propaganda and pop music across the border.
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
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Javier E

How U.S. can defeat coronavirus: Heed Asia?s lessons from epidemics past - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html

pandemic lessons asia policy crisis

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • in wealthy places on China's periphery — Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea — a rapid response swung into action.One reason was that they had learned from the past.
  • “We were all burned very badly with SARS, but actually it turned out to be a blessing for us.”
  • Political will, dedicated resources, sophisticated tracking and a responsible population have kept coronavirus infections and deaths in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore relatively low. South Korea, with more deaths, has led the way in widespread testing.
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  • In Taiwan, officials boarded planes arriving from Wuhan and assessed passengers for symptoms before allowing anyone to disembark. Within days, Singapore, South Korea and other Asian states had implemented similar steps.
  • A year after SARS, Taiwan established a National Health Command Center that brought together all levels and branches of government, preparing for the possibility of another disease outbreak. Its interventions over the past two months have been decisive in keeping Taiwan ahead of the curve
  • They didn’t hesitate, they didn’t want to die,” Wang said. “The mortality rate was so high [during SARS] and they didn’t know how bad this one was going to be. Nobody thought it was like the flu.”
  • As early as Jan. 5, Taiwan was tracing people who had been in Wuhan in the previous 14 days. Those with symptoms of respiratory infections were quarantined.
  • In subsequent weeks, authorities used data and technology to identify and track cases, communicated effectively to reassure the public, offered relief to businesses and allocated medical resources where they were needed most — rationing face masks and dramatically increasing their production.
  • On Jan. 27, Taiwan combined the databases of its National Health Insurance Administration and National Immigration Agency, allowing it to track everyone who had been in Wuhan in the recent past and alert doctors to patients’ travel histories
  • Now, Taiwan is hoping to keep its infection numbers down and has asked residents not to travel abroad after its biggest single-day jump of cases — 23 — on Wednesday. It is also barring most noncitizens from entering.
  • South Korea, meanwhile, has become the poster child for testing. Its success is rooted in a previous failure: The limited availability of test kits was seen as having aggravated the 2015 MERS outbreak, when the country suffered the second-highest caseload after Saudi Arabia.
  • More than 260,000 people in South Korea have been tested for the virus, the highest per capita anywhere, with testing and treatment fees covered by the government and drive-through centers capturing global attention
  • Whereas the United States and Japan keep testing tightly controlled by a central authority, South Korea opened the process to the private sector, introducing a path to grant “emergency usage approval” to tests for pathogens of pandemic potential.
  • Singapore, too, benefited from its own capabilities to test, as did Hong Kong and Japan. All developed their own diagnostic tests when the covid-19 genome sequence was published.
  • Outside mainland China, the territory had been the biggest casualty of the Communist Party’s coverup of the SARS outbreak, with some 300 deaths and little clarity on what was unfolding until it was too late.
  • This time, though, and without needing to be told much, Hong Kong residents took matters into their own hands. The city’s financial district was reduced to a ghost town in early February as companies closed offices. Bakeries known for hour-long weekend lines were abandoned.
  • Parties, weddings and family gatherings were canceled — without any government order. Almost everyone rushed to ­procure masks; a recent study ­estimated that 74 percent to 98 percent of residents wore them when leaving their homes. Voluntary social distancing was hailed as a key reason for the lower rate of infections.
  • From electronic wristbands to smartphone trackers, Asian jurisdictions have pulled out all the stops to ensure that suspected patients comply with quarantine and isolation orders, monitoring that is backed by laws that were tightened post-SARS.
  • Singapore used its FBI equivalent, the Criminal Investigation Department, to effectively interrogate every confirmed case with stunning granularity — even using patients’ digital wallets to trace their footsteps. Those caught lying face fines and jail time.
  • In South Korea, information on the movements of infected people before they were tested is collected and relayed over smartphones, creating a real-time ma
  • Taiwan tracks infected people’s whereabouts via smartphones
  • In Hong Kong, everyone subject to a compulsory quarantine must activate real-time location-sharing on their phone or wear an electronic wristband.
  • These measures have been backed by local populations that lived through previous epidemics and have largely shed concerns about privacy and tracking.
  • Americans should not focus “only on the kind of high-profile displays of state power that have made headlines from China” but also look at countries such as South Korea that are “balancing Democratic openness with rapid, concerted public-health action.”
  • Experts agree, though, that Western governments must be prepared to limit their citizens’ movements, mandate isolation for positive cases and track contacts regardless of privacy concerns.
lilyrashkind

6 Times the Olympics Were Boycotted - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...olympic-boycotts

olympics history

shared by lilyrashkind on 16 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)
  • The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.
  • ‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.
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  • The Details: China, North Korea and Indonesia chose to boycott the first Games held in an Asian country after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared it would disqualify athletes who competed in the 1963 Jakarta-held Games of the New Emerging Forces, created as an alternative multinational amateur competition. The boycotting countries sent many of their top athletes to the Jakarta games.
  • The Details: When New Zealand’s national rugby team defied an international sports embargo against South Africa and toured the apartheid nation earlier in the year, 28 African nations—comprising most of the continent—declared a boycott of the Olympics, which was allowing New Zealand to participate. Led by Tanzania, the boycott involved more than 400 athletes. In a separate action, Taiwan withdrew from the Games when Canada refused to let its team compete as the Republic of China. Of Note: The boycott led to hotel and ticket refunds totaling $1 million Canadian dollars. It especially affected several track and field events, where nations such as Kenya and Tanzania were frequent medal winners.
  • Afghani athletes, notably, competed in the Games. Some countries did not forbid athletes from competing as individuals under the Olympic flag, but American athletes attempting to compete faced losing their passports. A group of American athletes sued the U.S. Olympic Committee to participate but lost the case. The boycott resulted in just 80 countries competing in the Olympics, the fewest since 1956.
  • In retaliation for the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games four years earlier, 14 nations, led by the Soviet Union and including East Germany, boycotted the Los Angeles-held Olympics. Joined by most of the Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviets said they feared physical attacks and protests on American soil. "Chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in this country,” a government statement read.
  • and Joan Benoit, along with Mary Lou Retton, the first American gymnast to win the gold for all-around, became instant stars. And the Games were considered a huge financial success, with almost double the ticket sales of Montreal and earning the title as the most-seen event in TV history.
  • Angered over not being allowed to co-host the Games with South Korea, North Korea refused to attend the 1988 event in neighboring Seoul. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, accepted the IOC's invitation to compete, along with China and Eastern Bloc nations, leaving just Cuba, Ethiopia and Nicaragua joining North Korea in the boycott. “To have the Olympics in Seoul would be like having them at the Guantanamo naval base occupied by the United States," Cuba President Fidel Castro told NBC News at the time. "I wonder that, if Socialist countries refused to go to (the 1984 Olympics in) Los Angeles for security reasons, if really there is more security in Seoul than in Los Angeles.”
  • candals tarnished the Seoul Games, including reports of residents being forced from their homes and homeless people being detained at facilities in preparation for the Games. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson made global headlines when he was stripped of his world-record-setting 100-meter victory after testing positive for steroids, and controversial boxing calls that went against South Korean athletes caused outrage.
  • North and South Korean leaders met following the events, and agreed to send a combined team to the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games. However, North Korea announced in April 2021 that it would not participate because of the coronavirus pandemic. 
grayton downing

North Korea Threatens U.S. Over Joint Military Drill - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-us-over-military-drill.html

north korea US military drill

shared by grayton downing on 23 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • North Korea on Saturday warned the top American military commander in South Korea that if the United States pressed ahead with joint military exercises with South Korea scheduled to begin next month, it could set off a war
  • North Korea warns of war and threatens to deliver a devastating blow to American and South Korean troops.
  • The United States military uses the Panmunjom channel to inform North Korea of its planned annual military drills with South Korea, which it says are for defensive purposes.
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  • Anti-American messages, already daily fare in the North, increase at those times as the leadership uses a sense of crisis to strengthen popular support.
maddieireland334

After Nuclear Test, China Resists Pressure to Curb North Korea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...th-korea-xi-jinping-obama.html

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • But President Xi Jinping, in a private meeting with President Obama at Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, warned against putting too much pressure on Kim Jong-un, the North’s young, volcanic leader.
  • Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has pushed the limits of Chinese foreign policy, challenging America’s influence in the Pacific and using China’s financial heft to win allies across the globe
  • After North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test last week, world leaders escalated pressure on Mr. Xi, whom many see as the best hope of reining in Mr. Kim. South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, who has cultivated closer ties to Mr. Xi, called on China this week to match its disapproving words about the North’s nuclear ambitions with “necessary measures.”
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  • “If North Korea becomes an enemy state, it would have plenty of ways to harm China,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “Beijing cannot afford to have North Korea become permanently hostile.”
  • Adding to the complications, Mr. Xi, 62, and Mr. Kim, believed to be 33, have a fraught relationship, say American, Chinese, and South Korean officials.
  • While the two leaders hail from revolutionary families, they have little else in common. Mr. Xi’s formative years were dominated by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Kim attended a Swiss boarding school and inherited the title of supreme leader before turning 30.
  • Mr. Xi has long recognized China’s sense of camaraderie with the North, which dates to their Korean War alliance in the 1950s. (Mao called the relationship “as close as lips and teeth.”)
  • But the two countries have followed starkly divergent paths. While China is now a sophisticated economy and a rising power, North Korea has become increasingly isolated, enfeebled and erratic, depending on China for most of its food and energy.
  • “The nuclear test will seriously damage the bilateral relationship,” Mr. Yang said. “Xi Jinping has been forced to be more assertive.”
  • While his predecessors welcomed North Korean leaders with the fanfare of Politburo meetings, Mr. Xi has kept a distance.
  • In an unusually public rebuke, Mr. Xi warned that no country should be able to throw the world into chaos for “selfish gain.” Later that year, he imposed sanctions, limiting shipments of materials used in weapons and cutting ties to some North Korean banks, though enforcement was lax.
  • Mr. Xi has made clear to the North that its future lies in economic reform, not military development, and that China will not accept a nuclear state, current and former Chinese and American officials said.
  • In a sign of his displeasure, Mr. Xi has cultivated better relations with Ms. Park, the South Korean president, traveling to Seoul for a state visit in 2014.
  • Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who served as the American ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011, said there was a generational divide among Chinese officials about how to deal with North Korea. “The older apparatchiks would defend the North Korean line,” he said. “The younger ones wanted this issue to go away. There’s no emotional connection, there’s no war being waged.”
  • In recent months, Mr. Xi extended several olive branches to Mr. Kim, concerned that the relationship had deteriorated to the point that Mr. Kim might lash out again, American and Chinese diplomats said.
  • At the parade in October, Mr. Kim stood next to Mr. Xi’s envoy, smiling and waving. He spoke of a “blood-tied friendship” and said that “bilateral ties are more than neighborliness,” according to coverage in the North Korean news media.
ethanshilling

Biden Invites South Korea's President to White House in May - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orea-biden-president-moon.html

biden korea

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden will meet with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea in Washington on May 21, the White House announced on Thursday.
  • In an interview with The New York Times published last week, Mr. Moon urged Mr. Biden to sit down with North Korea and kick-start negotiations, calling denuclearization a “matter of survival” for South Korea.
  • He also called for the United States to cooperate with China on North Korea and other global issues, like climate change. Deteriorating relations between the two countries could threaten negotiations over denuclearization, he warned.
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  • Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, left office without removing a single North Korean nuclear warhead. Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, has resumed weapons tests.
  • Mr. Biden met with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan at the White House on April 16, marking the first in-person visit of a foreign leader during his presidency.
woodlu

North Korea Launches 2 Ballistic Missiles, South Korea Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...north-korea-missile-test.html

politics us history crisis economics

shared by woodlu on 09 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on ​Thursday ​in its ​sixth missile test this month, the South Korean military said.
  • The latest launch came ​two days ​after North Korea​ fired what South Korean defense officials said were two cruise missiles.
  • The two missiles flew 118 miles after they were fired from Hamhung, a port city on the North’s east coast, according to the South Korean military, which said its analysts were studying the trajectory and other flight data to help determine the types of missiles launched.
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  • The latest flurry of missile tests suggests that ​North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is both pushing ahead with his program of modernizing his country’s missile forces and trying to jolt the Biden administration out of its diplomatic slumber​ and force Washington to engage with North Korea on Mr. Kim’s terms.
  • In 2017, North Korea launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles and claimed it was capable of targeting the continental United States with nuclear warheads. Mr. Kim then entered into diplomatic talks with President Donald J. Trump.
  • In late 2019, Mr. Kim warned that he no longer felt bound by his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.
  • North Korea’s latest launch came amid reports that its internet service appeared to have been hit by a second wave of outages in as many weeks, possibly caused by a so-called distributed denial-of-service cyberattack.
  • In North Korea, only a small group of elites are allowed access to the global internet. Its websites, all state-controlled, carry propaganda for Mr. Kim’s government and report developments, such as its weapons tests, that it wants the world and the North Korean people to be aware of.
rachelramirez

U.N. Toughens Sanctions on North Korea in Response to Its Nuclear Program - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...north-korea-un-sanctions.html

sanctions new york times US politics crisis policy

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • U.N. Toughens Sanctions on North Korea in Response to Its Nuclear Program
  • Exasperated with North Korea’s defiant testing of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to severely toughen its penalties against the isolated country.
  • The 15-member Council approved a draft resolution, negotiated for weeks by American and Chinese officials, that called for inspecting all cargo going in and out of the country, banning all weapons trade and expanding the list of individuals facing sanctions.
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  • Much depends, however, on whether China — North Korea’s leading trade partner and diplomatic shield — will enforce it.
  • The measure’s toughest component would require all countries to inspect all cargo passing through their territory to or from North Korea. In the past, inspections were required only if there was reasonable suspicion of contraband aboard.
  • It prohibits North Korea from sending martial arts experts to train police officers in foreign countries, as a United Nations panel recently accused Pyongyang of doing in Uganda.
  • Although prices have fallen in recent years, minerals still account for 53 percent of North Korea’s $2.5 billion in exports to China, its chief supplier of oil.
  • The Chinese ambassador, Liu Jieyi, focused on the North’s Jan. 6 and Feb. 7 tests, done in violation of previous resolutions. He also expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of sanctions, and used the occasion to criticize an American proposal to deploy a missile shield in South Korea.
  • China’s agreement to limit imports of North Korean coal and iron ore came with a condition: that it should be demonstrated that such imports would support the North’s illicit weapons programs
izzerios

Trump may have to be patient about North Korea - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by izzerios on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Lean on China to turn off its life support to its neighbor, for another
  • warnings that Trump will fix the showdown with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, it's so far unclear whether at its foundation, his strategy is all that different from previous administrations -- which for the last quarter century have failed
  • "The era of strategic patience is over," Vice President Mike Pence
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  • the US, working closely with the UN and Japan, South Korea, China and Russia, could create enough international pressure to eventually push North Korea to denuclearize
  • Pyongyang recently conducted its fifth nuclear test and is soon expected to conduct a sixth, part of its accelerated drive to develop missiles that can reach the continental US with nuclear weapons small enough to place in the nosecones.
  • it's possible that Trump has pushed Beijing to pressure its unpredictable ally and trade partner
  • possible cost of North Korean retaliation for any military action against its nuclear and missile complex -- an artillery barrage targeting civilians in Seoul and thousands of US troops south of the border
  • China's capacity and willingness to make North Korea bend to Washington's will, for instance by cutting off fuel, food and investment supplies that sustain Kim's regime.
  • "We're definitely not seeking conflict or regime change," Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
  • The US has "made a decision -- and it's a decision that's been made with all of our allies and partners on this issue -- to maximize pressure, economic pressure, on the North Korean regime to try to get it to make tangible steps to roll back their illegal programs," Thornton said. "We just have to stick with it, be patient."
  • I think we should give the Chinese president some opportunity, some time, as well as pursuing the economic and diplomatic pressures that we have and our allies have that we can bring to bear on North Korea."
  • White House optimism about China's evolving role in the North Korea crisis was the summit earlier this month between Trump and Xi in Florida
  • China accounts for some 80% of North Korea's trade and as such, could have outsized influence on Pyongyang. "President Trump is very hopeful the Chinese will use the leverage they have,"
  • Trump, for instance, praised China last week for sending back a fleet of coal ships to North Korea, in line with international sanctions on the Stalinist state's exports adopted during the Obama administration.
  • Beijing is determined to avoid any action that could trigger the chaotic downfall of his regime and send refugees fleeing across the border into China.
  • China also wants to avoid the eventual scenario of a unified Korea, which could produce a US-allied nation on its frontier
  • "The conditions are not really ripe for any kind of talks until North Korea shows it is serious about what would be accomplished by undertaking such talks,"
  • "We're looking for some sort of signal that they've realized that the status quo is unsustainable."
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