Global News Journal

from Andrew Marshall:

Risks to watch in Asia: Country guides

For Reuters analysis of risks to watch in Asian countries, kept updated in real time and with graphics and video, click on the links below.

from Tales from the Trail:

State Dept seeks new ally vs. North Korea: PETA

North Korea -- you have been warned.

The State Department on Monday held out the possibility that the isolated Stalinist state's belligerent rumblings could earn it a powerful new foe on the world stage:  animal rights activist group PETA.

Asked at a news briefing about North Korea's latest move, which saw it fire a barrage of artillery shells into the ocean near South Korea, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was blunt:

"Well, I'm sure it resulted in a lot of dead fish.  And we certainly hope that PETA will protest," he said.

PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is no slouch when it comes to defending animal rights, having taken on everything from fur-wearing Hollywood celebrities and circus elephant acts to the meat and dairy industry.

It was unclear, however, if the group would rally behind Korean fish as the State Department suggested.

Crowley -- perhaps aware that he risked sounding flip with the PETA comment -- later reiterated longstanding U.S. concern over North Korea's actions, which included the March sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 South Korean sailors.

Defiant North Korea takes case to UN press corps

Officials working for the government of communist North Korea seldom appear in public — especially in front of reporters from countries they view as hostile. But Pyongyang’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sin Son-ho, turned to the U.N. press corps in New York on Tuesday to defend his nation against Seoul’s allegtions that the North Korean military torpedoed a South Korean naval ship on March 26, killing 46 sailors.

South Korea brought the dispute to the U.N. Security Council this month, asking the 15-nation body to take action to deter “further provocation” on the Korean peninsula, where the North and South have maintained an uneasy truce since the Korean War ended in 1953. On Monday members of a South Korean-led investigative panel presented the council with their evidence. Afterwards, Pyongyang had a chance to state its case in a separate closed-door briefing, though council diplomats said few if any envoys present were persuaded by the North Korean denials.

On Tuesday it was time to reach out to the press. The North Korean mission held a news conference at United Nations headquarters, a decision that several U.N. officials described as “unprecendented” for Pyongyang, which is under U.N. sanctions over its nuclear weapons program.

Large numbers of empty seats at U.N. briefings are commonplace, but Sin faced a full house. For most of his long rebuttal of Seoul’s allegations, Sin and two other North Korean diplomats on either side of him remained characteristically deadpan. Sin said his country was being framed by South Korea and the United States, both of which stood to politically benefit from unfairly heaping the blame on North Korea. He said the South Korean investigation was “a complete fabrication from A to Z” and compared its conclusions to Aesop’s fables.

“The U.S. most benefited from the sinking,” he said. “The U.S. wants to degrade our economy.”

Speaking in English, Sin showed a jovial side at least twice during his hour-long briefing, in which he fielded numerous questions from reporters, many of them Japanese and South Korean. He laughed heartily when asked how North Korea’s soccer team would perform in the World Cup in South Africa.

“This is not a place to be concerned about a soccer team,” Sin said with a big smile. “I am not in a position to give you any answer to your question, because your question is not directly related to the sinking of the South Korean warship.”

How Ill is Kim Jong-il?

Photo:A compilation by Reuters of pool photographs and images provided by North Korea’s KCNA news agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il from 2004 to 2009. The photograph in the lower right was released this week by KCNA

By Jon Herskovitz

The image the world once had of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, with a trademark paunch, platform shoes and a bouffant hair-do, is gone and may never come back. He has now become a gaunt figure with thinning hair who has trouble walking in normal shoes, let alone ones with heels 8-10 centimetres (3-4 inches) high like he used to wear.

A look at photographs the North’s official media has released of Kim over the past few months indicate he is not a healthy man. There has been an enormous amount of speculation about what is wrong with Kim, 67, including a report from South Korean TV network YTN this week that he has life-threatening pancreatic cancer.

Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North and his actual condition is likely known by a handful of people in his inner circle who risk death or prison camp for themselves and their families if they ever whisper a word about Kim’s problems.

It is a state crime in North Korea to make any comment that questions Kim’s god-like status in the communist dynasty he has ruled since 1994 when his father and state founder Kim Il-sung died.

An Interview With South Korea’s Box Office Champ Director Bong Joon-ho

The South Korean director whose movie about a mutant river monster became the country’s biggest box office hit has a new film on what might be an even more terrifying subject — an maniacally obsessive mother.

Bong Joon-ho sat down last week for an interview with Reuters about his new movie called “Mother”that debuted last month at the Cannes International Film Festival and has quickly become one of South Korea’s biggest hits of the year.

The movie is about a mother who goes to extremes to protect her emotionally and mentally unstable son after he is charged with murder. It follows Bong’s movie “The Host,” which was the first South Korean film to make more than $100 million at the local box office.

The following are excerpts from the interview in Korean and translated by Kim Junghyun 

Reuters: How would you describe your movie “Mother”?

Bong: It is a movie that brings this issue of motherhood to the extremes. This movie is about a mother, but not just a mother. It’s a mother whose son is facing a murder charge. International audiences might find it easier to approach this movie at first as a thriller.

North Korean Revolutionary Tunes Sink to Bottom of the Sea

                                              By Jon Herskovitz

North Korea says somewhere up in the sky, a satellite it launched at the weekend is beaming to earth two revolutionary paeans: “Song of General Kim Il-sung” for the founder of the reclusive state and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” for the son who succeeded him when he died.

U.S. and South Korean officials said the North Korean rockets did not send anything into space and all pieces of the rocket crashed into the sea, including the claimed satellite, which might have been North Korea’s oversized attempt to replicate an iPod.

The North Korean report was a a bit of a blast from the past because North Korea made a similar claim in 1998 that it had sent a satellite into orbit playing the exact same two songs.

There is far more to North Korea’s hit parade of songs than the two homilies it said were aboard its rocket. This is a country where soldiers sing, farmers sing, the hundreds of thousand gather in the centre of the capital Pyongyang to dance in special days and a refined teenage girl always has her accordion ready to play a tune.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-il: Proof of life

                                                          By Jon Herskovitz

It is not often that I am reminded of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan in our coverage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.  But I thought of the 2000 movie starring Ryan and Crowe called “Proof of Life”   North Korea this week when  served up pictures of its Dear leader Kim and a communist party newspaper with a clearly marked Tuesday date.

This was the first time since Kim’s suspected stroke in August that North Korea has added a clear date as to when Kim appeared in public. The North has reported on Kim appearing several times in public over the past several weeks, but all of those reports have been undated.

 In the movie version, the “proof of life” is a part of the hostage and ransom trade where a kidnap victim holds up a newspaper to offer proof that he or she is alive on a certain date.

North Korea likes to do things its own way and in the official media, there is one picture that shows Kim in a winter coat, fur hat and ski gloves at a library standing behind his subjects as they stare into computer monitors. The next photograph shows a computer monitor with the on-line version of the North’s communist newspaper bearing Tuesday’s date. There is no picture of Kim and the newspaper together, but this is the closest North Korea has come to offering a proof of life, or better yet, a proof of recovery since Kim’s suspected illness.

State media has also been issuing reports and pictures of  what are called “field guidance visits” by Kim in recent months to places such as army units, factories and chicken farms. In most of these pictures, Kim seems a little bit thinner than he did about a year ago. He is almost always seen wearing a heavy coat, sunglasses and gloves.

The kinder, gentler side of North Korean communists

                                 By Jack Kim North and South Koreans have been divided for more than 50 years by one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. When we come into contact, it is almost always in small and carefully arranged visits.

I was a part of a South Korean group that recently spent four days in the North. Over the course of countless hours of contact with the North Korean minders assigned to our group, conversation turned from heated discussion over international politics and inter-Korean troubles to nationalism and sports. 

We had been told by the officials from the group in the South that arranged the trip to avoid any discussion of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il because this highly sensitive subject would invariably lead to awkward discussions and raise tension.

But there was enough time to get a glimpse of the softer, human side of North Korean officials who were supposed to be tough, propaganda-conscious apparatchiks armed with skills to respond to any kind of challenge to the communist state’s leadership or its ideology.

The minders, usually mid-level cadres in the bureaucracy, would invariably break into warm smiles when we raised the subject of family, either ours or theirs, just to change the subject after a tense discussion on politics. They willingly talked about life at home.

Greater freedom in Pyongyang than Seoul?

                                                           By Jack Kim For about eight straight years I’ve been covering North Korea, one of the world’s most closed countries with a human rights record that is roundly criticised as one of the worst on the globe.

So it came as a surprise when a North Korean “guide” said on my seventh visit to the communist state that when it comes to restricting freedom of movement, South Korea’s spy agency makes life tougher for North Korean visitors to the capitalist neighbour.

“They even follow you into the hygiene room and wait there until you’re finished!” a North Korean handler said as his voice rose in indignation when describing the treatment given to North Korean visitors to the South.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service agents limit a North Korean visitor’s movement from floor to floor and ban any kind of excursion unless in a group tour. They also follow visitors into public restrooms.

“Conducting official duty” is the explanation when asked what they thought they were doing following you into the bathroom, the North Korean guide said, adding it is presumably to make sure you’re not receiving secret instructions from the North or being handed a secret message from a double agent in the South.