"Many defectors I met, they hardly sleep. They're putting in more time and energy to earn money so they won't be too behind," documentary filmmaker Steve Choi said. https://t.co/8IZucaJuJl
A memorial service for the eighth anniversary of the sinking of the Cheonan warship in a North Korean torpedo attack takes place at a cenotaph on Baengnyeong Island in the northern Yellow Sea on March 24, 2018. (Yonhap)
Newsweek seems to be seriously stretching what this means if they think suspending tunneling at Punggye-ri means the Kim regime is serious about giving up nuclear weapons:
WILL NORTH KOREA GIVE UP NUCLEAR WEAPONS? THESE PHOTOS SUGGEST KIM JONG UN MAY BE SERIOUS
North Korea has suspended activity at its main nuclear site, according to recent satellite imagery and expert analysis that appeared to support Pyongyang’s offers to solve the crisis on the Korean Peninsula diplomatically.
President Donald Trump’s decision to accept an unprecedented invitation to meet North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un came after South Korean officials assured the Republican leader that Kim was willing to denuclearize in exchange for peace. As suspicions arose as to what North Korea’s true intentions were, leading analysts Frank V. Pabian, Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. and Jack Liu found a major slowdown at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in a report posted Friday to 38 North, a project of the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. [Newsweek]
I would think US military families would be taking this year’s Focused Passage training a little more seriously than in year’s past:
The U.S. military plans to hold a regular noncombatant evacuation drill in Korea next month under the scenario of a crisis here despite markedly eased tensions.
The Focused Passage training will take place from April 16-20, when South Korean and U.S. troops stage a massive combined combat exercise called Foal Eagle, according to the Stars and Stripes newspaper.
It’s aimed at ensuring U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) service members and families are prepared to evacuate designated noncombatants in case of a conflict on the peninsula.
Around 200,000 American civilians are said to reside in Korea. [Korea Times]
South Korean first lady Kim Jung-sook (2nd from R) and Vietnamese first lady Nguyen Thi Hien (2nd from L) tour the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi on March 23, 2018. Kim is accompanying President Moon Jae-in on his three-day state visit to the Southeast Asian country, which began the previous day. (Yonhap)
Considering John Bolton’s recent comments about North Korea, I think it is pretty clear that President Trump is putting people in position that will support hard measures against the Kim regime if negotiations fail:
John Bolton
When John Bolton talks of war, on the other hand, it’s more explicable. “Question: How do you know that the North Korean regime is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving,” he said on Fox News shortly after news broke that Trump and Kim Jong Un had agreed to participate in direct talks on “denuclearization” by May. The North Koreans aren’t going to voluntarily abandon their goal of obtaining nuclear-tipped long-range missiles, he argued. “They want to buy time: three months, six months, 12 months—whatever it is they need to get across the finish line. What Trump did … is foreshorten that period” by organizing a meeting that can quickly expose North Korea insincerity about relinquishing its nuclear program anytime soon. (“I may leave fast or we may sit down and make the greatest deal for the world,” Trump himself recently predicted.) “Rather than having the low-level negotiations rising to the mid-level negotiations rising to the high-level negotiations, finally rising to a summit meeting—that’ll be two years from now, they’ll have deliverable nuclear weapons,” Bolton explained. “That we cannot allow.” [The Atlantic]
You can read the whole article at the link.
I think President Trump’s quick acceptance and short timeframe for conducting the summit combined with his recent appointments of Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Bolton has to be putting significant pressure on the Kim regime that past delay games are not going to work this time.
This seems to be the wave of the future, cashless stores:
Starbucks Coffee Korea, the local unit of the U.S. coffee giant, said Thursday it will begin a test run of cashless stores at three outlets next month amid rising use of credit card and mobile payment systems.
The stores at the country’s major office districts — Gangnam and Guro in Seoul, and Pangyo, just south of the capital — have been tapped to start testing the new system April 23, according to the company.
When launched, it will mark the second trial for the global coffee giant, following its first cashless store under test run in Seattle, the United States, it said.
Paying with cash has been constantly declining at Starbucks stores in South Korea, from 31 percent of the total in 2010 to 15 percent in 2013 and 7 percent last year, the company said. [Korea Times]
38 North is pleased to work with @ISNJH on creating a panorama of the interior of the #DPRK's National Aerospace Development Administration's Control Room https://t.co/h5pJjl65nr
