Decapitation? Assassination? Over in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-Un isn’t hung up on semantics

Decapitation? Assassination? Over in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-Un isn’t hung up on semantics

Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk People who split hairs over semantics ask if decapitation is the same as assassination. The debate assumes relevance in the wake of the killing of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. No, he wasn’t exactly decapitated, meaning his head wasn’t literally cut off from the rest of his body though […]

Flashback: N. Korea’s Kim Jong-Il shot 38 under par his 1st time out

Flashback: N. Korea’s Kim Jong-Il shot 38 under par his 1st time out

Special to WorldTribune.com By Geostrategy-Direct June 16, 2004 Editor’s Note: In commemoration of the historic June 12, 2018 summit in Singapore, we are republishing the following nonfiction report about Kim Jong-Un’s father. South Korea’s Pyeonghwa (Peace) Motors Corporation plans to stage an inter-Korean golf game next month in the North’s capital city of Pyongyang, company […]

Memo to Seoul on the great Pacific Ocean aircraft carrier race

Memo to Seoul on the great Pacific Ocean aircraft carrier race

Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Could aircraft carriers be the next big thing for Korea’s enormous shipbuilding industry, the world’s best and biggest? With orders down during the global economic slowdown, it would seem logical that Hyundai Heavy Industries and some of its rivals bring up the topic of aircraft carrier production with […]

Summit documents reveal N. Korea’s fears of being absorbed by China

Summit documents reveal N. Korea’s fears of being absorbed by China

Special to WorldTribune.com By Lee Jong-Heon, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — North Korean leaders have been living in fear of coming under Chinese control but had no option but to rely on the economic giant for much-needed hard currency, documents and sources said. According to the 2007 inter-Korean summit transcript disclosed by South Korea’s spy agency, then North Korean […]

Snowden’s best option: Come home and talk like there’s no tomorrow

Snowden’s best option: Come home and talk like there’s no tomorrow

Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com We keep hearing about all the countries where Edward Snowden is looking for asylum ― Ecuador and Venezuela would love to have him just to show they can’t be intimidated. Now it seems Ecuador is chickening out while Venezuela vies with Nicaragua for the distinction of defending the […]

2 of 3 South Korean students in survey thought their country started the 1950 war

2 of 3 South Korean students in survey thought their country started the 1950 war

Special to WorldTribune.com East-Asia-Intel.com In a shocking poll, 69 percent of South Korea’s high school students believed that it was the South that started the Korean War in 1950. President  Park Geun-Hye expressed dismay on June 17 during a cabinet meeting in the Blue House, the presidential office/residence complex in Seoul. “This kind of wrong […]

What would the Iron Lady have done about North Korea?

What would the Iron Lady have done about North Korea?

Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Memories and images of Margaret Thatcher and her legacy as displayed in the media this week evoke an obvious question: What would the Iron Lady have done about North Korea? The answer would seem clear. It’s hard to imagine the woman who dispatched troops to the Falklands in […]

Calling N. Korea’s hand: Decades after Hiroshima, proliferation threat becomes real

Calling N. Korea’s hand: Decades after Hiroshima, proliferation threat becomes real

Sol W. Sanders   A bitter and unresolved struggle behind the scenes for control of North Korea, the world’s most regressive regime, is the likeliest explanation for Pyongyang’s unprecedented deluge of threats against South Korea, the U.S. and Japan. For heavy hangs the head of Kim Jong-Un, heir to the world’s only Communist monarchy, a […]

Korean Vortex: Reading the tea leaves

Korean Vortex: Reading the tea leaves

John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — The increasingly ballistic bluster pouring out from Pyongyang and threatening South Korea, Japan and the USA, with nuclear attacks has jolted East Asia into “paying attention.” Perhaps that’s the real intent of Kim Jong-Un, the new and untested Marxist monarch of the quaintly titled “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” […]

Obama’s Alice-in-Wonderland foreign policy

Obama’s Alice-in-Wonderland foreign policy

Sol W. Sanders   That clanking and screeching you hear out of Washington, almost drowning out the caterwauling of the budget debate, is the Obama administration making a 180-degree turn on Pacific Ocean anti-missile defense. As usual with the cloying mainstream media, the significance of this complete reversal of strategy has been obfuscated at the […]