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Some 900 workers at Ssangyong, the smallest of South Korea’s five car manufacturers, have occupied their factory against mass sackings for the last two months.
The government and company savagely attacked the workers. They mobilized 5,000 riot police and strikebreakers, and blockaded the plant. Recently, they have even stopped the supply of essential necessities like water, foods and medical supplies.
- Sounds like Egypt. - on 2009-07-28
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- Police helicopters sprinkled the liquefied tear gas onto the workers. This is so strong that it melts skin. Police have also been using tasers, often aiming them at workers' faces.
  - Aaaaaaaargh. Disgusting! - on 2009-07-28
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- But the workers have kept showing almost superhuman courage. The workers have refused to leave the factory – even those who were tasered and one who suffers from diabetes. This last is despite the fact that the blockade has halted his insulin supplies, so his legs are starting to decompose.

27 Jun 09

كوريا الجنوبية تتخلى عن إنترنت اكسبلورر | وادي التقنية

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29 May 09

Is North Korea the real threat? | SocialistWorker.org

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Korea Imperialism USA

The idea that North Korea represents a military threat to the U.S. is absurd.
The North Korean regime's militaristic rhetoric--and, even more so, its police-state methods for repressing dissent--makes it easy for the media to dismiss its leaders as crazed fanatics. But when North Korean officials say their attempts to develop nuclear weapons have been a deterrent against U.S. attack, they're right.
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- Communist forces in the North backed by the USSR launched an offensive with the aim of reuniting Korea in 1950. The U.S. responded with a wholesale slaughter. With the authority of the United Nations as a cover, the U.S. used napalm to firebomb every Northern city, reducing them to ruins.
- North Korea adopted the repressive Stalinist system of its patrons in Russia and China. Though its leaders still claim to be presiding over "communism," North Korea is the polar opposite of a socialist society of workers' power and democracy. The state apparatus directs the economy and society with an iron hand, and the regime promotes a cult of personality, first around Kim Il-sung, and now his son Kim Jong-il.
- But if North Korea has always been highly militarized, it has also faced half a century of military threats from the U.S. and its clients in the South. The U.S. introduced nuclear weapons to the peninsula in the late 1950s, in violation of the armistice that ended the war. It also maintains, to this day, a huge military force stationed in both South Korea and nearby Japan as a constant threat against the North.
- Clinton broke all these promises, except for the delivery of fuel oil and some food aid. The economic crisis grew worse. Severe flooding in the 1990s led to a famine that killed as many as one in 10 people in the country. In other words, in spite of the agreement, the Clinton administration was continuing to up the pressure on the regime, in the hopes that it would break.
- When George W. Bush came to power, he made matters worse by rejecting further direct negotiations. The state of relations between the two countries was symbolized by Bush's racist rants about Kim Jong-il being a "pygmy."
- No sane person wants to see the spread of nuclear weapons. But when it comes to the arms race and war threats in East Asia, the driving force is the U.S. government.

24 Jan 09

"Prescient Young Blogger Did What S. Korea Couldn't -- Foresee Global Financial Crisis" By Blaine Harden

While Minerva was forecasting doom, government officials spent much of the early autumn inaccurately forecasting moderate market disruption and continued growth

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009012303506.html - Preview

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