North Korea threatens
South over propaganda balloons
Reuters. 10/19/12 By
Jack Kim and David Chance
(Reuters) -
Impoverished North Korea threatened on Friday to open fire on South
Korea if it allows activists to go ahead with plans to drop anti-North
leaflets on its territory, its most strident warning against its long-time
foe in months.
Some of the leaflets,
printed on plastic bags, will contain $1 bills. As well as the dollars, the
bags themselves are said to be prized by North Koreans, many of whom often lack
daily necessities.
South Korea's defense
minister told parliament that its
military would retaliate in the event of any attack.
"If (a North
Korean strike) were to happen, there would be a perfect response against the
source of the attack," Kim Kwan-jin told a parliamentary committee.
North Korea said that
if the leaflets were dropped on Monday, a "merciless military strike
by the Western Front will be put into practice without warning", according
to state news agency KCNA.
N. Korea levies
$160,000 in taxes on 8 S. Korean firms in Gaesong complex
The Korea Herald.
10/19/12
North Korea has
unilaterally imposed hefty taxes on eight South Korean firms operating in the joint industrial
complex in the North's border city of Gaesong, a Seoul government official
said Friday.
"Eight out of
123 South Korean companies in the Gaesong complex were slapped with taxes
totaling $160,000," the Unification Ministry official said, requesting
anonymity.
Of the eight firms,
one was levied $87,000 and another was ordered to pay $30,000, the official
said, adding another firm has already paid around $20,000 in taxes to the
North.
Pyongyang has also
demanded 21 South Korean
firms in the joint complex submit several documents related to their
accounting practices, the official said, a move seen as preparation for
further taxation.
Such moves came after
Pyongyang unilaterally revised rules in August on operations of South Korean
companies in the inter-Korean complex, which call for maximum fines of 200
times any unreported revenues, scrapping a ban on retroactive taxation, and
more detailed documentation of purchases of raw materials and accounting
practices, among other demands.
As part of efforts to
extract taxes, the North is reportedly threatening a ban on the movement of
goods and people in and out of the complex if the taxes are not paid, according
to other sources here familiar with the issue.
The joint industrial
park in the North's Gaesong opened in 2004 as a symbol of cross-border
reconciliation and has been in operation without any major interruptions
despite high cross-border tensions between the two Koreas. It was designed to
combine cheap North Korean labor with South Korean capital and technology.
As of end-August, a
total of 52,881 North Koreans were working for 123 labor-intensive South Korean
plants there, according to government data. (Yonhap News)
Pyongyang says only
sea border in West Sea is its own
The Korea Herald.
10/20/12
SEOUL, (Yonhap) -- North
Korea repeated its claim Saturday that the only maritime border in the
western Yellow Sea is the one drawn by Pyongyang, condemning the
South Korean president's recent trip to an island near the border where he
urged increased efforts to deter any border violation by the communist nation.
South Korean President
Lee Myung-bak on Thursday said the
country's service members must stake their own lives if necessary to safeguard
the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a de facto maritime border drawn by the
U.S.-led United Nations Command at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
The North mostly refrains from crossing the de
facto border, but often claims the NLL, drawn unilaterally by the
United Nations Command, is not legitimate and demands a new border be drawn
further south of the existing NLL.
"Only the sea
military border drawn by us will exist in the Yellow Sea, not the NLL, until
unification comes," an unidentified spokesperson for the North's powerful
National Defense Commission said in a statement carried Saturday by the
communist nation's Korean Central News Agency.
The Yellow Sea border
has been the scene of a number of bloody inter-Korean clashes. The two sides
fought naval gun-battles in the area in 1999, 2002 and 2009. In 2010, the North
torpedoed a South Korean warship in the area, killing 46 sailors, and shelled
Yeonpyeong Island, leaving two South Korean Marines and two civilians dead.
On Friday, a North Korean fishing boat briefly
crossed into South Korean waters near the border, but returned after South
Korean patrol boats broadcast warning signals. It marked the seventh border
violation by the North's vessels in the area since last month.
