News Stories

[yezhanquan]

I think China would act only if the US agrees not to station troops in the unified Korea, at least not above the 38th parallel, and current Chinese interests in North Korea are not compromised.

Afghanistan was a disaster for the USSR, while the Sino-Vietnamese War was a wake-up call for the PRC to pull up their socks in the military.

[Terrestrial Dream]

Originally Posted by Saleh

N. Korean Leader Dying of Cancer, Report Says



May he find peace, whenever he dies (regardless of what did).


Bush/Cheney/CIA Scandal's Investigation Landmark

Please let the bastard die painfully. There is no way this guy deserves any kind of peace for what he did which was bad as what the Nazi did imo.

Originally Posted by Claies

Russia won't actively do anything. There is no value for them in taking over North Korea, and they're not at all ideologically similar. Europe is their main soft-power priority. Russia will more likely be a side effect added in after anything drastic happens, because selling gas to an empty (?) market of 22 million people would be laughably profitable.

China's in a weird position. If they do anything militarily, the world will go crazy. The best they can do is threaten the military to keep the status quo (i.e. just prop the son up and go to bed).

Does anyone know if Japan and South Korea have any visible cooperation when it comes to North Korea, seeing as they're in the deepest crap if things get out of control?

Why would Japan and Korea cooperate? If that were to happen they will destroy each other before North Korea attack .
Aside from my lame joke there seems to be some cooperation but I am not sure how effective that will be.

[Claies]

Originally Posted by Terrestrial Dream

Why would Japan and Korea cooperate? If that were to happen they will destroy each other before North Korea attack .
Aside from my lame joke there seems to be some cooperation but I am not sure how effective that will be.

I simply haven't heard anything of what Japan and South Korea have done with their relations post-WWII. They've been on the same boat ever since (staring at China), so I'd imagine at least some warming by now. I expect at least some talking with each other, but I haven't heard of any joint exercises or anything, which I thought would be very useful.

[Shadow Kira01]

Malaysia detains nine Christians allegedly on conversion mission

There they go again... Claiming to be a non-profit organization, a proper religion yet they had to travel all the way to the Muslim nation, Malaysia to provoke religious conflicts. How pitiful..

Originally Posted by Terrestrial Dream

Why would Japan and Korea cooperate? If that were to happen they will destroy each other before North Korea attack .

That's what the South Korean government is doing right now, is it not? Under the leadership of 2MB, South Korea agrees that the denuclearization of North Korea is placed as a priority and that forcing North Korea into six-party talks is necessary. For that matter, I don't understand your question at all as that it denies reality.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by yezhanquan

I think China would act only if the US agrees not to station troops in the unified Korea, at least not above the 38th parallel, and current Chinese interests in North Korea are not compromised.

Afghanistan was a disaster for the USSR, while the Sino-Vietnamese War was a wake-up call for the PRC to pull up their socks in the military.

Afghanistan is a disaster for any military which went there. See the 1800s-early 1900s British Colonial Empire for another reference. If Putin is a nice guy he would have went up to Bush and said, "I told you so." A gun nut high on opium is crazier than a marine high on ibuprofen.

The Korean War should be the reminder, because they are fighting the Americans with bolt-action rifles and MiGs armed with autocannons and machine guns when the "white devils" are blasting away with M1 Carbines and Garands with F104 Starfighters armed with heat-seekers. Sino-Vietnamese is the reminder for them to smack little kids that are misbehaving, whether they are yours or not.

Back to the topic, I just looked down Google Earth on North Korea. The number of high grounds will pretty much any invasion force a failure.

[Kamui4356]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

Malaysia detains nine Christians allegedly on conversion mission

There they go again... Claiming to be a non-profit organization, a proper religion yet they had to travel all the way to the Muslim nation, Malaysia to provoke religious conflicts. How pitiful..

Christianity and Islam both have it as part of their percieved mission to convert others to the "true path". While people shouldn't try to convert others, governments also should never arrest people for something like this. People should have the right to decide what religion they believe in, and given the oppertunity to choose.

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

Afghanistan is a disaster for any military which went there. See the 1800s-early 1900s British Colonial Empire for another reference. If Putin is a nice guy he would have went up to Bush and said, "I told you so." A gun nut high on opium is crazier than a marine high on ibuprofen.

The British also went back later and won. People tend to forget that.

The Korean War should be the reminder, because they are fighting the Americans with bolt-action rifles and MiGs armed with autocannons and machine guns when the "white devils" are blasting away with M1 Carbines and Garands with F104 Starfighters armed with heat-seekers. Sino-Vietnamese is the reminder for them to smack little kids that are misbehaving, whether they are yours or not.

The main US fighter in the Korean war was the F-86 which was armed with .50 cal machine guns. The mig-15 was actually better armed, and a number of them were being flown by Russian pilots with WWII combat experience as well. The difference in infantry weapons on the ground wasn't as great as you seem to be trying to portray either. The main issue there wasn't the quality of weapons but the relative lack of heavy weapons among the Chinese and North Korean troops. Also heat seeking missiles didn't enter US service until 1956, a few years after the war and the F-104 didn't enter service until 1958.

Back to the topic, I just looked down Google Earth on North Korea. The number of high grounds will pretty much any invasion force a failure.

It didn't stop UN forces in the 1950s, and today the gap in weapons is much greater than it was back then.

[Saleh]

168 Feared Dead After Plane Crashes in Iran

Spoiler for snippet:

Originally Posted by NYTimes

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A passenger plane bound for Armenia from Iran crashed Wednesday morning in northwest Iran, and all 168 people aboard were believed to have perished, Iranian state media reported.

The plane, made by the Russian company Tupolev, crashed near the city of Qazvin at about 11:30 a.m. local time after leaving Tehran on a flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Hussein Behzadpour, the police chief of Qazvin, said in comments quoted by Iran’s English language Press TV.

The crash site was near Jannatabad, a village just outside Qazvin, Mr. Behzadpour said.

The spokesman for Iran’s Aviation Organization, Reza Jafarzadeh, told Press TV that the plane, Caspian Airlines Flight 7908, crashed 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport. Qazvin is about 90 miles northwest of Tehran.

The plane was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members, state television reported. The broadcast showed wreckage mingled with human body parts, and a fire brigade official was quoted as saying the debris was strewn over a broad area.

Among the images was a crater gouged into farmland with mangled pieces of metal scattered about, Reuters reported.

News reports said the pilot may have been trying an emergency landing after technical problems occurred.

...

Cyberattack Probe Goes Global

Spoiler for snippet:

Originally Posted by CSO

British authorities have launched an investigation into the recent cyberattacks that crippled Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, as the trail to find the perpetrators stretches around the world.

On Tuesday, the Vietnamese security vendor Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis) said it had identified a master command-and-control server used to coordinate the denial-of-service attacks, which took down major U.S. and South Korean government Web sites.

A command-and-control server is used to distribute instructions to zombie PCs, which form a botnet that can be used to bombard Web sites with traffic, rendering the sites useless. The server was on an IP (Internet Protocol) address used by Global Digital Broadcast, an IP TV technology company based in Brighton, England, according to Bkis.

That master server distributed instructions to eight other command-and-control servers used in the attacks. Bkis, which managed to gain control of two of the eight servers, said that 166,908 hacked computers in 74 countries were used in the attacks and were programmed to get new instructions every three minutes.

But the master server isn't in the U.K.; it's in Miami, according to Tim Wray, one of the owners of Digital Global Broadcast, who spoke to IDG News Service on Tuesday evening, London time.

The server belongs to Digital Latin America (DLA), which is one of Digital Global Broadcast's partners. DLA encodes Latin American programming for distribution over IP TV-compatible devices, such as set-top boxes.

New programs are taken from satellite and encoded into the proper format, then sent over VPN (Virtual Private Network) to the U.K., where Digital Global Broadcast distributes the content, Wray said. The VPN connection made it appear the master server belonged to Digital Global Broadcast when it actually is in DLA's Miami data center.

...

[Shadow Kira01]

Originally Posted by Kamui4356

Christianity and Islam both have it as part of their percieved mission to convert others to the "true path". While people shouldn't try to convert others, governments also should never arrest people for something like this. People should have the right to decide what religion they believe in, and given the oppertunity to choose.

You do have a very good point but unfortunately...

The laws of Malaysia are not that of international standards. In Malaysia, about 28 million people are Muslims and that it is illegal for them to leave their religion regardless of any circumstances. Generally, Malaysia is an Islamic nation and the fact that Christians and Islams are somewhat rivals, if not enemies just make it worse when several Christians, some of which are from foreign places attempt to convert Muslims to join their religion will obviously get arrested as that the action is considered a crime of up to 2 years imprisonment.

[Terrestrial Dream]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

That's what the South Korean government is doing right now, is it not? Under the leadership of 2MB, South Korea agrees that the denuclearization of North Korea is placed as a priority and that forcing North Korea into six-party talks is necessary. For that matter, I don't understand your question at all as that it denies reality.

I pretty much stated that it was a joke.

[yezhanquan]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

Afghanistan is a disaster for any military which went there. See the 1800s-early 1900s British Colonial Empire for another reference. If Putin is a nice guy he would have went up to Bush and said, "I told you so." A gun nut high on opium is crazier than a marine high on ibuprofen.

The Korean War should be the reminder, because they are fighting the Americans with bolt-action rifles and MiGs armed with autocannons and machine guns when the "white devils" are blasting away with M1 Carbines and Garands with F104 Starfighters armed with heat-seekers. Sino-Vietnamese is the reminder for them to smack little kids that are misbehaving, whether they are yours or not.

Afghans fight among themselves, but once a foreigner steps into the land, they band together, drive it out, then resume fighting among themselves. This land is wild, and to tame it, you probably do need to level the mountains to form ravines.

Don't forget that the Chinese failed to get Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia, which is one aim of the invasion. As for the "smacking", since both sides had grounds to claim victory (read: a stalemate), it reflects badly on China.

[killer3000ad]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

You do have a very good point but unfortunately...

The laws of Malaysia are not that of international standards. In Malaysia, about 28 million people are Muslims and that it is illegal for them to leave their religion regardless of any circumstances. Generally, Malaysia is an Islamic nation and the fact that Christians and Islams are somewhat rivals, if not enemies just make it worse when several Christians, some of which are from foreign places attempt to convert Muslims to join their religion will obviously get arrested as that the action is considered a crime of up to 2 years imprisonment.

Actually about 65% of the total population are Muslim, not ALL 28 million of them.
The Malays are all Muslim and automatically so upon birth, while the other races, the Chinese, Indians, Aboriginals tend to vary from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, ancestral worship to plain old atheism.

In any case, with regards to the earlier report about the students allegedly trying to convert Muslims, they were released since they weren't actually doing that, but were accused by some overzealous and mistaken official of the university-> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090715/...tians_arrested

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

You do have a very good point but unfortunately...

The laws of Malaysia are not that of international standards. In Malaysia, about 28 million people are Muslims and that it is illegal for them to leave their religion regardless of any circumstances. Generally, Malaysia is an Islamic nation and the fact that Christians and Islams are somewhat rivals, if not enemies just make it worse when several Christians, some of which are from foreign places attempt to convert Muslims to join their religion will obviously get arrested as that the action is considered a crime of up to 2 years imprisonment.

But even in Malaysia, Islam can historically be considered the "interloper" or "new arrival". Insecurity drives this sort of lawmaking and intolerance for other solutions to spirituality - "No, I'm right and I'm going to hit you til you agree with me" is how it comes off.

[Shadow Kira01]

Indonesian Muslims Protest Against China's Crackdown on Uighur

China's perceived mistreatment of its Uighur Muslim minority has sparked few protests among Muslim communities around the world. In Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim population, there have been almost daily demonstrations in front of the Chinese Embassy. But the protesters have been relatively few in number and seem unable to generate public outrage against China.

About 100 Muslim students from the University of Indonesia are protesting in front of the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta. Their spokesman, Ahmad Setiabudi, says they are here to protest the discrimination and violence against Uighur Muslims in China.

He says they urge not only China to act, but also the Indonesian government to firmly say it is against the violence in China.

News reports of China's crackdown after ethnic unrest hit Xinjiang region have prompted Muslim organizations in Indonesia to denounce what they say is religious repression in China.

The Muslim Uighurs speak a Turkic language and share many characteristics with people from Central Asia. They complain they face discrimination from the Han, China's dominant ethnic group, and that the government restricts their religious practices, as well as travel. Beijing rejects those allegations.

The Indonesian Council of Ulemas has criticized China for forbidding Uighur Muslims from performing their Friday prayers at the mosques after the violence.

But Professor Azyumardi Azra with the State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah says outrage against China is not gaining popular support in Indonesia.

"Indonesians in general do not have some kind of anti-China feelings," Azra said.
He says while there is some animosity toward Chinese Indonesians, China is seen as a positive influence and vital economic partner.

And he says the repression of Muslims in China does not fit with the world view of many Muslim activists, who have focused for so long on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I think that is because of the long standing conflict in the Middle East and of course with the suspicion in general, not only Indonesia but all over the world, of the you know so-called U.S. conspiracy to destroy Muslims and things like that," Azra said.

Azra says while Indonesia should be consistent in defending the rights of Muslims all over the world, the sporadic protests will have little effect on either the Indonesian or Chinese governments.

[Thingle]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

Malaysia detains nine Christians allegedly on conversion mission

There they go again... Claiming to be a non-profit organization, a proper religion yet they had to travel all the way to the Muslim nation, Malaysia to provoke religious conflicts. How pitiful..



.

That seriously reeks of religious intolerance (on your part too).

If Islam IS a superior religion, then why don't you guys let the believers choose which faith to follow?

I'll tell you why.. It's because Muslims will leave by the fuckload if you introduce freedom of religion. That would be a serious blow to the clerics' political power.

We have a thriving Muslim community here. They proselytize and we don't give a damn. Why can't you do the same?

[Saleh]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

Indonesian Muslims Protest Against China's Crackdown on Uighur

Turkey was quite unhappy and there have been report claiming that terror organization Al Qaeda wants a bit more fame.

UN adds targeted North Koreans to sanctions list

A UN Security Council panel on Thursday added five North Korean individuals and five Pyongyang entities to a sanctions blacklist, a western diplomat said.

The diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous, told reporters that sanctions, which include a travel ban and an asset freeze, would be imposed on the targeted people and entities, before returning to the talks.

The diplomat did not name the targets, but said two goods linked to North Korea's suspect nuclear and weapons programs were also added to the sanctions list. They were also not identified.

Late Wednesday, Washington had welcomed what it called an international "consensus" on implementing further sanctions on North Korea, which has defied UN resolutions with recent nuclear and missile tests.

"We are in the final stages right now of completing the discussions around designating persons and entities" under a UN resolution, which was adopted nearly two months ago, a US official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"There's a broad consensus, including by China, frankly, that this is the right way to go," another US official said.

"I don't think the Chinese would take this step lightly, or if they believe that it wasn't important in terms of securing (the) North Koreans' compliance."

A South Korean official said Wednesday the UN Security Council was discussing sanctions which would for the first time target individuals involved in North Korea's nuclear and missile program.

"Unlike before, the list they are working on will include North Korean individuals this time," a Seoul government official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "You may say sanctions are toughening."

He said there was a "strong sentiment" that the list should be finalized no later than Wednesday New York time, to meet an extended deadline of July 19.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Shadow Kira01

Indonesian Muslims Protest Against China's Crackdown on Uighur

I am sorry but that image made me laugh. It reminds me of the film Harold And Kumar : Escape From Guantanamo Bay because of prejudice caused by sterotyping.

Anyway, I heard this morning that some nut bombed a Ritz Carlton Hotel somewhere in Malaysia. Can anyone verify it?

[KongZilla]

Its sad that people are getting stereotyped just because of the media. Not all Muslims are as bad as the media made them seem to be and that goes the same for any other religions for that matter.

[428]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

I am sorry but that image made me laugh. It reminds me of the film Harold And Kumar : Escape From Guantanamo Bay because of prejudice caused by sterotyping.

Anyway, I heard this morning that some nut bombed a Ritz Carlton Hotel somewhere in Malaysia. Can anyone verify it?

Really? I just flew into KL this morning. Haven't heard about it.

EDIT: http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/...337255859.html

SaintessHeart, WRONG NEIGHBOUR. Not the one who gives you water problems, it's the one giving you sand problems.

Manchester United's first visit to Indonesia is in doubt after a deadly bomb struck the hotel where the English soccer champion was due to stay from tomorrow.




At least nine people were killed and 42 others injured following blasts around 8am at the Ritz Carlton and JW Marriott hotels in the capital city, Jakarta, police said.




United players including Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen are scheduled to arrive in Jakarta tomorrow and were booked in at the Ritz Carlton, said Azwan Karim, media officer for the Indonesia Football Association. Luisa D'Aprano, a United executive, said in a phone interview that a decision about the two-night trip to Indonesia may be announced at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur today.




The 18-time English champion flew from the UK to Malaysia's capital today, arriving after the blasts. It faces a Malaysian XI tomorrow before traveling to Jakarta in the evening to prepare to take on an Indonesian All-Star team July 20.




Indonesian soccer officials are holding an emergency meeting today, Karim said. United's opponents were staying at the Marriott and missed the blast because players were training at the time, he added. The team has moved to another hotel.




Today's explosions ripped the faade off the Ritz, blew out windows and showered the street outside the hotels in the up- market Mega Kuningan district with glass and debris.




Hours later a car bomb exploded north of the capital, killing two people, TVOne reported.
"The lobby of the Ritz Carlton was destroyed," said Rubi Purnomo, a spokesman at the Indonesian unit of Newmont Mining Corp., who witnessed the blasts from an adjacent building.




United is sending a squad with 20 internationals including England's Rooney and new signing Owen for its fifth trip to Asia. The team is also due to play in South Korea on July 24 and China two days later. More than half United's 333 million fans are in Asia and about 12 million are based in Indonesia, according to club estimates.




Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, has been largely free of attacks since a bombing campaign blamed on the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah left about 280 people dead from 1999 to 2005.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by 428

Really? I just flew into KL this morning. Haven't heard about it.

EDIT: http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/...337255859.html

SaintessHeart, WRONG NEIGHBOUR. Not the one who gives you water problems, it's the one giving you sand problems.

Not just sand, but terror mechanic problems too (MSK used to work as a mechanic).

Indonesia's law enforcement is probably crippled by the recent elections, thus the nuts decide it is a good time to strike. And it is.

[MrTerrorist]

Ultra-Orthodox Jews visit Hamas
Now that's something you never expected.