Eyewitness: US tourist in North Korea

Email received today - with a link to this BBC report Eyewitness: US tourist in North Korea - from a friend with this message:

"Unfortunately, humans are great 'followers' by temperament and preference."

North Korea tells aid agencies to leave

Right now here in England it is 7.30 Tuesday evening and I am watching channel 4 TV news. Commentator Jon Snow says North Korea is telling aid agencies to leave, even though thousands are starving and in need in aid.

According to the report, North Korea is a country where millions are starving or malnourished:

6.5 million people receive aid. It's leadership is throwing out western aid agencies by the end of the year.

North Korea Manager of the UN's World Food Programme was interviewed. They have been asked to stop humanitarian aid. The UN agency has been asked to stay to do development work but is unclear as to what that is.

Foreign NGOs have been told to get out. North Korea's leaders insist the country can feed itself.

The reality is an impoverished land still struggling to feed itself. It's the monitoring of aid North Korea does not like. They feel there are too many foreigners around. Grain including rice has been banned from being sold commerically.

Also, the reporter said if North Korea finds western aid workers too instrusive, it does not bode well for nuclear inspections.

MEDIA FAST FOR MOJTABA

Excerpt from a post at Committee to Protect Bloggers May 19, 2005:

The CPB is asking bloggers and other concerned people to observe next Thursday, May 26 as a Media Fast for Mojtaba.

Mojtaba Saminejad, a blogger from Iran, has declared a hunger strike. He is being held at Tehran's Gohar Dashat prison, which has a reputation for mistreatment of detainees. He is being held in the general population, the overwhelming majority of which are common criminals.

Mojtaba was arrested for reporting the earlier arrest of three of his fellow Iranian bloggers. (Iran has arrested over 20 bloggers over the last year.) Iranian bloggers who have been released have reported being the victims of torture.

Read full story at Committee to Protect Bloggers: MEDIA FAST FOR MOJTABA.

[via Curt with thanks] Tags: Tehran Iran Mojtaba Blog Bloggers Committee+to+Protect+Bloggers

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC RADIO IN THE AGE OF PODCASTING: Anybody can create their own public radio online

Note Rebecca MacKinnon's post linking to a live webcast from Harvard's Berkman Center today, May 17, 2005.

Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange will talk about the future of public radio in the age of podcasting, which enables anybody to create their own public radio online.

This is history in the making. Keep it for your archives.
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Open Source. It'll be a radio show. May 30, 2005

Here is a don't miss, must-do: listen to Open Source's pilot on podcasting and bloggers without borders. Hear phone interviews and discussions with Rebecca and Ethan of Global Voices, and several other bloggers, hosted by smooth (and thankfully not-so-fast) talking American Christopher Lydon at Harvad's Berkman.

See Ethan's follow-up post "On hold with Chris Lydon".

Note also GlobalCoordinate.com Geo-Community. Click on the map to zoom in. You can add your own comments, stories, or photos at any location.

Tags: Tehran Iran Podcast Blog Podcasting Radio Audioblogging Zuckermann LydonMacKinnon Shapiro Berkman Harvard

Make Poverty History - Tony Blair chairs G8 summit July 6, 2005

Email just received from Patrick Kielty (pictured below):



Hello,

Over the past few months more than a quarter of a million people have sent a message to Tony Blair and asked him to make poverty history.

It's an achievable aim that has risen up the political and news agendas like never before - thanks to the actions of people like you.

But we are rapidly approaching the critical moment of this campaign - and it really is time to turn up the heat.

After last week's election result we now know for sure that it will be Mr. Blair who sits at that all-important G8 summit table in Scotland on July 6th. Last month, he said he would work "night and day" on this issue until the summit. Now he has the chance to prove it, and the responsibility to deliver.

30,000 children will continue to die needlessly every day unless he succeeds.

So please, if you are in the UK click here [outside the UK click here] and urge Tony Blair to make this his number one post-election priority.

Even if you have emailed him before, now is the time to do so again.

The countdown has begun to the biggest day ever in the fight to end poverty and we need to make sure that our message is getting through loud and clear.

Thank you,

Patrick Kielty

Worse Than 1984 - North Korea, slave state.

Copy of a report by Christopher Hitchens, May 2, 2005:

How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment's thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il's government runs "concentration camps." It would be truer to say that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.

This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word "genocide" has. To call a set of actions "genocidal," as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.'s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

In consequence of this, and for the first time since the founding of Kim Il Sung's state, large numbers of people have begun to take the appalling risk of running away. If they make it, they make it across the river into China, where there is a Korean-speaking area in the remote adjoining province. There they live under the constant threat of being forcibly repatriated. The fate of the fugitive slave is not pretty: North Korea does indeed operate a system of camps, most memorably described in a book—The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan—that ought to be much more famous than it is. Given what everyday life in North Korea is like, I don't have sufficient imagination to guess what life in its prison system must be, but this book gives one a hint.

It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation. The Chinese obviously cannot be expected to take millions of North Koreans all at once, which is why they engage in their otherwise criminal policy of propping up Kim Jong-il, but if international guarantees for runaway slaves could be established, this problem could be anticipated.

Kim Jong-il and his fellow slave masters are trying to dictate the pace of events by setting a timetable of nuclearization, based on a crash program wrung from their human property. But why should it be assumed that their failed state and society are permanent? Another timeline, oriented to liberation and regime change, is what the dynasty most fears. It should start to fear it more. Bravo to President Bush, anyway, for his bluntness.

[via Slate Magazine via Disinformation with thanks]

Related in Slate
Fred Kaplan questioned whether President Bush understands the situation in North Korea in this "War Stories"; Kaplan's other Slate articles on North Korea can be found here. In March, Soyoung Ho filed a "Foreigners" detailing her conversation with a North Korean defector living in Seoul. Brendan Koerner explained why the North Koreans kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s in 2003. This 2002 "Assessment" of Kim Jong-il said that, "It would be easy to dismiss Kim as a madman, but his behavior is too consistent for that."

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays, in which a longer account of North Korea can be found.

South Korea Prepared for Possible Govt Collapse in North

VOA News October 5, 2004 - A South Korean newspaper reports that Seoul has prepared secret plans to deal with the possible collapse of North Korea's government.

The JoongAng Ilbo said the plans, discussed at a South Korean parliamentary hearing Monday, call for South Korea's Unification Minister to take over as ruler of a post-collapse North Korea.

The report says South Korea's military has set up 10 refugee camps for North Korean defectors near the inter-Korean border, while Seoul has designated public facilities nationwide to house more than 200,000 North Koreans.

The plans, made public by an opposition lawmaker after a parliamentary hearing, were said to have been first drawn up around the time of the death of North Korea's founder, Kim il-sung.

South Korea has declined comment on the newspaper report.

http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=9EB7B5FC-72A9-4B9F-97015B2611E805DC&title=Re

Seoul: North Koreans Train for Cyberwar

VOA News October 4, 2004: South Korea's Defense Ministry says North Korea has trained hundreds of computer hackers to wage cyberwar against other countries.

In a report to the National Assembly's National Defense Committee, the ministry said North Korean hackers are among the best in the world.

The report said 500 to 600 military hackers in North Korea have been put through a five-year university course training them to penetrate the computer systems of South Korea, the United States and Japan. Officials say the North Koreans are able to launch cyberattacks to gather intelligence information.

Earlier this year, hackers broke into 211 computers at 10 government agencies in South Korea, including those at defense- and security-related agencies.

South Korea's National Intelligence Services said in July that the attacks were launched from China, but it could not be determined whether the hackers were Chinese or nationals from a third country using China-based computers.

Seoul on Alert After al-Qaida Calls for Attacks

Here is a copy of a report by staff writer Song-wu Park at hankooki.com online October 2, 2004:

Seoul went on high alert for possible terrorist attacks over the weekend after a close associate of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden purportedly called for attacks on the United States and its allies, including South Korea.

The Defense Ministry on Sunday ordered the whole army, including the 2,800 troops dispatched to Iraq, to step up anti-terrorism readiness, following government measures on Saturday to enhance security measures at foreign embassies in Seoul and certain key facilities, including government offices, airports and seaports.

South Korean soldiers stationed in the northern Iraqi town of Irbil are keeping a low-key posture so as not to provoke Islamic rebels, the Defense Ministry said.

The Arabic language TV news network Al Jazeera aired Friday what it claimed was a new audiotape of bin Laden's top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri urging ``young men of Islam'' to resist the U.S.' allies by saying, ``The interests of America, Britain, Australia, France, Norway, Poland, South Korea and Japan are everywhere.''

CNN quoted a CIA official as saying it had "high confidence'' that the tape was of al-Zawahiri, the second in command of al-Qaida.

It is not clear when the tape was made. The main purpose of the audiotape appears to be to encourage Muslims to help Palestine. "In Palestine we don't face the Jews only, but also the anti-Muslim world coalition led by America,'' al-Zawahiri said at the beginning of the statement.

In response to the audiotape, some lawmakers said the Seoul government does not need to overreact to the inclusion of South Korea on the al-Qaida list of more than 10 U.S. allies, although the government should guard against terrorist attacks.

"He didn't point to South Korea alone as a target for attacks,'' Rep. Park Jin of the opposition Grand National Party said. "We don't need to act excessively in response to such a strategy of psychological warfare. But we need to be fully ready for any terrorist attacks because it could turn into a real threat sometime later.''

A defense minister-turned lawmaker also echoed Park's remarks, saying: "It's not new for South Korea to receive such warnings on terrorism.''

Rep. Cho Seong-tae of the ruling Uri Party, who served as defense minister from 1999 to 2001, said Seoul received warnings against South Korean supertankers in July this year and even suffered the death of Kim Sun-il, an Arabic interpreter who was captured and decapitated by Islamic insurgents in Iraq in June.

"Their aim is to attack what they think are `anti-Arab' countries like the United States,'' Cho said. "We didn't need to worry about such animosity-driven attacks from Arab terrorists when I was working as defense minister. But now we have dispatched troops to Iraq, we have every reason to be on high alert.''

Following an emergency meeting of the National Security Council on Saturday, the Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry ordered diplomatic missions overseas to strengthen security.

The Justice Ministry directed airport authorities to tighten immigration procedures to prevent the entry of suspected terrorists. The ministry also increased checks on illegal foreign workers in South Korea due to concerns that they might collaborate with international terrorist networks.

South Korea is relatively unfamiliar with Islamic terrorism, most of its defense capabilities being directed against the communist North Korea.

South Korea deployed 2,800 troops to Iraq last month and will add 800 more once the brigade has expanded its base in Irbil. The unit, which needs its mandate renewed by the National Assembly to stay beyond December, is the third-largest foreign force in the Middle Eastern country, after the contingents from the U.S. and Britain.

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200410/kt2004100316552211950.htm

American professor Tom Plate's report in Korea Times: Smell of a Pre-war Countdown

Tom Plate is a Professor at Univesity of California, Los Angeles and Director of Asia Pacific Media Network. Below is a copy of his report, published at Korea Times online October 2004, entitled Smell of a Pre-war Countdown.

LOS ANGELES - You know what’s even more pertinent than a tension-filled American presidential debate? It’s the prospect of war between China and Taiwan. And, unlike our so-called “debates,” it’s real. What’s more, folks, the possibility of war is looming, getting less and less unlikely.

One way you know for sure that something big is up is that even Singapore is caught in the teeth of the imbroglio. Sharp-as-a-nail Singapore is to the diplomatic misstep what Balanchine was to amateur ballet.

And what an improbable imbroglio it is: For no less than George Yeo, Singapore’s internationally respected diplomat, who was recently elevated to the position of foreign minister, had the temerity to suggest to Taiwan, in a major U.N. speech, that pulling the China cat’s tail was a good way to suck Asia into a big-time regional war.

By George! He meant only to be helpful, but the remark drove nervous Taiwan absolutely ballistic, despite decades of friendship between the city-state and the wanna-be-independent-state of Taiwan. Indeed, the latter’s foreign minister responded to Yeo as if his public plaint were some kind of cheap low blow, adding insult to vitriolic injury by charging that little Singapore was just sucking up to giant China.

Well, that’s probably true; in fact, just about everyone in Asia (with the possible exception of North Korea, alas) has been sucking up to China lately. And why not? It is better positioned than any other country to become the first Asian superpower since imperial Japan. So who in his right mind _ besides the current Democratic Progressive Party government in Taiwan _ would want to pick a fight with the geopolitical heavyweight champion of Asia?

In fact, the question people are starting to ask, predictably, is whether the government of Taiwan is in its right mind. Having recently returned from a reporting trip there, I suspect it knows exactly what it is doing. Ordinarily, I am the first to admit that it’s hard to understand this bizarre cross-strait relationship. My Chinese-American friends, those who frequently visit the mainland on family or commercial business, counsel me to take all the nasty cross-strait insults with the proverbial grain of salt.

As a director of a Southern California bank that does business in Asia recently put it to me, “You have to figure that each side has taken the measure of the other, knows how much it can get away with, and is playing a highly sophisticated game at a level of diplomatic nuance well beyond our normal decoding.”

His observation reminded me of a similar one made by a high-level Taipei-based international lawyer at a World Economic Forum conference in Beijing a few years ago. He was seated at the same table as a prominent mainland industrialist, and the two of them went at it with the delicious pleasure of old friends at a college reunion. When I expressed surprise at the obvious depth of their mutual respect, my lawyer friend later explained to me that tension across the strait was more artificial than real, whipped up by politicians who are eager to take people’s minds off such concrete issues as prices, jobs, housing shortages and so on.

I have tried to keep this measured perspective in mind ever since, especially in recent months as the cross-strait temperature has risen. If, as my friend suggests, politicians on both sides are just playing their usual games, perhaps the American media’s virtual indifference to this story will in retrospect prove to be inspired news judgment.

But sometimes game-playing can go too far, and things get out of control. The mainland game is: the civil war that ended in 1949 isn’t over, because we’ve still not settled the Taiwan secession issue. The Taiwan game is: we’re a proud democracy and until that’s what the mainland becomes, all talk of unity is foolish, even immoral.

But when the premier of Taiwan suggests, as he recently did, that the island of 23 million people needs to target missiles at Shanghai, the most populous metropolis in a country of 1.3 billion, alarm bells should go off. It has the smell of a pre-war countdown.

This is where statesmanship comes in. And this is where Foreign Minister Yeo tried to come in with his U.N. comment. But as his reward, Taiwan tried to bite off his nose. Say whatever you want about Singapore _ make all the caning and chewing-gum jokes you want. But one thing you can’t say is that it’s a stupid country. And stupid is quite far from the first word that comes to mind when you think about a brain like Yeo.

Korea Planning to Nurture 10 Nobel Prize Candidates

Here is a copy of a report publishined online at Korea Times in October 2004:

South Korea plans to shell out big bucks to foster a number of candidates capable of garnering the prestigious Nobel Prize, according to a senior official in Chong Wa Dae Sunday.

Park Ky-young, presidential adviser for science and technology, reported the grandiose scheme to president Roh Moo-hyun in August and it will be fully operational next year.

Under the plan, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) will handpick around 10 promising scientists, who grab international attention with epoch-making expertise or research, and financially support their studies.

The MOST looks to provide at least several million dollars to scientists who have the potential to bring in the nation's first bona fide Nobel Prize.

"We want to support basic scientists who retain global competitiveness rather than spending money on applied scientists," Park said.

Former president Kim Dae-jung snatched the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his diplomatic efforts to bring peace to the Korean peninsula, as well as in promoting democracy and human rights here.

But aside from Kim's award, the nation has yet to gain a Nobel Prize especially in the fields of science or medicine.

Seoul National University professor Hwang Woo-suk could be the first candidate for the plan.

The nation earmarked a total of 26.5 billion won to support his attention-grabbing biotechnological breakthroughs.

Hwang stole the show twice over the past year when he created mad cow disease-resistant calves last December and cloned the world's first human embryos earlier this year.

The bio-scientist also plans to take the wraps off his study on gnotobiotic (sterilized) pigs soon.

Together with the mad cow disease-resistant calves last December, Hwang developed six gnotobiotic miniature pigs, whose organs can be transplanted into humans.

The pigs all failed to survive more than two days at the time but with the development of technology, some pigs are currently older than six months according to an inside researcher.

He added Hwang's team gained about five gnotobiotic pigs this month alone and now holds more than 10 pigs.

Sudan Wants to Expand Economic Ties With S. Korea

SOUTH KOREA: Visiting Sudanese Foreign Affairs Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail has called for further economic cooperation with South Korea in sectors such as electronics, textiles, cars and the oil industry.

After signing an agreement to avoid double taxation with his South Korean counterpart Friday, Ismail said this agreement and his visit to Seoul will help boost the economic relationship of the two countries,

"I have met with some chairmen of important companies here, and also invited President Roh Moo-hyun and Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon to our country. Maybe business groups will come with them,'' Ismail said in an interview with The Korea Times Sunday.

"Unfortunately, South Korean National Oil Corporation (KNOC) came in second after a Malaysian national company in a competition for an oil contract in our country recently,'' he said, citing KNOC's lack of specific knowledge on the international oil market and scarce government-level exchanges between the two countries as some of the reasons for the failure.

The minister, however, stressed that his country still has a lot of opportunities to offer investors, especially those from Asian countries, unlike other African nations where European companies tend to be dominant." "Our biggest trading partner is China. France is second, Malaysia third and India is following close behind,'' he said.

"Those countries in alliance with the U.S., like Japan and South Korea, have been reluctant to invest because of political interests. China, however, pursues an independent policy, as does Malaysia, India and Iran. China approached us first, so they became our number one partner,'' he added, explaining how China came to play such a big role in their economy, especially in the oil sector, since the Sudanese government has a ``sometimes difficult'' relationship with the U.S.

South Korea, with no crude oil produced on its territory, has been stepping up energy diplomacy, including projects involving trans-Siberian pipelines as well as direct imports from resource-rich countries.

Recently Sudan has received a lot of international attention regarding the Darfur crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell reported to the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the Janjaweed, or Arab militia under the government's control, is committing ``genocide'' against the people of Darfur, in the western region of Sudan. Ismail rebuffed the accusation against Sudanese government involvement in the ``genocide'' as totally groundless.

"Of course there is a humanitarian crisis in Darfur. But is it okay to use the case for immoral political agenda? The Bush administration is just trying to detract the world's attention from Iraq, where their soldiers are dying and the prisoners of Abu Graib are being immorally and sexually abused,'' the minister said, accusing the U.S. of applying double standards to Iraq and Sudan.

He also pointed to the relatively lukewarm reaction from other parts of the world, such as members of the African Union (AU) and European countries, to the Darfur crisis. "Other delegations from AU, European and Arab countries have also been welcomed into our country to assess the situation, but it is only the U.S. who uses the term "genocide'' to describe the situation in Darfur,'' he said.

N Korea rules out nuclear freeze - UN team arrive in Seoul Sunday to scrutinise nuclear disclosures

North Korea has said it can "never dismantle" its nuclear arsenal while US policy towards it remains hostile.

Pyongyang also accused the US of "double standards", saying it had aided nuclear experiments by South Korea.

North Korea suspended talks aimed at nuclear disarmament earlier this month after the disclosure that South Korea had secretly violated nuclear accords.

The US, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea have been negotiating with North Korea to reduce its nuclear capability.

Shock disclosure

South Korea has said its efforts to extract plutonium and enrich uranium were undertaken purely for civilian purposes.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN's atomic agency, meanwhile praised Seoul for co-operating with an inquiry into its nuclear experiments.

A UN team is to arrive in Seoul on Sunday to scrutinise its nuclear disclosures.

South Korea shocked observers on 2 September by admitting its scientists had taken part in small experiments to yield materials that could be used in processes leading towards building nuclear weapons.

Little progress

The statement by North Korean news agency, KCNA, reiterated a refusal to continue disarmament talks and accused the US of stoking an arms race in the region.

"South Korea's clandestine nuclear experiments go to prove that the US double standards are a fundamental factor of the nuclear proliferation," it said.

Talks could not be resumed, the agency said, "unless the US drops its hostile policy based on double standards towards [North Korea]."

Disarming Pyongyang's "nuclear deterrent force" was also out of the question, KCNA said.

Long-running talks aimed at encouraging North Korea to surrender some of its nuclear weapons in exchange for aid and guarantees of security have made little progress so far.

Mushroom Cloud Reported Over North Korea

Sep 13, 2004: A massive explosion has reportedly rocked a northern province of North Korea close to the Chinese border.

South Korea's Yonhap new agency reported the incident on Sunday despite the event having taken place on Thursday.

Yonhap, quoting an unnamed diplomatic source in Seoul as saying a mushroom cloud, with a radius of 3.5-4 kms (2.2-2.5 miles), was spotted in Kimhyungjik county in Yanggang province.

Satellite images of the event have gone explained until the Yonhap report.

Seoul's top negotiator with North Korea, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, said South Korea was seeking confirmation of the explosion, its cause and effects, according to the Yonhap report.

North Korea is a secretive nation that rarely reveals happenings within the country. The press and media generally is tightly controlled by the government.

Earlier this year North Korea admitted to an explosion at a railway station, which killed more than 150 people, three days after the event. Unconfirmed reports at the time put the death toll at much higher levels.

Meantime North Korea is reportedly attempting to delay talks that were planned for later this month on North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

During the last talks in June, South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia agreed to meet again before the end of September.

Pyongyang is now seeking to delay the negotiations until after the U.S. presidential race, hoping President George W. Bush is voted out of office, the Korea Times reported Saturday.
- - -

Upddate -

South Korean media has been full of speculation about the blast

BBC report September 13 (note BBC's excellent database, further information, resource links, etc.): South Korean media has been full of speculation about the blast. Visiting UK Foreign Minister Bill Rammell, urged North Korea to allow a British diplomat to inspect the scene. Copy of report here - in full:

North Korea has given its first explanation for the huge blast last week which prompted speculation that it had carried out a nuclear test.

The country's foreign minister, Paek Nam-sun, said the blast was in fact the deliberate demolition of a mountain as part of a huge, hydro-electric project.

His remarks came in response to a call for information by the visiting UK Foreign Office minister, Bill Rammell.

North Korea had said nothing about the incident until now.

After meeting with Mr Paek, Mr Rammell urged North Korea to allow a British diplomat to inspect the scene.

Mr Rammell welcomed the fact that North Korea had provided an explanation.

"But if they are going to be open and engage with the international community, what we really need is diplomats to be able to go to the area and confirm for themselves that that is the case," Mr Rammell said.

The North Koreans have promised to consider the request, he said.

'Peculiar cloud'

The United States and South Korea had already played down suggestions that the explosion in Yanggang Province, close to the Chinese border, was caused by a nuclear device.

"There was no indication that was a nuclear event of any kind. Exactly what it was, we're not sure," US Secretary of State Colin Powell told ABC television on Sunday.

The blast in Yanggang Province, close to the Chinese border, is said to have happened on Thursday as the Stalinist state celebrated its National Day.

It created what officials in Seoul say was a peculiar-shaped cloud.

The incident and the fears it has provoked around the world are another illustration of the enormous tension between the regime and the international community, says the BBC's diplomatic correspondent James Robbins, in Pyongyang.

North Korea is under international pressure to end all nuclear programmes and disarm.

But so far it has offered only limited concessions during "six-party" international talks involving both Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan.

It has not yet committed to attend a fourth round of the talks, which the Chinese, as hosts, wanted to start before the end of this month.