THE KOREAS: Broken ship found off North Korea

South Korea has not given up all hope of finding survivors

The South Korean military says it has located the stern of its warship that sank in mysterious circumstances on Friday following an explosion.

The authorities are hoping that some of the 46 crew members still missing may be alive but trapped in underwater air pockets in the wreckage.

Military diving teams were due to begin a search for survivors.

The vessel sank close to the sea border with North Korea; the South says it is open-minded on the cause of the blast.

Rescue officials said on the weekend that the explosion had broken the ship into two parts, which had sunk to the seabed.

Rescue race

The BBC's Korea correspondent, John Sudworth, said navy divers had been hampered by strong currents and murky waters, but had now located the stern, lying on the sea bed.

It is the part of ship that contains the sleeping compartments, so thought to be the most likely location in which survivors might be found.

But it is now a race against time, our correspondent says.

If any of the 46 missing crew members are still alive, calculations suggest that any oxygen in the trapped air will soon run out.

The 1,200-tonne Cheonan naval patrol vessel sank near the disputed maritime border with North Korea but military officials say there is no indication the North was involved.

Our correspondent says that although the two navies have exchanged fire along the sea border in recent years, no unusual military movements were detected on Friday night, leading to speculation that the sinking was due to some kind of accident.

Whatever the cause, as well as a disaster for the South Korean navy, it is moment of terrible, personal tragedy for the families of the missing, their trauma, and sometimes anger, played out on national television as the whole country waits for answers.

Tensions rise

At his latest emergency briefing on the rescue, the South Korean president has urged all available personnel and equipment to be mobilized to search the sunken ship as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, North Korea has accused the South of psychological warfare for allowing journalists to enter the two countries' demilitarised zone, and warned of "unpredictable incidents".

"If the US and the South Korean authorities persist in their wrong acts to misuse the DMZ for the inter-Korean confrontation despite our warnings, these will entail unpredictable incidents including the loss of human lives in this area for which the US side will be wholly to blame," the statement said.

Dramatic warnings from the North are not unusual - on Friday the North had threatened "unprecedented nuclear strikes".

However, they are dissected by Korea-watchers for hints of movement on the primary issue of importance to North Korea's neighbours - it's readiness to re-enter talks about how to end its nuclear programmes.

Separately, North Korea's Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Monday castigating the United Nations for its criticism of the North's human rights record.

South Korea recognises the Northern Limit Line, drawn unilaterally by the US-led United Nations Command to demarcate the sea border at the end of the Korean War. The line has never been accepted by North Korea.

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JAPAN: Japanese pair win world's top architectural prize

The duo were praised for the way their work blends into its surroundings

A duo of Japanese architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, have won the most coveted award in architecture, the Pritzker Prize, the has jury announced.

The 2010 winners were praised for using everyday building materials to create ethereal structures that shelter flowing, dreamlike spaces.

Their art museums, university buildings and designer-label fashion boutiques span Japan, the US and Europe.

The prize will be awarded formally in May in New York.

Sejima and Nishizawa, who are partners in the architectural firm Sanaa, said they did not see themselves as working within any sort of distinct Japanese architectural tradition.

But they acknowledged being influenced by the austere construction methods, lightweight materials and porous boundaries between inside and outside space that characterise traditional Japanese buildings.

"If you see Japanese temples made of wood, you can see how the architecture is made up," Nishizawa said.

"They have a clear construction and transparency and they are quite simple. I think this is one of the big things that we are influenced by."

Among the projects mentioned by the Pritzker jury were the Christian Dior Building in Tokyo's Omotesando shopping district and the Toledo Museum of Art's Glass Pavilion.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's newly opened Rolex Learning Centre was also cited; it is a single-storey slab-like concrete and glass structure that undulates over a four-acre site, punctured in places to let light enter the massive open space that makes up its interior.

The duo's 2004 art museum in Kanazawa, Japan, was admired

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CHINA: China Court Due To Rule On Rio Tinto Workers

By ELAINE KURTENBACH , 03.28.10, 08:50 PM EDT, Associated Press

SHANGHAI -- A Shanghai court is due to rule Monday on bribery and commercial secrets charges against four employees of mining giant Rio Tinto - a case seen as a barometer of China's treatment of foreign business in a time of rising trade friction.

The verdict comes as multinational companies like Rio Tinto are facing increasingly strict oversight into their business dealings worldwide, as both developed and developing countries gradually tighten enforcement of anti-corruption rules.

Stern Hu, an Australian executive of Rio Tinto, and his three Chinese co-workers pleaded guilty to charges of taking bribes in a three-day trial held last week. Their pleas on commercial espionage charges were unknown as those hearings were closed and lawyers said they were barred from commenting.

"Please kindly understand that my colleagues and I are obliged to keep any and all of the secrecy matters in most strict confidence even after tomorrow, pursuant to professional regulations in China," said Jin Chunqing, a defense lawyer for Hu.

The court was due to issue a verdict and sentences Monday afternoon, Rio Tinto and the Australian government said. An Australian consular official was to attend the hearing.

Jin said he was wary of speculating on the likely sentence for the secrecy charges, which he described as "technically complicated and sophisticated."

"It is an unprecedented case for China, in its international business history and law enforcement," Jin said.

China warned against politicizing the case, while the Australian side lobbied for greater transparency and protested the court's decision to close sessions handling the commercial secrets charges.

But investigations aren't limited to just China or Rio Tinto.

German automaker Daimler AG, accused of paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes through subsidiaries to officials of at least 22 governments, including China, is among many companies snagged by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it unlawful to bribe foreign government officials or company executives to secure or retain business.

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., Asia's biggest refiner, acknowledged Friday that Daimler AG had allegedly paid bribes to one of its employees. It urged the government to tighten oversight of lawbreaking foreign companies.

With most major economies still struggling to recover from the fallout from the global financial crisis, many Asian governments also have sharpened their scrutiny of multinational companies, says Robert Broadfoot, managing director of the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy in Hong Kong.

"There is nothing like a severe global recession to get people to focus on corruption," Broadfoot said. He noted, however, that graft cases also are used to advance the political agendas of those doing the accusing.

China ranks 10th among 16 countries the consultancy tracks in its political corruption survey of more than 2,000 executives working in Asia, the U.S. and Australia. Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam were the three worst.

In China, anti-corruption campaigns are a perennial political strategy of the Communist Party, which recognizes the damage to its image from widespread graft but enforces its crackdowns selectively.

Whistleblowers often run greater risks than the officials caught abusing their positions, especially if party leaders fear the accusations could threaten their hold on power.

In the Rio Tinto case, the government has said nothing official about the local businesspeople accused of giving the bribes.

"It's clearly a selective application of the law," Broadfoot said.

The arrests of the Rio Tinto employees last August were initially thought linked to Beijing's anger over high prices it paid for iron ore - a key commodity for China's booming economy. Rio Tinto, based in London and Melbourne, is one of the top suppliers of ore to China and a key industry negotiator in price talks with China's state-owned steel mills.

Few details of the allegations against Hu and the others have been released, and none has been allowed to make any public comment since they were detained.

Reports in the past week on the Web site of the Chinese financial magazine Caijing said one of the Rio Tinto employees, Wang Yong, was accused of receiving $9 million from Du Shuanghua, a steel tycoon whose company, Rizhao, has chafed at the state-dominated pricing arrangements, setting his own agreements with overseas suppliers.

The contrast between the Daimler case, which will be presented to a U.S. federal court next week, and Rio Tinto's highlights China's secretive way of handling such issues.

U.S. court documents available online outline in great detail the allegations against Daimler, reflecting the results of five years of investigations. No such materials on the Rio Tinto case are available in Shanghai; court officials refuse comment and defense lawyers said they were barred from commenting on the secrecy charges.

Australia's consul-general, the only outside official allowed to attend the bribery section of the trial, planned to attend Monday's hearing, and his government said it would comment after the verdict is announced.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

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N. KOREA: North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets

Mun Seong-hwi, a North Korean defector, speaking to someone in North Korea to gather information at his office in Seoul.  Jean Chung for The New York Times

March 28, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea, one of the world’s most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies.

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.

The result has been a news free-for-all, a jumble of sometimes confirmed but often contradictory reports. Some have been important; the Web sites were the first to report the outrage among North Koreans over a drastic currency revaluation late last year. Other articles have been more prosaic, covering topics like whether North Koreans keep pets and their complaints about the price of rice.

But the fact that such news is leaking out at all is something of a revolution for a brutally efficient gulag state that has forcibly cloistered its people for decades even as other closed societies have reluctantly accepted at least some of the intrusions of a more wired world.

“In an information vacuum like North Korea, any additional tidbits — even in the swamp of rumors — is helpful,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has chronicled the country’s economic and population woes for decades.

“You didn’t used to be able to get that kind of information,” he said of the reports on the currency crisis. “It was fascinating to see the pushback from the lower levels” of North Korean society.

Taken together, the now-steady leak of “heard-in-Korea” news is factoring into ever swirling intelligence debates about whether there is a possibility of government collapse, something every American president since Harry S. Truman has wished for, and none have witnessed.

The news the informants are spiriting out is not likely to answer the questions about the North’s nuclear program or leadership succession that the United States cares about most. There is no evidence so far that these new sources have any access, or particular insight, into the North Korean leadership or military elite.

The informers themselves remain of limited use to American and South Korean spymasters, in part because the North has no broad cellphone network, making it easier for the authorities to eavesdrop on calls and harder for handlers to direct operatives in real time.

As one senior American intelligence official put it, “You’re not going to find the North Korean uranium project from these guys.”

So the traditional methods of intelligence collection — using satellite imagery, phone and computer intercepts, and informants and agents of South Korea’s intelligence service — remain the main sources of information.

Still, the Web sites appear to have inflicted damage. North Korea’s spy agencies, which almost never admit to weaknesses, recently warned that South Korea’s “plot to overthrow our system, employing all manners and means of spying, is spreading from the periphery of our territory and deeply inland.”

They vowed retaliation, especially against “human trash,” an apparent reference to the North Koreans who have betrayed their leaders’ code of silence out of principle or for pay to supplement their usually meager wages.

The informers’ networks are part of broader changes in intelligence gathering rooted in the North’s weaknesses. The first breakthrough came in the 1990s, when famine stoked by a breakdown in the socialist rationing system drove defectors out of the country and into the arms of South Korean and American intelligence agencies. The famine also led North Korea to allow traders to cross the border into China to bring home food, leaving them vulnerable to foreign agents, the news media and, most recently, the defectors and activists intent on forcing change in the North.

The first of their Web sites opened five years ago; there are now five. At least three of the sites receive some financing from the United States Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy.

The Web reports have been especially eye-opening for South Koreans, providing a rare glimpse of the aptly named Hermit Kingdom untainted by their own government’s biases, whether the anti-Communists who present the North in the worst light or liberals who gloss over bad news for fear of jeopardizing chances at détente.

“I take pride in my work,” said Mun Seong-hwi, a defector turned Web journalist with the site Daily NK, who works with the informers and uses an alias to protect relatives he left behind. “I help the outside world see North Korea as it is.”

Even in the days of the Iron Curtain, North Korea was one of the world’s most closed societies. There were few Western embassies where spies could pose as diplomats. And with citizens deputized to watch one another for suspicious activities, strangers could not escape notice for long.

Of the 8,400 agents South Korea sent over the border between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and 1994, just 2,200, or about 1 in 4, made it home. Some defected, according to former agents, but many were killed.

As recently as 2008, when the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, reportedly had a stroke, it was long-distance sleuthing rather than on-the-ground spying that broke the news. South Korean agents intercepted a government e-mail message containing his brain scans, according to the Monthly Chosun magazine.

The Web sites have not uncovered news that delicate, although the implications of their reports on the currency crisis, later confirmed by South Korean government officials, were far-reaching. They said that the North was requiring people to exchange old banknotes for new ones at a rate of 100 to 1, as well as limiting the amount of old money that could be swapped. That suggested that officials in the North were cracking down on the few glimmers of private enterprise that they had tolerated, dashing hopes that the country might follow China’s lead of at least opening its economy anytime soon.

Still, the Web sites are plagued with challenges. The cellphones work on China’s cellular networks, so they operate only within several miles of the Chinese border. Because North Koreans cannot travel freely in their country, the Web sites are forced to depend mostly on people who live near China.

Beyond that, Ha Tae-keung, who runs one of the Web sites, says that some sources are prone to exaggerate, possibly in the hopes of earning the bonuses he offers for scoops. He and other Web site operators, meanwhile, are vulnerable to “information brokers” in the North who sell fake news.

But Mr. Ha said that the quality of the information was improving as Web sites hired more defectors who left government jobs and remained in touch with former colleagues, often by cellphone.

“These officials provide news because they feel uncertain about the future of their regime and want to have a link with the outside world,” he said, “or because of their friendship with the defectors working for us, or because of money.”

While such contacts would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, one thing has not changed: the danger.

Mr. Mun of Daily NK says his informers engage in a constant game of cat and mouse with the authorities. The North Korean government can monitor cellphone calls, but tracing them is harder, so the police rove the countryside in jeeps equipped with tracking devices.

The informants call him once a week; they never give their names, and they hide the phones far from their homes.

Despite those precautions, they are sometimes caught. This month, Mr. Ha’s Web site reported that an arms factory worker was found with a cellphone and confessed to feeding information to South Korea. A source said the informant was publicly executed by firing squad.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

An earlier version of this article was published in print in the International Herald Tribune on Jan. 25, 2010, and was published on nytimes.com on Jan. 24, 2010.

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