North Korea Warns Embassies to Evacuate Before April 10

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By AKIKO FUJITA (@akikofujita)

April 5, 2013

North Korea advised the Russian and British embassies in Pyongyang today evacuate their staff, saying their safety could be at risk "in the event of conflict from April 10."
"The proposal was made to all the embassies in Pyongyang, and we are now trying to shed light on the situation," Sergei Lavrov told journalists in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, according to Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office in Britain confirmed the request in a statement. "The British Embassy in Pyongyang received a communication from the North Korean government this morning,"
The news was the latest escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula, spurred by near daily bellicose threats North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has made, since the U.S. and South Korea began large scale military exercises last month.
On Thursday, U.S. officials confirmed that two medium-range missiles had been moved to North Korea's eastern coast, fueling speculation that North Korea was planning a missile strike.
In response, South Korea sent two Aegis destroyers equipped with advanced radar systems to both its coasts. The untested North Korean Musudan missile is estimated to have a range of between 1,800 and 2,500 miles, potentially putting U.S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam within its range.

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The call to evacuate foreign embassies appeared to be the latest tactic by North Korea to dial up the rhetoric and win concessions from the U.S. and South Korea. Pyongyang has already threatened a nuclear strike against the U.S., declared it has scrapped the Korean War armistice, vowed to restart a plutonium reactor, and blocked South Koreans from entering the jointly run industrial complex in Kaesong.
"If Pyongyang were getting ready for an armed conflict in earnest, it would hardly have asked the foreign missions to leave the country," said Alexander Zhebin, head of the Korean Studies Center of Russian Academy of Science, in an interview with Interfax. "Moreover, the North Koreans would in that case have used foreign diplomatic missions as a shield, because strikes against Pyongyang, which would have affected embassies as well, would naturally have been condemned and rejected unanimously by Russia, China and other countries."
In North Korea today, thousands took part in rallies against the U.S. and South Korea. Broadcaster KRT aired images of students donning military uniforms, practicing their shooting while speaking against "the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon," according to the Associated Press. State television also showed workers from the Pyongyang 326 Cable Factory supporting their country's nuclear program.
"I cannot stand it anymore. We're scared of nothing," said one marching student.
While Kim has yet to act on his threats, the mere prospect of conflict on the peninsula, has rattled investors' confidence in South Korea. The Yonhap News Agency reported foreigners were rushing to unload South Korean shares and bonds, with investors offloading $667 million in the stock market Wednesday and Thursday as they looked to safer investment destinations.
GM CEO Dan Akerson said he would consider shifting production away from the Korean Peninsula if the situation deteriorated.
"If there were something to happen in Korea, it's going to affect our entire industry, not just General Motors," Akerson said, in an interview with CNBC.

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Mexico at Odds Over How to Mourn Drug War Victims

Mexico at Odds Over How to Mourn Drug War Victims

 

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON Associated Press

MEXICO CITY April 5, 2013 (AP)

Mexico, a country suffering the turmoil of a drug war, can't agree on how to honor the victims of a six-year assault on organized crime that has taken as many as 70,000 lives.
The government's official monument was dedicated Friday, four months after its completion, in a public event where relatives of the missing chased after the dignitaries in tears, pleading for help in finding their loved ones.
Only some victims' rights groups recognize the monument, while others picked an entirely different monument to place handkerchiefs painted with names and personal messages in protest of the official site, which does not bear a single victim's name.
"Other organizations asked us for other space because they're against this one," Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said at the official dedication of the government monument, which consists of steel panels bearing quotes from famous writers and thinkers. "What took us so long was trying to get agreement among the groups, and we failed."
The memorial dispute arises from the fact that the Mexican government has yet to fully document cases of drug war dead and missing, despite constant pleas from rights groups, the public and orders from Mexico's own transparency agency. The previous government of Felipe Calderon stopped counting drug war dead in September of 2011 and the new government of Enrique Pena Nieto has only provided monthly statistics for December, and January and February of this year. The estimates of the dead range from 60,000 to more than 100,000, and the missing from 5,000 to 27,000.
Jose Merino, a political science professor at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, said only when the government documents every victim's case and acknowledges that the violence continues will people accept a memorial.
"We haven't reached the point where we can agree on what is hurting us and why," Merino said. "The job of the government is to study all these cases and not pile up stones for memorials."
Calderon, who at first dismissed most of the drug-war dead as criminals, proposed the memorial last year after a long process of meeting with victims' families and taking heat for his earlier remarks.
Javier Sicilia, a well-known poet whose son's death sparked a nationwide movement for peace, immediately opposed the idea because it is built on a military installation, and many Mexicans consider the military complicit in drug-war abuses and disappearances. Instead, Sicilia has organized the group that has taken over the recently built Pillar of Light, a tower designed to commemorate the country's independence, but that became a symbol of corruption because of its high costs and construction delays. Other known writers and filmmakers have joined Sicilia in his petition.
The memorial dedicated Friday is supported by two of Mexico's largest victims' rights groups. Sports magnate Alejandro Marti founded Mexico SOS after his teenage son was kidnapped and killed despite reportedly paying a ransom. He acknowledged at the ceremony that government still owes an official list of the victims.
It is also supported by Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who founded Stop the Kidnapping after her son disappeared, never to be heard from again. She ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Mexico City last year as a candidate for Calderon's conservative National Action Party
The land for the memorial belonged to the Defense Department but was given to a governmental body that helps victims and relatives. Over four reflective pools, a group of builders and architects working with three anti-crime organizations erected 64 panels of steel that appear to be rusty. Quotes from Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Martin Luther King Jr. are cut in to the corners of some of the steel plates.
Most panels are blank so people can write in the names of thir relatives, said Ricardo Lopez Martin, one of the architects who designed the memorial. Lopez Martin said it's not simple to make Mexico's monument like the Vietnam or Holocaust memorials, because some relatives are still scared or feel they could be stigmatized by having their family members identified among the dead.
"It is sensitive and there is no database," he said. "We have talked with many victims' relatives and many of them say 'I don't want my son's name to appear next to a drug trafficker or a criminal.'"
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Adriana Gomez Licon is on Twitter http://twitter.com/agomezlicon
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At Least 36 Killed in Southwest Nigeria Bus Crash

At Least 36 Killed in Southwest Nigeria Bus Crash

 

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 5, 2013 at 6:52 PM ET

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — An official says at least 36 people have been killed in a bus crash in which a gasoline tanker exploded in southwest Nigeria.

The explosion happened Friday afternoon in Nigeria's Edo state.

Federal Road Safety Corps spokesman Jonas Agwu said three people survived the collision between the large bus and the tanker. Agwu said the crash resulted in a fire that burned for hours, making it difficult for officials to know how many people died in the crash.

Nigeria has some of West Africa's worst roads, despite its oil wealth. Massive potholes and poor paving, coupled with aggressive drivers, are blamed for many crashes. World Health Organization data shows Nigeria suffers from one of the world's highest traffic fatality rates.

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Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Brea

Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break

By JOHN MARKOFF

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

A system developed by a joint venture between Harvard and M.I.T. uses artificial intelligence to assess student papers and short written answers, freeing instructors for other tasks.

 

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers.

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: April 4, 2013 

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators and has many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers. One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders.

“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current researcher at M.I.T.

He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.

“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and universities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12 universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year, including adding international schools.

The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.

The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical rank. It will also provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer was on topic or not.

Dr. Agarwal said he believed that the software was nearing the capability of human grading.

“This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but it’s good enough and the upside is huge,” he said. “We found that the quality of the grading is similar to the variation you find from instructor to instructor.”

EdX is not the first to use automated assessment technology, which dates to early mainframe computers in the 1960s. There is now a range of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test answers, and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia — are using some form of the technology in secondary schools. A fifth, Indiana, has experimented with it. In some cases the software is used as a “second reader,” to check the reliability of the human graders. But the growing influence of the EdX consortium to set standards is likely to give the technology a boost. On Tuesday, Stanford announced that it would work with EdX to develop a joint educational system that will incorporate the automated assessment technology.

Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback.

“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

Last year the Hewlett Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by one of the Hewlett-Packard founders and his wife, sponsored two $100,000 prizes aimed at improving software that grades essays and short answers. More than 150 teams entered each category. A winner of one of the Hewlett contests, Vik Paruchuri, was hired by EdX to help design its assessment software.

“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.”

Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings.

With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most schools.

“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

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Iran Mentions New Plan at Nuclear Talks as Stalemate Continues

Iran Mentions New Plan at Nuclear Talks as Stalemate Continues

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Iran’s expansive language about a “comprehensive” solution has previously seemed to dim, rather than improve, the prospects for an agreement.

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: April 5, 2013

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — As negotiations resumed here on Friday between Iran and the six world powers demanding that it curb its nuclear program, Iran said it had put forward a new “comprehensive proposal” that it hoped would “establish a new bedrock for cooperation.”

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The other negotiators, however, described Iran’s statement as a bewildering surprise and said they had not received any concrete new proposal. An afternoon negotiating session ended with little sign of additional clarity, and though officials said the talks would continue on Saturday, they seemed to have hit a roadblock.

A Western official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Iranian remarks essentially echoed a position articulated at talks in Moscow last June. “We are somewhat puzzled by the Iranians’ characterization of what they presented at this morning’s plenary,” the official said. “There were some interesting but not fully explained general comments on our ideas.”

The announcement of a new proposal, by Ali Baqeri, deputy head of the Iranian delegation, came after the opening session of talks as Iranian officials took a break for lunch and prayers. Mr. Baqeri did not offer any details. In the past, expansive language about a “comprehensive” solution has involved additional complicated issues, like the civil war in Syria, that seemed to dim rather than improve the prospects for an agreement.

With American and European officials demanding that Iran show willingness to address international concerns, Mr. Baqeri suggested that the Iranian delegation had gone even further. “These steps are referred to as confidence-building measures, but they are part of a comprehensive set of measures,” he said at a news conference at a central Almaty hotel. “This is not distinct from that comprehensive step.”

But at a second briefing at the end of the day’s talks, Mr. Baqeri acknowledged that the proposal put on the table had roughly the same contours as the plan offered in Moscow. “The Islamic republic of Iran this morning proposed a practical method to implement the Moscow plan in a smaller scale,” he said.

Expectations for this latest round of negotiations have been modest at best, with little sign that the Iranian government was ready to accept an offer made by the six powers at the last round of talks in February: restrictions on its supply of dangerous enriched uranium in exchange for a modest easing of international sanctions.

“We had a long and substantial discussion on the issues, but we remain a long way apart on the substance,” a Western diplomat said Friday. “We are now evaluating the situation and will meet again tomorrow.”

Although American and European officials arrived expressing guarded hope of a breakthrough, the lead Iranian negotiator began his visit with a speech to university students in which he insisted on his country’s unfettered right to develop a civilian nuclear program and accused the larger powers of hypocrisy because they have nuclear arms.

In the speech, at Al-Farabi Kazakh International University on Thursday, the Iranian negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said that it was possible to “unlock” the stalemate in the talks if the international negotiators — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — would simply “accept the inalienable rights” of Iran, specifically the right to enrich uranium.

In complaining of hypocrisy, Mr. Jalili singled out the United States for criticism and called the new round of talks here “a test for American behavior.”

But American and European officials have insisted that the test is for Iran, which must respond to an offer presented here in Almaty at the last talks in February and explained in greater detail at a meeting with technical experts in Istanbul last month “How far we get,” a senior Obama administration official said before leaving Washington for Almaty, “depends on what the Iranians come back with in terms of a response on the substance to our proposal.”

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That proposal would impose constraints on Iran’s supply of enriched uranium and require Iran to shut its enrichment plant at Fordo, which is built deep underneath a mountain. Iran would also have to agree to a series of steps making it more difficult to resume producing nuclear fuel quickly. The proposal would allow Iran to keep a small amount of uranium enriched to 20 percent purity for use in a reactor to produce medical isotopes. Such uranium can be converted to weapons grade with relatively modest additional processing.

While Iran says its nuclear program is exclusively for civilian purposes, Western officials suspect that Tehran is seeking the technology for nuclear weapons.

As the talks opened Friday, Michael Mann, the spokesman for Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief and chairwoman of the group of six powers, said: “What we are hoping is that the Iranian side will come back to us today with a clear and concrete response.” Mr. Mann, speaking at a news conference, declined to speculate on the response should Iran initially not offer a concrete counterproposal early in the session. But he said the process at this point hinged on the Iranian side.

“The confidence-building measure has to come from Iran,” Mr. Mann said.

Iran is in the midst of a contentious presidential election, a process that inevitably complicates any negotiations in the international arena.

The senior Obama administration official said that so long as Iran remained in defiance of the international community, painful sanctions including Western restrictions on importing Iranian oil would remain in place and potentially become even more severe. “That pressure only will increase if Iran does not begin to take concrete steps and concrete actions,” the official said. “Sanctions as well as the isolation Iran has created for itself continue to have their effect, and oil importers have continued to make reductions.”

The official noted Iranian statistics showing inflation has soared by 31.5 percent over the past year and continues to rise. The value of its currency, the rial, has plummeted since sanctions began.

As in February, the negotiations are taking place in Kazakhstan, the former Soviet republic that was once the main site for testing of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union. It takes pride in its role on the issue of nuclear nonproliferation, including the elimination of missiles left behind by the Soviets.

Russian and Chinese officials have been more restrained in their comments ahead of the current round of talks.

Earlier this week, a deputy Russian foreign minister, Igor Morgulov, said that an agreement ultimately would have to recognize Iran’s right to the use of atomic power for energy and medicine. Russia has been a partner in the construction and operation of Iran’s existing Bushehr nuclear power plant.

“We believe a long-term settlement should be based on the recognition of Iran’s unconditional right to develop its civilian nuclear program, including the right to enrich uranium” provided that all nuclear activity is put under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. Morgulov told the Interfax news agency.

Mr. Morgulov said that the Russian delegation was working in close consultation with its Chinese counterparts. “We highly value a close dialogue with China on the situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear program,” he said. “Our positions coincide in many aspects.”

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, however, said expectations were modest for the Almaty talks. “Regrettably, the sides have not yet started to move toward formulating compromise-based agreements,” the spokesman, Aleksandr Lukashevich, said in Moscow on Thursday.

Gary Samore, who oversaw nuclear arms control issues for the White House during the first Obama administration and is now executive director for research of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said in Washington this week that he had very low expectations for the talks and that both sides had reasons to prolong the diplomatic wrangling.

“The Iranians use diplomacy in an effort to try to show that there’s progress and therefore no further sanctions are justified, and to the extent that it looks like there’s progress it helps maintain the value of the rial,” Mr. Samore said, while the United States and its partners “use diplomacy in order to demonstrate that Iran is being intransigent and unreasonable and therefore more sanctions are required.”

“That process is going to continue,” Mr. Samore added.

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For South Koreans at North’s Edge, Drumbeat of War Is More of a Patter

Munsan Journal

For South Koreans at North’s Edge, Drumbeat of War Is More of a Patter

By MARTIN FACKLER

Some residents of Munsan, South Korea, which sits on the edge of the tense border with the North, have learned to accept the dangers, and try to focus on enjoying their daily lives.

Jean Chung for The New York Times

Pedestrians walk past apartment buildings in  Munsan, a distant suburb of the South Korean capital that sits on the edge of the demilitarized zone.

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: April 5, 2013

MUNSAN, South Korea — As Lee Jae-eun retrieved her squirming twins from day care and loaded them into a two-seat stroller, she barely glanced up at the olive green Blackhawk helicopter that swept overhead, just above the high-rise apartment buildings.

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Jean Chung for The New York Times

South Korean soldiers patrol next to the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, which lies where the fighting stopped 60 years ago.

Even in peaceful times, low-flying military aircraft are a common sight in this residential community near the heavily fortified border that separates capitalist South Korea from the communist North. But these are not placid times, and the roaring helicopters are one more reminder of rising tensions wrought by North Korea’s recent barrage of war threats.

Still, said Ms. Lee, a 34-year-old homemaker, residents have resigned themselves to living with the constant risk, and occasional tantrums, from their bellicose northern neighbor.

“Sure, our radar is up to new danger,” she said, holding one of her year-old daughters and surrounded by other mothers picking up their children. “But living here makes you used to it. It’s not such a big deal.”

In recent weeks, the heavily armed North’s cherub-faced young leader, Kim Jong-un, has threatened South Korea and the United States with nuclear attack, declaring that a “state of war” exists on the Korean Peninsula. Refusing to be cowed, South Korea’s newly elected president, Park Geun-hye, the democratic nation’s first female leader, responded by ordering her generals to strike back if provoked.

Despite the steady drum beat of war talk, life seems to go on as usual in most of South Korea, the industrial powerhouse that lifted itself from the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War to become one of Asia’s economic success stories. Nowhere is the determination to hold on to the South’s hard-won middle-class living standards more apparent than in Munsan, a distant suburb of the South Korean capital of Seoul that sits on the edge of the tense border: the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, which lies where the fighting stopped 60 years ago.

Once a collection of farming villages known for their local delicacy of tasty eel, Munsan was transformed into a fast-growing suburb of tall white apartment buildings and neon-lighted shops a decade ago during an era of political rapprochement with the North and soaring property prices in the fast-growing South. More recently, development has slowed after the global financial crisis hurt the South’s export-driven economy and new tensions with the North have scared away some prospective buyers.

Some of the 47,000 residents who live here now say they have learned to accept the helicopters’ near-constant rattling of their windows, and the columns of tanks that sometimes block roads during training exercises, making their children late for school. They say they have also learned how to ignore the rows of concrete bunkers and guard towers along the highway they use every morning to commute to Seoul, 35 miles to the south.

They just tune out the dangers and focus on enjoying their daily lives.

“Korea is the most dangerous place in the world, but we are numb to it,” said Song Hyun-young, an employee in the real estate department of Paju city hall, which has jurisdiction over the town of Munsan. “If something happens, we will all die together, so I don’t really think about it.”

When pressed, many residents admit to feeling anxiety about the intensity of the North’s most recent threats, and the fact that its new nuclear arsenal is controlled by an untested, unpredictable leader. Some also partly blame their own country for imposing sanctions on the North, a closed and impoverished country.

“To be honest, the talk of nuclear attack is much scarier this time,” said Ms. Lee, the mother of the twins. “I think North Korea is cornered, and anyone who is cornered will strike back.”

Responding to such concerns, Paju city employees held an evacuation drill last week with the police, firefighters and the army. In the event of an attack, residents would be led to one of nine new underground bomb shelters, which were built by the city after the North’s last violent provocation, the artillery bombardment of a South Korean island three years ago that killed two civilians. The shelters have been freshly stocked with flashlights, medicine, gas masks and first-aid kits, officials said.

But most residents have not taken similar precautions. None of the more than half-dozen residents interviewed said they were stockpiling food or supplies. Many said they were optimistic that such preparations were unnecessary. They were confident, they said, that the bonds of shared ethnicity between the two Koreas would prevail over political differences, and prevent the North from following through on its apocalyptic threats.

“The world thinks we are on the brink of war, but we are fine,” said Gong Soon-hee, 55, a real estate agent whose small office was filled with wall-size maps showing a checkerboard of privately owned plots that abruptly end at the edge of the DMZ, just a few miles away. “Koreans are good people, kind people, not stupid people who would just start a war suddenly.”

Despite the tensions, Ms. Gong said, new homebuyers continue to trickle in, lured by prices that have dropped to less than one-tenth of those in central Seoul. Most give no sign of noticing a formation of helicopters flying overhead as they check out apartment units, she said.

“I guess we could hide in an underground parking garage if the shells start falling,” she said, “but we don’t bother with escape plans.”

Others said the current standoff cast a spotlight on the fact that in the face of the North’s threats, the South was in the weaker position because it has so much more to lose. Some said South Korea’s biggest vulnerability was its unwillingness to sacrifice its much higher living standards to essentially buy off the North.

“If this is just going to continue until we give aid, then let’s just give them some aid,” Park Soon-yi, a 44-year-old homemaker, said with a laugh. But she was only half-joking, as she shopped in the upmarket Hillstate high-rise condominium and retail complex. “Then they’ll be quiet, and leave us in peace.”

Su Hyun Lee contributed reporting.

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Embassy Warning Joins Drumbeat of North Korea Threats

Embassy Warning Joins Drumbeat of North Korea Threats

By ELLEN BARRY 

North Korea suggested some countries might want to evacuate their Pyongyang embassies, a move analysts dismissed as a new way of raising tension.

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: April 5, 2013

MOSCOW — The North Korean government on Friday advised Russia and other countries to consider evacuating their embassies in Pyongyang amid rising tension there, Russia’s foreign minister said.

Share Your Views

The Lede would like to hear from readers who live on the Korean peninsula or have family members there. Submit a comment here, in English or Korean, or post your thoughts on Twitter, with the hashtag #NYTWorld.

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• Tensions With North Korea Unsettle South’s Economy (April 6, 2013)

• Munsan Journal: For South Koreans at North’s Edge, Drumbeat of War Is More of a Patter (April 6, 2013)

British officials said that they had received a similar communication, but that there were no immediate plans to evacuate the British Embassy.

Analysts in Russia and South Korea suggested that the North’s advisory was not an indication that Pyongyang was considering military action but was instead part of an unrelenting drumbeat of threats calculated to frighten the United States and its Asian allies, possibly to force concessions including much-needed aid.

“I don’t think they are doing this because they think there is going to be a war,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies in Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea. “Rather, this is part of a calculated, psychological campaign to increase a sense of crisis and get international attention.”

Aleksandr Zhebin, a leading Korean expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, also played down the significance in a statement to the Interfax news agency: “If Pyongyang were getting ready for an armed conflict in earnest, it would hardly have asked the foreign missions to leave the country,” because the presence of diplomats, especially from Russia and China, could help shield the city in case of military conflict.

He also said North Korea’s advisory was not accompanied by any moves indicating that the North was preparing for large-scale hostilities, like mobilizing reservists, and suggested that Friday’s warning might be aimed at enlisting help from Moscow and Beijing, both potential advocates, as the United States strengthens its military presence in the region.

In any case, the advisory appeared to cause confusion among the countries that were notified, a relatively small group, since few nations maintain embassies in the isolated and often belligerent North.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Russia was pushing for clarification.

“We are very concerned about the increase in tension, so far verbal,” he told reporters traveling with him in Uzbekistan, according to an official transcript. “We want to understand the reasons for this proposal to evacuate embassies.” He said it also remained unclear if the North Koreans were actually ordering diplomats to leave despite their indication that it was a proposal meant to guarantee diplomats’ safety in the event of a conflict.

Mr. Lavrov said Russia was consulting with officials from the United States, China, South Korea and Japan on the matter.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry released a statement condemning the rising tensions.

“Prevention of military operations on the Korean Peninsula is imperative,” the statement said. “We consider the policy of stirring up military tension as absolutely unacceptable, and we hope for the parties’ maximum restraint.”

The British Foreign Office also expressed confusion, first issuing a statement suggesting that the North had said it would be unable to guarantee the safety of embassies “in the event of conflict from April 10,” raising the possibility that it was planning some action. But the foreign office later said that was a misinterpretation and that the North had asked diplomats to let Pyongyang know by that date if they needed help moving from the embassies.

In a statement, the foreign office also condemned North Korea for ratcheting up tensions “through a series of public statements and other provocations.”

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Tensions With North Korea Unsettle South’s Economy

 

Tensions With North Korea Unsettle South’s Economy

By CHOE SANG-HUN

The Seoul stock market fell Friday, and General Motors said it was making contingency plans for its workers amid a torrent of threats from North Korea.

• North Korea Moves Missile to Coast, but Little Threat Is Seen
• British Premier Says Nuclear Risks Highlight Need for Deterrent

Tensions With North Korea Unsettle South’s Economy

Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

South Korean cars return from a joint industrial park in the North Korean town of Kaesong, which Pyongyang has threatened to close.

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: April 5, 2013

SEOUL — North Korea’s torrent of threats — and the matching show of military power and political resolve from the United States and South Korea — began showing signs of unsettling foreign investors’ confidence Friday.

Multimedia

Multimedia Feature

Timeline on North Korea’s Nuclear Program

U.S. Defense Against North Korea

The development magnified the challenges Seoul and Washington face. The two powers are trying to show the North’s novice leader, Kim Jong-un, that they will not be blackmailed by his bluff and bluster. But at the same time, they do not want to escalate the tensions to an extent that they hurt the South Korean economy, the pride of the local population, or President Park Geun-hye’s political standing at home.

“In the past, North Korea-related events had little impact or the markets recovered quickly,” the South’s vice finance minister, Choo Kyung-ho, told a meeting of top finance officials Friday. “But recent threats from North Korea are stronger and the impact may therefore not disappear quickly.”

His comment came hours after the chief executive of General Motors, Dan Akerson, underscored the increased concern by saying that his company was making contingency plans for employee safety at its South Korean plants and that further increases in tensions would prompt G.M. to look at moving production elsewhere. In an interview with CNBC television, he said, “If there were something to happen in Korea, it’s going to affect our entire industry, not just General Motors.”

South Korean stocks slumped 1.64 percent Friday in a selling spree among foreign investors that analysts attributed to jitters over North Korea. The South Korean won also sank against the U.S. dollar.

Although South Koreans have become almost nonchalant after decades of on-and-off threats from North Korea, they believe that when things get ugly with the North, their globalized economy has much more to lose than the North’s isolated and already highly sanctioned economy.

“The North Koreans are now using the propaganda in an extreme form to try to damage foreign direct investments into South Korea,” said Tom Coyner, a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea and author of “Doing Business in Korea.” “They are, in a sense at this point, winning in an asymmetrical psychological warfare, attacking the economic strength of South Korea.”

War cries from North Korea have been factored into the stock market for decades. Still, its threats have grown in their intensity and frequency since the country upheld Mr. Kim as its top leader in late 2011, and especially after the United Nations imposed sanctions against the North following its nuclear test in February. The sanctions took direct aim at North Korea’s Achilles’ heel by focusing on cash transfers and luxury items, which the Kim regime uses to buy the loyalty of the elite.

North Korea has since called the Korean Peninsula “back to a state of war” and declared that it would launch “pre-emptive nuclear strikes” at the United States and its allies. It also said it would never bargain away its nuclear arsenal but rather expand it.

Also making this situation different was the way Washington and Seoul responded. South Korea matched the tone by declaring that if provoked, it would target the North Korean military leadership and by revising the rules of engagement to let its military respond more swiftly, forcefully and “without political consideration.” Meanwhile, the United States flew nuclear-capable bombers over the peninsula on training sorties and signed an agreement with Seoul to respond jointly to any North Korean provocation.

“The relentless show of force on a daily basis by not just North Korea, but also the U.S. and South Korea as part of their annual military exercises, has captured the attention of the world, and made the Korean Peninsula a place associated not with ‘Gangnam Style’ but with nuclear weapons and stealth bombers,” said John Delury, an American scholar who teaches at Yonsei University in Seoul.

“Markets hate risk, even if it is the perception, rather than reality of risk,” he added. “This poses a serious challenge to President Park, who was elected on the basis of promises to keep growing the South Korean economy and improve relations with the North.”

Published: April 5, 2013

Government officials said that the military tensions had so far had only limited effects on the markets. But for the South Korean economy, the North Korean imbroglio is an additional drag at an inopportune time. In the face of the weakening Japanese yen, which hurts South Korean exporters, South Korea recently announced a sharp cut in growth forecasts.

Multimedia

Multimedia Feature

Timeline on North Korea’s Nuclear Program

U.S. Defense Against North Korea

Related

• British Premier Says Nuclear Risks Highlight Need for Deterrent (April 5, 2013)

• North Korea Moves Missile to Coast, but Little Threat Is Seen (April 5, 2013)

Officials vowed to ensure stability if the situation got worse.

An important test is whether North Korea will go so far as to close down a joint industrial park in the North Korean town of Kaesong. The complex, where South Korean factories use low-cost North Korean labor, is a major source of hard currency for Pyongyang and stands as the last major symbol of inter-Korean cooperation. Seoul officials have cited the project when they wanted to show foreign investors that North Korean harsh rhetoric is not always matched by action.

In a “Global Political Insights” report Friday, Citi Research said that “barring an outbreak of wide-scale military conflict, we think North Korean brinksmanship will not impact the South Korean economic fundamentals.” In a report earlier this week, Thomas J. Byrne and Steffen Dyck at Moody’s Investors Service expressed similar views but also mentioned “a heightened risk of military adventurism or miscalculation by the 30-something Kim Jong-un.”

Lee Beom-ho, an analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp., said that markets had traditionally tended to dismiss North Korean brinkmanship.

But this time, “the targets of North Korean threat have expanded and the international community has become more sensitive,” he said, referring to the North’s growing nuclear and missile capabilities and American plans to deploy more interceptor missiles to the region. “At the same time, there is doubt over the abilities of those who are supposed to deter North Korea, especially China.”

Millions of South Koreans live within range of North Korean artillery, with the area between Seoul and the border with North Korea developed into forests of high-rise apartments in recent decades for people commuting to the metropolis. Yet, previous provocations by North Korea have usually had an ephemeral effect on South Korea’s equity and foreign exchange markets, occasionally even presenting buying opportunities.

In a sign of how accustomed South Korea has grown to the security provided by the military alliance with the United States, people in South Korea have shown few signs of agitation in recent weeks, even as North Korea has been bombarding their country almost daily with apocalyptic threats of “final destruction.”

South Koreans remain more sensitive about foreign investors’ moves.

During a previous North Korean nuclear crisis in 1994, the market proved resilient when a videotaped threat by a North Korean official to turn Seoul into “a sea of fire” was leaked to the media. But later that year, when Washington drew up plans to evacuate Americans from South Korea before a planned surgical strike at the North Korean nuclear facilities, South Koreans rushed to supermarkets, hoarding goods, and the stock market took a dive.

Officials and analysts in South Korea suspect that North Korea, no longer able to fight a conventional war or even start a major skirmish with the South without suffering a humiliating strike-back, was increasingly resorting to other forms of warfare, like hacking South Korean banks and broadcasters.

“Most people say they are used to a lot of blustering and posturing by North Korea and we should not take it too seriously,” Mr. Coyner said. “But it needs to be taken seriously in the sense that it is already proving to be effective where foreign multinationals are looking at political risk contingency option.”

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Obama Budget Is Dismissed by G.O.P. and Attacked by Left

Obama Budget Is Dismissed by G.O.P. and Attacked by Left

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR 1:43 PM ET

Speaker John A. Boehner accused President Obama of holding entitlement programs hostage for tax increases while some liberals vented their own anger over the plan. 

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Published: April 5, 2013

WASHINGTON — The House speaker, John A. Boehner, on Friday waved aside reports that President Obama would seek a new budget compromise next week, accusing the president of again demanding tax increases in exchange for “modest entitlement savings.”

Related

• Obama Budget to Include Cuts to Programs in Hopes of Deal (April 5, 2013)

“If the president believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to help shore up these programs, there’s no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes,” Mr. Boehner said. “That’s no way to lead and move the country forward.”

At the same time, liberals quickly vented their anger about Mr. Obama’s plans, saying they would not accept changes to Social Security and Medicare that would threaten the programs and harm beneficiaries.

“Evidently the president either does not understand or does not care how critically important Social Security and Medicare are, not just to seniors but to middle-aged and younger workers for whom these programs are likely to be even more crucial,” said Eric Kingson, co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition.

The sharp reaction was a preview of what is likely to come on Wednesday when the president formally unveils his budget.

The New York Times reported on Friday that the document would call for a deal similar to the final compromise offer Mr. Obama made to Mr. Boehner last year before talks fell apart — cuts to entitlement programs in exchange for new revenues from tax increases.

Among those cuts is a change in the way inflation is calculated for Social Security, called “chained C.P.I.” An administration official said that “things like C.P.I. that Republican leaders have pushed hard for will only be accepted if Congressional Republicans are willing to do more on revenues.”

Republicans quickly dismissed that idea, noting that the C.P.I. change also raises some revenue for the treasury and should not be used as an excuse for other tax increases. Mr. Boehner said that the president had “never lived up to his rhetoric” about being willing to cut entitlement programs.

“In reality, he’s moved in the wrong direction, routinely taking off the table entitlement reforms he’s previously told me he could support,” Mr. Boehner said in the statement. “That’s no way to lead and move the country forward.”

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, also seemed unimpressed. On CNBC’s “The Squawk Box,” he said that if the president agreed with Republicans about some entitlement changes, he should agree to make them without additional tax increases.

Mr. Cantor said he did not understand “why we just don’t see the White House come forward and do the things that we agree on.” But he added: “I am in a wait-and-see mode as to whether this White House is really serious.”

Liberals, however, are not waiting.

Some of the president’s staunchest supporters expressed outrage months ago when Mr. Obama first proposed changing the way inflation is calculated for Social Security. Many Democrats are also against cuts to Medicare that officials said will be embraced in Mr. Obama’s budget.

On Friday, several liberal organizations suggested that the president was unnecessarily giving in to Republican demands for entitlement cuts.

“President Obama’s plan to cut Social Security would harm seniors who worked hard all their lives,” said Anna Galland, the executive director of Moveon.org. “Under this plan, a typical 80-year-old woman would lose the equivalent of three months’ worth of food every year. That’s unconscionable.”

Ms. Galland added: “It’s even more outrageous given that Republicans in Congress aren’t even asking for this Social Security cut. This time, the drive to cut Social Security is being led by President Obama and Democrats.”

For the president, the budget proposal — which comes two months later than the president is required by law to release the budget — appears to be another attempt to test whether Republicans could accept further tax increases under any circumstances.

Mr. Boehner’s reaction suggests that a deal would most likely be elusive, in part because Republicans remain suspicious about how far the president is willing to go in making serious entitlement cuts that will anger his supporters.

The reaction from both sides demonstrates how little space there is in Washington for a bipartisan deal when it comes to taxing and spending issues.

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Hiring in U.S. Tapers Off as Economy Fails to Gain Speed

Hiring in U.S. Tapers Off as Economy Fails to Gain Speed

By CATHERINE RAMPELL 1:07 PM ET

Employers added only 88,000 jobs in March, a pace of growth too sluggish to make a big dent in the backlog of idle workers. The jobless rate dipped to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent.

• Stocks End Down 4:33 PM ET
• TimesCast: The Economy’s Spring Slide

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

A job fair in New York in late March for former members of the military. 

By CATHERINE RAMPELL 3It looks as if the “spring swoMultimedia 

By CATHERINE RAMPELL 3It looks as if the “spring swoMultimedia

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Economy’s Spring Slide

Related

• Sequestration and the Jobs Report (April 5, 2013)

• The Shrinking Ranks of the Working (April 5, 2013)

American employers increased their payrolls by 88,000 last month, compared with 268,000 in February, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. It was the slowest pace of growth since last June, and less than half of what economists had expected.

It also was the start of a third consecutive spring in which employers have tapered off their hiring, even after the Labor Department adjusted the numbers for the usual seasonal changes. Slowdowns in the previous two years could be attributed to flare-ups in the European debt crisis, but this time the cause is unclear. The recent payroll tax increase or political gridlock in Washington could be to blame for the sudden slowdown, but neither seems to be showing up much in other relevant economic data.

“I’m at a bit of loss as to how to explain it,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist at Capital Economics. “Even if this is the start of another springtime-summertime slowdown, we’re hoping it’ll be a bit more modest than it was in previous years, because the housing market is doing very well.”

The unemployment rate, which comes from a different survey, ticked down to 7.6 percent in March, from 7.7 percent, but for an unwelcome reason: more people dropped out of the labor force, rather than more got jobs.

The labor force participation rate has not been this low — 63.3 percent — since 1979, a time when women were less likely to be working. Baby boomer retirements may account for part of the slide, but discouragement about job prospects in a mediocre economy still seems to be playing a large role, economists say.

“The drop in the participation rate has been centered on younger workers,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief economist at MFR Inc., “many of whom have given up hope of finding a decent job and are instead continuing in school and racking up enormous amounts of student debt, which has contributed to the recent surge in consumer credit outstanding.”

Stock market indexes were down in Friday afternoon trading.

Still, as always, economists cautioned not to draw too many conclusions from one month’s report, because the numbers will inevitably be revised.

“Remember that we’ve had a pattern of upward revisions,” said John Ryding, the chief economist at RDQ Economics, noting that the government on Friday revised January and February’s net growth upward by a total of 61,000 jobs. “Before we read too much into it, bear in mind we have at least two more cracks of the whip before the number is really finalized.”

March’s job gains were concentrated in professional and business services and health care, while the government again shed workers, as it has been doing for most of the last four years, though reductions at the Postal Service accounted for most of the latest decline. Economists expect more government layoffs in the months ahead as the effects of Congress’s across-the-board budget cuts make their way through the system.

Some policy makers have started to publicly address deficiencies in the quality of the jobs being created by the private sector, in addition to their quantity.

“It’s important to look at the types of jobs that are being created because those jobs will directly affect the fortunes and challenges of households and neighborhoods as well as the course of the recovery,” Sarah Bloom Raskin, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, said in a recent speech.

Relatively low-wage sectors like food services and retail businesses have accounted for a large share of the job growth in the last few years; a report in August from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group, found that a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, while a majority of those added during the recovery have been low-paying.

In March, in fact, jobs in food services and drinking places accounted for the largest share of total American employment on record. Today nearly one in 13 American jobs is in this industry.

Ms. Raskin also expressed concern about temporary jobs, which account for a growing share of total employment.

Usually an increase in temp hiring is considered a good thing, at least at the start of a recovery, because it indicates that employers are thinking about taking on permanent workers. So far, though, employers seem to be sticking with those temporary contracts.

“Temporary help is rapidly approaching a new record,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial, who noted that there was also a rapid increase in temp hiring during the boom years of the 1990s. “That of course means more flexibility for employers, and less job security for workers.”

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U.S. and Japan Reach Deal on Returning Okinawa Land

U.S. and Japan Reach Deal on Returning Okinawa Land

By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: April 5, 2013

TOKYO — The United States and Japan agreed on a new timetable for the return to Japan of an unpopular Marine air field and other military bases on Okinawa on Friday, moving to solve a long-festering issue that has bedeviled America’s ties with its largest Asian ally.

By agreeing to a clear timetable to return the land, the United States is hoping to entice Okinawans to drop their opposition to the air base, which the Americans want to move to another part of the island but many Okinawans want to move off the island. Local opposition has kept Japan from being able to follow through on an earlier deal to allow the base and its noisy aircraft to be relocated to a less populated area of the island.

The new and hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has been trying to revive the deal at a time of increasing tensions with China that have led many Japanese to support strengthening the alliance with the United States, Japan’s longtime protector. The United States move on Friday could help Mr. Abe politically, by making clear what Okinawans stand to gain by agreeing to keep the base.

Announcing the new agreement in a room filled with American and Japanese flags, Mr. Abe called it a significant step toward finally carrying out a long-stalled plan that will reduce the burden of American bases on the Japanese island. The inability to move forward on that plan, leaving the future of the important air base in limbo, is an obstacle to the Obama administration’s strategic “pivot” to Asia.

“We are able to make progress in reducing Okinawa’s burden in a visible manner,” Mr. Abe said, flanked by a dozen American and Japanese officials. “I am extremely glad that everybody could sit down together today and reach a conclusion on this intractable issue.”

The centerpiece of the original deal was the relocation of the busy air base, the United States Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, from the middle of the city of Ginowan. The deal would also shrink the huge American military presence on Okinawa, a legacy of the United States occupation of that tropical island after World War II, by moving some 9,000 Marines to other bases in Guam, Hawaii and Australia.

Friday’s agreement tries to restart that plan by setting a target date of returning the Futenma base by as early as 2022, provided the replacement air base is finished and operational. It also lays out a timetable for handing over five other American bases, which along with Futenma occupy some 2,500 acres of land in the island’s crowded southern half.

Under the timetable, the first parcel — an access road and surrounding land totaling 2.5 acres — would be turned over to Japan this year.

In a bid to increase transparency and accountability, the new timetable also includes flowcharts outlining which government agencies in both countries need to take what steps for the land to be returned on schedule. American and Japanese officials said this was to prevent the deal from getting bogged down in murky bureaucratic proceedings, as happened in the past.

For the Obama administration, the agreement is meant to not only shore up one of America’s most important security relationships in Asia, but also to demonstrate to other regional allies, as well as rivals, that the United States has the willpower to maintain its security presence, despite its current budget difficulties and fatigue from wars in the Middle East.

“This sends a clear signal to the region that we are committed to making hard choices to keep our force posture in Okinawa,” said Mark Lippert, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs, who visited Tokyo to finalize the agreement.

For Mr. Abe, restarting the stalled relocation plan would fulfill a campaign pledge to improve ties with the United States at a time when his nation faces a growing challenge from China over disputed islands near Okinawa. Becoming a fuller military partner of the United States has been a centerpiece of the popular prime minister’s bid to reverse his nation’s declining stature in the region after years of economic stagnation and its relative eclipse by China’s rise.

However, he is also taking a political risk on an agreement that may fail to appease Okinawan anger over what they see as an unfairly onerous American base presence.

The Abe government has been trying to whittle away at Okinawans’ opposition with offers of generous financial aid and other efforts to court the island’s governor, Hirokazu Nakaima, a base opponent who is also a member of Mr. Abe’s conservative governing party. In a sign the government’s tactics may be working, Mr. Nakaima offered uncharacteristic words of praise on Friday, though he warned that the central government still has to win over other local leaders.

“I think it is extremely good that the government is buckling down to deal in concrete terms with the return of bases,” Mr. Nakaima told reporters in Naha, the Okinawan capital. “But it is hard to evaluate the plan until I have had a chance to consult with mayors of the affected communities.”

One sticking point might be the timetable for moving the base. Under an earlier agreement, it would have been relocated next year. That can no longer happen because the United States does not yet even have a construction permit for the new base.

An original agreement on the base was reached in 1996 after the gang rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl by American servicemen. 

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